About FlowSaga

Why I built FlowSaga

The first time I used somebody else’s Flow extension, I stared at it for ten whole minutes. I did not understand it. Not that it was ugly. I genuinely could not tell what the thing was doing — the buttons had names I could not parse, the order made no sense, and when I pressed something I could not tell what had happened.

I gritted my teeth and worked through it once. It did not solve a single problem. I knew what I wanted. The picture was right there in my head. I just could not get it out.

I sat in front of that screen with a frustration rising in my chest. Not anger at the tool — anger at myself. I had gone in hoping a tool would make me better at this. I came out feeling stupid.

Later I worked something out. It was not my fault.

Before you can get good at something, there is a door. You have to be able to read it, and want to use it, before practice can even begin.

Put the door too high and it does not matter how talented you are. You are left standing outside. My English is poor. That extension was English only, which is not my language, and the interface was complicated; I could not read it. So I decided to build my own. One I could read, and so could you. I built FlowSaga because of that day.

Where the name comes from: Sága, goddess of story

In Norse myth there is a place called Sökkvabekkr — “the sunken stream”. Cool waves run through it, and never stop. Odin goes there every day.

A woman is waiting for him. Two cups of gold. They drink. They talk. Every single day. What did they say? Nobody wrote it down.

Long afterwards, someone wrote the Norse gods into a book. In it is a list of goddesses — sixteen of them. First, Odin’s wife. Second, her: Sága. About her, the book keeps a single sentence: she lives at Sökkvabekkr, and it is a big place.

What her name means, scholars still argue. One camp says to see. The other says — story. She spoke every single day. Not one sentence survived.

An idea that never got made, never got written down, might as well not have happened.

Saga is Old Norse for “story”. Flow is the Google Flow you make videos in — and the stream where Sága lives. Our mark is a longship, like the one in the myths: raise the sail and the wind is with you; when you do not need it, it folds away like cloth into a pocket. The S on the sail is Saga.

A hundred and thirteen calves

Three in the afternoon, and already pitch dark. This is Iceland, a thousand years ago. No king. No court. No town. Only a fire, and the people around it. Someone starts to speak: a family feud, a lawsuit, a killing.

In that century, once it was told, it was gone. Tell it again next winter and the details drift; a generation on, the teller dies and the story is buried with him.

The Icelanders refused. They decided to write it down. But there was no paper. To write, you killed a calf: skinned it, scraped it thin, dried it. One skin, folded in half, gave just two leaves. The largest manuscript of medieval Iceland, Flateyjarbók: two hundred and twenty-five leaves — a hundred and thirteen calves.

And on this island, a milk cow is not wealth. It is whether your children make it through the winter. Elsewhere in Europe, in those same centuries, writing that costly went to Latin: to Bibles, saints and royal pedigrees. The Icelanders spent it on their own words, their own people, their own stories.

Not for having a story. For actually making it exist.

Do not strike

The thirteenth century. An Icelander named Snorri Sturluson notices something terrible: the young poets can no longer read the old poems. A craft handed down for centuries is about to break in his generation’s hands.

He could have just sighed about it. Most people do. He did not. He sat down and wrote a book. Not poetry. A manual: what this word means, where this image comes from, how you use it. For the people who still wanted to write, and could not read it.

What he built was a door. And he lowered it.

The year 1241. The twenty-third of September. Night. Men break into his house. His last words, just three of them: Eigi skal höggva. Do not strike.

He does not survive. The book does. Almost everything the world knows of Norse myth comes from that book. Including the list of goddesses. Including the one line about Sága.

What FlowSaga does

Now it is your turn. Making a story no longer costs a calf. Type a few lines and there is a picture, moving.

But the hard part was never the typing. It is having a good idea and no way to get it clear, no way to take the next step. And when you do make them, you open the Downloads folder and the file names are gibberish — you cannot even tell which is which.

FlowSaga lowers the door, then does the binding.

The highest door is language. Not a difficult interface. The tool simply does not have your words on it. FlowSaga speaks 91 interface languages. A thousand years ago, Europe reserved writing for Latin; the Icelanders used the words they actually spoke, to write their own stories. We are on the Icelanders’ side.

The second door is time. Thirty seconds — that is the standard I hold it to: open it, and within thirty seconds you should know how to start. Then, dozens of ideas in at once, made one by one, each saved under the title you gave it, neatly, into the folder you chose. That folder slowly becomes a book of your own.