guest@blueinkalchemy:/$ make me a sandwich
What? No! Make it yourself!
guest@blueinkalchemy:/$ sudo make me a sandwich
Okay.
Eagle-eyed readers will see right away that I pretty blatantly stole that gag from xkcd, specifically from the unixkcd portion introduced on April Fool’s Day. I’ve done this for two reasons. One, I have sudo command lines on the brain since I was wrestling with Ubuntu and Wine last night to get World of Warcraft working on my jalopy of a laptop. Two, I do in fact have a point to make about writing that this little joke illustrates.
The existence of writer’s block is somewhat dubious. Sometimes it’s easy for writers to say, “stop whining about being blocked up and just write something” when the subject comes up, and sometimes those same writers stare blankly at an empty document wondering what the hell they’re supposed to type next. Sometimes this stare goes on for hours. Sometimes they just type “tits” over and over again. …Wait, maybe that’s just me. Let’s move on.
The point is, when the well of words seems to dry up, “sudo” yourself in some way. Do something you normally wouldn’t. If you feel your weak point is dialog, write out a new conversation between the characters in the scene, even if they’re arch-nemeses. Sure, Doctor Mercury has got Codpiece Johnson tied to a Table of Doom, but having them chat about drywall while she sets up the vivisection lasers will help you structure the verbal back-and-forth of two characters. Not normally into action choreography? Have ninjas burst into a room where the housewife is making breakfast for her kids. Those are her kids, man, and she has to protect them. That’s a great time for her to re-discover her ancient and as-yet-unrealized potential as a mistress of kung fu.
You don’t have to keep it after you write it. But it shakes off the cobwebs. Shifts you out of your comfort zone. Makes you think. It gets the creative wheels turning in your head again, and maybe a line of that drywall conversation or a bit from the epic ninja showdown in the kitchen will inspire you to go back to your original thought and carry you through another few thousand words.
I realize this isn’t a perfect metaphor, but I’m trying to keep this blog at least tangentially about writing. I’m not done with Mega Man 10 yet, I haven’t even imported my character for Dragon Age: Origins: Awakenings: Return Of The Son Of The Colons: This Time It’s Personal and now Ye Olde Laptope is giving me guff about video compatibility. Hopefully I can keep the theme of writing advice going before my comments become completely inane.
Trains are pretty amazing, when you think about it.
You’ve got several tons of steel on a couple of rails, and be it through steam power or electricity, this monstrosity of metal can speed along at quite a good clip. It carries quite a few people from one place to another, more directly than some other means of transportation, isn’t as costly as air travel and, in the case of electrics, is better for the environment. Back in the days of the coal-powered locomotive, getting a decent pace going required building up what was called ‘a good head of steam.’
I feel like I’m doing that with the novel.
I have a little notebook from the Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh, and it’s slowly getting filled with the ongoing adventures of Asherian and his friends. I’m currently tearing through one of the action scenes in the story, down in the dark dwarven tunnels. Character and world building has proceeded better than I thought it would so far, and hopefully the fact that none of it has felt boring to write will mean it’s not boring to read, either.
It’s due in no small part to this train, right here.
Even if I don’t transcribe my jotted narrative scribbles right away, I still have that big of internal knowledge that I’m writing every day, making progress. As the train pulls into the station, I’m building characters. As it hurtles along to its destination, I’m debating the morality of and impetus for open warefare. The train takes on more passengers as I describe subterranian spiders and the efforts of Asherian and his companions to stay alive and uneaten. It’s a lot more than I ever got done with my commute while sitting in traffic.
I hope i can keep the head of steam up for the foreseeable future. It’d be nice to finish the first draft before the Philly Writer’s Conference in June.
I’ve been accused, in the past, of being something of a care bear when it comes to PvP content in games. Thankfully, there’s help, even for someone like me. I’m slowly rediscovering what it means to take joy in the misery of other players, thanks to my return toTeam Fortress 2. Along with a resurgence of a competitive nature that more often than not takes the form of a stream of expletives, as 2Fort is SRS BZNS*, it’s given me cause to think about what makes good and not-so-good PvP content in both tabletop and on-line games.
In single-player games, it’s good to have a single villain or a group of antagonists that clearly stand between the player and their objective. And straight-forward dungeon crawls often benefit from pitting multiple players against a single intelligence, be it a human GM or a programmed AI that respawns enemies as you click your way around the dark tunnels. As much as the Steam game Torchlight evokes the nostalgia of hours spent exploring the many and varied underground demon-guarded caches of loot in Diablo II, it misses the benefits of many people diving into the game to face more powerful enemies in the name of grabbing shinier equipment. But I’m wandering off my point, which is that in those cases, it’s good to have a single bad guy. But what happens when your potential player base expands beyond a handful of intrepid adventurers?
Sometimes, you just have to pit one group of adventurers against another. There are a few ways to do this.
1. Always Evil, All The Time
In the old World of Darkness, most notably in Vampre: The Masquerade, factions were a completely player-based thing. While the threat of the Antideluvians coming back to life and consuming their children in an orgy of blood-fueled Armageddon was an ever-constant threat, most of the night-to-night problems were caused by one group of vampires (the Camarilla) fighting against the other (the Sabbat). What was the cause of this conflict, you ask? The Sabbat’s evil.
Now, no vampire can really be described as 100% “good,” no matter what Team Edward might say. Even your most approachable and human-friendly blood-sucking fiend is still a blood-sucking fiend.
But if the Camarilla are vampires who talk nice to their cows before killing them in a humane way in order to carve them into delicious well-made marinated steaks, the Sabbat laugh as they kick the cows mooing into a giant meat grinder to churn out the greasiest, nastiest, cheapest “heart-attack-on-a-bun” burgers possible, selling them to the public at $10 US a pop as ‘classic American hamburgers’. There may or may not be babies in there, too. Baby cows, hopefully. Though I wouldn’t rule out kittens.
This conflict is built into the core game. There’s no ambiguity or much room for interpretation, one side’s less evil and more amenable towards humanity, while the other is thoroughly nasty and definitely not family-friendly. While it can be fun to be the bad guy every now and again, having your entire motivation be puppy-punting grandma-incinerating nastiness all day every day gets a bit old after a while. Which might be why that game ended.
Anyway, future iterations of the World of Darkness would see factions be more ambiguous in certain ways, and rather than saying “X and Y are locked into AN ETERNAL STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY UNTIL KINGDOM COME,” it’s much more “Here are some factions you guys can play in. Decide for yourselves how they get along. Have fun!”
2. Affably Evil, or Evilly Affable?
Team Fortress 2 is a bit like that. Neither RED nor BLU is clearly defined as being on one side or the other of the “Good/Evil” scale. Leaving aside the role the Announcer may or may not play in the conflict, the motivations of the teams pretty much boil down to healthy competition. With live ammunition and sharp objects. Not to mention explosives.
Anyway, the point is that it’s up to individual players to fill in the blanks. It’s a straightforward, simple system that works well in on-line shooters. It could almost be considered the polar opposite of the strict pigeonholing of the old World of Darkness. When you get into on-line games involving more than a few dozen players, though, things get a bit more complex.
3. The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy, Too
World of Warcraft and Aion have something in common. The players in these games select one of two factions, which are essentially flip sides of the same coin. They do fight each other, but larger external threats demand the attention of both sides and can sometimes lead to alliances of convenience (the Wrathgate in WoW for example). This allows players access to both PvP and PvE play styles, and interested parties can either strike a balance of time between both, or eschew one entirely in pursuit of excellence in the other. Or people can do what I used to do, which is fart around on dailies trying to earn enough money for a flying mount that’s only slightly faster than one I could build with my bare hands as an Engineer.
More on this when I discuss World of Warcraft more in-depth on Saturday. There’s change coming, and it might be good. Good enough to return to Azeroth? The jury’s still out.
Basically, when you want to engender player-versus-player conflict in your games, be it on the table or through the Intertubes, it’s best to let it grow on its own. Give players fields in which to compete and let them go at it. There’s really no need to give them motivations other than “they’re not on our side.” However, if you want to give the other side a nudge, just hit ’em with incriminating photos of a family member. Their mom, for instance.
Cats are gregarious creatures. Most won’t react too violently when you pick them up, provided you don’t give the impression you’re going to drop them. They’re all furry and purring and affectionate, right up until you try to bathe one. Bathing cats is necessary if there’s a flea issue or dirt in their undercoat that they just can’t get themselves, to name just a couple reasons. But cats at this point turn from cute balls of unconditional love to claw-swinging flesh-biting mewling pain dispensers. You have to wrangle them, hold them down, so they can be scrubbed properly and whatever issue precipitated the bath is resolved.
It occurs to me that ideas can be a lot like that. When you first get an idea, it’s beautiful. You can see all the different facets of it catching the light. As soon as you sit down to coherently put it into a format other people might read, however, it can quickly get out of control. Darlings creep in, descriptions go on too long, conversations meander, etc. You have to wrangle your idea to get it into a coherent form, and trust me, the idea will fight.
Maybe it’s just my experience in writing a first draft that brought this metaphor to mind, or maybe ‘wrangling cats’ was just too good a metaphor not to use and I’m just slapping the ‘ideas’ thing in there to make the visual work. But, at least in my experience, a lot of things can happen in the course of writing that first draft that you don’t anticipate. By keeping an eye on your idea as you write, and being unafraid of revisions made by either yourself or others – ‘wrangling’ in other words – the idea’s going to end up being much smoother and more attractive to others, and will return to curling up around your ankles and purring before you know it.
While I’m busy moving myself and my Canadian half into our swank new Lansdale pad, here are some thoughts I’ve had recently concerning what was lately called “The Project”. I’d originally planned this out as a trilogy of stories to introduce the world, build up some of its history and cultures, and do my utmost to tell a few damn good stories while I’m doing that boring stuff at the same time.
The first novel in the arc will introduce the Cities of Light, the different systems of & viewpoints on magic, and how some of the other races have gotten on since the major catastrophe that happened in that part of the world. The next major story entry would take readers across the ocean to other settlements of humans, bring out some of the religions of the world and set up the dire circumstances that cause the events of the third novel. The initial story arc concludes with a globe-trotting world-threatening race-against-time sort of deal.
Now, this may seem like a typical trilogy, but I don’t think the stories need to end with the conclusion of the third novel. Descendants may run into future problems and allegiances or outlooks may shift over time. It’ll depend mostly on how much interest is actually garnered in my writings, if any at all comes my way, but I don’t want to necessarily limit myself to just three books in this world after investing a great deal of time & energy into its creation. So it may go transmedia, more books may get written, maybe there’ll be puppet shows or something. I can’t say.
Anyway, since the first three books will have a guy named Asherian as the protagonist, I figured the titles should reflect his central role. “Citizen in the Wilds” follows Asherian as the ‘spell’ of the Cities is broken and he struggles to survive in the inhospitable world beyond the battlements that surround them. “Alchemist at Sea” will have him going over oceans for a variety of reasons. And “Ambassador at War” should be pretty self-explanatory.
This is how things will get started, if I can get the first novel off the ground. Which, considering the epiphany I had Thursday night, is actually looking more likely.
“God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That’s flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.” – Robert McKee (Brian Cox), Adaptation.
Originally the first novel was going to be named “Asherian’s Journal,” with subsequent titles starting with “Asherian’s” in ending in another capitalized noun. “Hey, it works for Jacqueline Carey, right?” was my thought. Then, hearing Brian Cox bellow out the preceding, it hit me like a half-brick to the face. Asherian writing in his journal between most chapters is the prose equivalent of a voice-over. Now, the character in the film is kind of taking the piss out of the film he’s in, since there’s a lot of voice-over narration that actually works, but I took his words to heart and cut some of mine out of the novel. We should be focused on Asherian, not necessarily shifting from an observer’s perspective to lengthy bits of his internal monologue and back again. It’s flow-breaking, shoddy and shallow, bordering on self-insertion.
It was a hold-over idea from when I first started this with Asherian as my protagonist, as a way to tell the reader more about his mentality and his view of the Cities of Light. But that’s what his communication with his sister is for. She talks with him through dreams and visions, and she shapes the forum in which they speak. Right there is all the in-world excuse I need to show the Cities of Light and how these twins see them, not to mention how that view shifts as the story goes on.
So down went the journal entries with a boot in the ass, followed by the Mozambique Drill. Pop, pop. BLAM.
Hopefully with that out of the way, I can get back on track with a daily word count of a thousand or more, since I dropped my projected total words for Citizen in the Wilds to 100k. Here’s why.
Anyway, there’ll be writing happening this weekend. Maybe after we unpack a bit.
