Some of my favorite stories have been ruined because they’ve gone on too long. Even stories I’ve been lukewarm about have taken a turn for the abysmal when more story has been tacked on when it wasn’t needed. It’s so common that it’s been dubbed “Sequelitis” by the Tropers.
It’s informed some of the decisions I’ve made as a writer. I’ve envisioned Acradea as a trilogy, and while I have ideas for extending the cycle beyond three books, I wouldn’t want to do so unless the story is good. If Pendragon gets picked up, I have ideas for a story arc with a solid conclusion. The modern supernatural fantasy/horror novel idea kicking around in my head is a standalone product. Suffice it to say, I’ve learned to go into my storytelling with a plan in mind.
Lately, I’ve been wondering why World of Warcraft is different.
Now, on-going interactive storytelling is a different kettle of fish entirely from your standard-issue long-form fiction-writing. Any Dungeon Master worth their salt can tell you that. Would the epic D&D games played by the guys from Penny Arcade be anywhere near as interesting and fun without poor, poor Aeofel? It’s a collaborative effort, and roleplayers, good ones at least, do not exist in a vacuum.
That said, I’ve been thinking about what to do with my main World of Warcraft character.
I’ve been playing a blood elf hunter since the race was introduced to players in the Burning Crusade expansion. I’m fond of him. Playing an outdoors-oriented, inclusive member of a race known for being arrogant and isolationist has lead to a lot of interesting anecdotes. He’s had highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies – a pretty full life considering he’s only a couple years old in real-life terms.
With the next expansion coming, I’m wondering where he’s going to fit in. Or, more to the point, if he’s going to fit in at all. The story of Gilrandur Dawnstalker feels like it’s come to something of a conclusion. Do I take him on a “coming out of retirement” track when the Cataclysm hits, or is it time to start a new story instead of continuing the old?
The inspiration for this thought came from the pre-Cataclysm event, Zalazane’s Fall. Warcraft’s trolls have always been one of my favorite races in that universe. They have fantastic lore, interesting relationships with the other Horde races and are poised to have a big role to play in the expansion. Of course, their accents and aesthetic don’t hurt either.
As writers, I have to ask. Do you know it’s time to end a story? If so, how?
I’ve been in therapy quite a bit in my adult life.
You’re shocked. I can tell.
One of the most effective pieces of advice I was given by a therapist involved dealing with the internal mechanisms of my brain. Specifically, the phenomenon she called “racing thoughts.” Basically, if a notion came into my head or something bugged me, the notion itself and my thoughts on that notion would begin chasing each other around with little restraint or regard for anything I wanted to accomplish. Something would shock me or blind-side me emotionally, and I’d be a useless weepy rag of a man for at least half a day. It was bad.
Getting a grip on this problem, and by extension myself, was a lot like herding cats. Rather mangy undomesticated ones that that. My inability to properly cope with or communicate important, life-impacting information and events has lead directly to some real disasters. I’ve messed up quite a few things in my life. Some bridges have been burned, never to be repaired. I like to believe in things like redemption, forgiveness and hope, but reality is a lot colder and more harsh than the heavenly kingdom in just about any walk of faith.
See? There it goes. My mind starts chasing its own tail in a spiral of, in this case, self-loathing and regret. Nip that in the bud, mind! I’ve done bad things in my life, sure. But they weren’t all bad. And I can learn from the bad things I’ve done in the past and do better in the future. Yes, I’ve lost friends. Yes, I’ve disappointed loved ones. Who the hell hasn’t? We live on. Pain heals, chicks dig scars.
The Only Real Writer’s Block
Going back to my rosy-eyed optimism, I’m fond of telling people that they are their own biggest obstacle. Yes, the deck might be stacked against you in a certain endeavor, be it because of the success of other people or your gender or your current finances or the fact you can’t get your hands on a trained orangutan. But more often than not, the little doubts and tiny bits of self-loathing we all struggle with are the pebbles in our shoes that keep us from taking another step forward.
It’s especially true for writers. You hum along, banging out words, sending queries, pitching articles and sharing your stories with other writers. Or long-suffering spouses. Or confused pets. Or anybody within earshot. Bottom line is, six days out of seven everything’s fine as far as writing is concerned.
Then comes the bad news. Another rejection for the “I’m doing something!” pile. A disappointingly inadequate paycheck, or word that payment isn’t coming at all for another month or three. A collections call. The sound of the repo man’s tow truck hitching up to your car. Your dog leaves you a ‘present’ in your shoes. The roaches carry off the good china you haven’t managed to wash yet. You get the idea.
Whatever it is, however it comes about, you just stop cold. You doubt your worth as an artist, a writer, a human being. A little voice in your head tells you this was a bad idea. You’ll never make is as big as the people out there who have one tenth of your talent but are twenty times as wealthy and popular. You messed up somewhere, and you’ll never recover. The little bastard in the back of your brain drops a tiny bit of red matter into your heart and wham, super-massive emotional black hole. Because that feeling? Sucks.
Herding Cats While Herding Cats
Writers and artists aren’t the only folks who deal with this. Gamers also run afoul of doubt fairies. Get blasted by other players one time too many, fail in the boss fight time and again, mess up the timing necessary to get that elusive achievement after an afternoon of attempts, and the gamer rage takes hold. You fume. You cuss. You quit.
Now imagine that frustration duplicated at least a few times, in the personage of fellow gamers with whom you have direct contact, but it’s all directed at you. That’s what it means to form a guild, clan or similarly titled organization of gamers within a given game. You not only have to deal with your own anxiety and desire to get your goals across, but you also need to respond to the needs of other gamers. Some are easy to please, some are passive-aggressive in communicating what they want, some just don’t want to play by the rules and some think they’re entitled to special favors just because you’ve made the wise decision to include them in the club (which, by the way, they’re not).
Basically you’re putting yourself through the wringer not only of proving your own self-doubts wrong but weathering the slings and arrows of the outrageous expectations of others doing the same. Egos are projected. Friends become whiners. Any ideals you had get swept aside as people scramble for bits of recognition and validation. It feels like the original notion has been picked up and carried in a direction you don’t like. Red matter, center of heart, black hole, suck. The feeling that comes from herding the cats in ones’ head is aggravated by herding multiple additional cats.
So how do you wrangle these rampant felines?
Catnip for the Brain
The best advice I can give for situations like this is to keep things in perspective. As a writer, there’s nobody else in the world who can tell your story the way you want to tell it. Sure, concepts or themes or plot structures replicate themselves all the time, but the nuances, the fine details, the character ticks and turning points are all you. You’re the teller of that story, and if you don’t get out there and tell it it won’t be told.
As for gamers, games are supposed to be fun. A joy and a delight, a distraction and a touch of escape. We shouldn’t drag our personal problems into our entertainment to the degree that it stops being entertaining. That said, I’m as guilty as doing it as anybody, starting over and ragequitting with the best of them, taking a game too seriously. So I’ll be right there with you, struggling to remember that I’m in the game to have fun. The people that prevent me from having fun, that try to take that fun away to fulfill those false feelings of entitlement, are people I really shouldn’t associate with. Maybe they’ll get over it, giving the gamer form of a cat’s look of “I meant to do that.” And maybe they’ll wander off, hindquarters high in the air in that “I’m the most awesome and everybody else is an idiot” prance cats do so well.
It’s important to have goals, in just about everything you do. The somewhat tricky part is that not everything will have defined goals laid out for you. The deadlines of a dayjob, the billing dates of utilities, the expiration on a gallon of milk – these give us tangible goals. Other goals aren’t usually as well defined.
Take gaming, for example. People are under no obligation to reach a particular level in World of Warcraft, Mass Effect or EVE Online. In fact, EVE has no “end-game” content to speak of. There’s no sprawling story structure of quests and rewards – just you, your starting vessel and the vast emptiness of space. To keep things interesting you have to set goals for yourself – get this skill to a certain level, earn enough money for that class of ship, be good enough to be invited to the Awesome Express corporation.
Mass Effect, being a single-player experience, has the goals of the story missions, side quests and DLC, but beyond that you really don’t have any obligation to play it more than once. Yet I find myself contemplating doing just that. I’ve beaten both games on standard difficulty (as an Inflitrator) and Hardcore (as a Vanguard). But the Insanity difficulty taunts me. I also never hit the maximum level in the first game. So at some point, I’ll be revisiting it, and maybe I can put together a review of ME2’s DLC while I’m at it.
As for World of Warcraft, my main character’s plunging into the final end-game raid of the last expansion. I’m also getting him geared up for the arenas, which are pretty much the pinnacle of player-versus-player skill. Meanwhile, I have two other characters I’m working on, one for the purposes of change-of-pace gameplay (tanking as opposed to DPSing) and one for role-playing purposes. It’s difficult to portray a charismatic, powerful villain when you’re only half as powerful as everybody else in terms of level, after all.
Outside of my various electronic distractions, other goals approach as well. I’ve been doing podcasts for IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! for almost a year, and in a few months I’ll have been getting blog posts up for over 365 days. The editing process of Citizen in the Wilds proceeds, I’m trying to get a hold of Polymancer again and in a few weeks I’ll know the end result of my efforts to place in the Blizzard fiction contest. Once these goals are met, however, I know I can’t stop – new ones will have to be set, otherwise I’ll just be puttering around in games all day.
I mean, more than I usually do.
What sort of goals do you/have you set for yourself? How do you reward yourself when you reach them?
I have a tendency to take my games seriously. Like James T. Kirk, I don’t like to lose. I tend to find being on the wrong side of a die roll or an enemy stratagem to be very frustrating. But rather than taking the opportunity to learn from my mistakes, my habits lean towards venting those frustrations in an immediate, vocal manner. I’ve been making efforts not to do that, and have been successful when it comes to board games or Magic duels. However, one place that saw me continuing this bad habit was World of Warcraft.
Thankfully, Wil Wheaton‘s around to show us how it’s done.
A little background information: Not only did my wife and I meet on World of Warcraft, she is also better at it than I am. She’s shown me how to theorycraft, the ways to look for new gear and telltale signs to be wary of when grouping with people. Just like her editorial skills can improve my writing (if I can ever get up the gumption to let her tear what I write to shreds), her high standards help me be a better player than the ‘bads’ with which neither of us wishes to associate.
I’m a hunter. My ability to do damage and, by extension, contribute to the group revolves around my ranged weapon. I’ve been in need of a new one for some time now, and the most viable way to get one is in defeating a creature called Ick in the dungeon known as the Pit of Saron – abbreviated PoS, insert obvious metaphorical joke here. The system by which WoW generates random numbers determines what loot drops from its creatures, and after 16 attempts at this lumbering monstrosity on heroic difficulty, that system had yet to come up with the result linking to the crossbow I’ve been after.
My wife’s been very patient. I, less so. It got to the point that she was reluctant to be in certain situations in-game with me for fear of a display that’d put the Angry German Kid to shame. After her admission of this and Wil’s pep talk, I’ve resolved to change my ways. In a sense, I wanted attempt #17 on Ick to fail. I wanted to make sure I could do this – to prove I could take my losses in stride with my successes because a) it’s just a game and b) I’m spending time with my wife doing something we both love. Not every couple can claim that.
I also wanted to be honest about my feelings. My wife (along with many others I suspect) has an internal bullshit detector, and even if I didn’t feel entirely okay with the likely outcome of another encounter with Ick and the random number generator, I wanted to at least convey the sentiment with enough honesty to avoid a scathing look. My goal was to be within a tolerable range of at least two or three decibecks*.
So after waiting around 15 minutes in the queue for a tank to show up, we entered the PoS. Skip the first group of mobs, take out the workers and a proto-drake rider, drop the first boss. Head around the quarry, don’t fall in, don’t stand in the toxic waste. Once the trash was clear, we were staring at him, the pustule-decorated lunk with an annoying spikey-haired gnome on his shoulder telling him what to do. It was a somewhat disorganized fight, a bit moreso than usual, but like sixteen previous attempts, eventually Ick succumbed to my comrade’s blades and my bullets.
And like sixteen attempts before, my crossbow did not drop.
I heard my wife apologize. I didn’t say much. I’m not sure what she expected, if anything. The first chance I got, I got up from my computer, walked over to her desk, and kissed her. I thanked her for being patient with me and told her I love her.
Later, I ran another dungeon, the Halls of Reflection on normal difficulty. There was a bow available at the end, and while it’s not as high a quality as the crossbow Ick is hoarding, it’s still a better weapon than my hand-made epic rifle. Breezing through a normal difficulty dungeon was actually kind of refreshing, and much to my delighted surprise, the bow dropped on the first try.
I’m going to do my utmost to practice this good habit. I want to do more with my wife. We’ve discussed story ideas and means to continue playing that maintain our now-mutually high standards, and I want to prove that I’m a partner upon whom she can rely, not just in Azeroth, but in the real world as well. So I’ll keep my temper in check, laugh at our mutual misfortune, point out the bads and praise her when she saves the group with her fantastic healing prowess. We’re in this together, after all, and we play to enjoy it, not to get worked up over the electronic equivalent of a toss of the dice. Maybe I can keep that in mind from now on.
And maybe that stubborn Ick will drop that crossbow someday.
*decibeck (n): A measure of falsehood within a statement, based on the notion that one out of every ten syllables spoken by Glenn Beck is absolutely false.
Why don’t you come with me, little girl, on a magic carpet dragon ride?
I’m going to let you in on a little secret.
With a few exceptions, I’m not entirely focused on World of Warcraft when I’m playing it.
The aforementioned exception is the dungeons & raids. I stay focused in there. Mostly because I don’t want to suck at playing whichever role I happen to be playing at the time. If I’m DPS, I want to top the damage charts. If I’m tanking, I don’t want anybody else getting smacked in the face. And nobody dies on my watch when I’m healing, otherwise you have every right to call me a tosser.
There are exceptions to the exceptions, too, since some of the dungeons I’ve seen and finished on my main character about a hundred times. If the run’s routine, and populated with random folk I’ve never met who are all sporting gear as good as or better than mine, I can slip into the place where I spend the bulk of my Warcraft time. Half in the actual game, half in other places.
You see, being in the fantasy world of Azeroth is to my brain what being in the gym is to other people’s bodies.
I don’t go to a gym. I can’t afford it, and while I might benefit from extended physical activity on a regular basis, I see walking to and from the train stations in Lansdale & Doylestown as an adequate amount of physical exercise, more than most in my sedentary line of work get as they sit in traffic cursing at some jerk in a BMW who cut them off while yammering on their Bluetooth and sipping their latte. Suckers.
Back on topic. Wandering around the huge game world of Blizzard’s MMO, I find inspiration almost everywhere I turn. The towering spires of Dalaran, that whole floating city in fact, reminds me a great deal of the similar cities I’ve conceptualized in Citizen in the Wilds. The lush, overgrown landscape of Sholazar Basin invokes those selfsame Wilds. Northrend, in general, is a big reason why I got off my ass and was able to finish the first draft of Citizen, and is a constant reminder that I have more editing to do before it’s ready to present to agents and professional editors.
I’m also using the background and ongoing stories for Warcraft characters as exercises in writing. I’m looking out for passive voice. I’m keeping things simple and brief. I’m killing darlings. Even if only a half-dozen people read the stuff that emerges from those exercises, I’m keeping my writing knives and scalpels sharp. But those exercises wouldn’t come to be at all if I weren’t playing the game.
I know that playing the game as much as I do doesn’t make me as productive as I could be. However, if I try to get something creative out of the experience, be it inspiration for an original work or motivation to write even a small snippet from a character’s point of view, then some minor productivity manages to emerge overall.
I’m approaching Warcraft the way I do movies these days. I keep my brain on.
