My wife and I like to discuss different things we like about the game, other ways we plan on playing it, and even toss dialog from the game back and forth at one another. If that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is.
I’m also starting up a new Mass Effect play-through, but I’ll probably finish my Orange Box review series as well as Assassin’s Creed 2 before I really dedicate myself to putting another Infiltrator through the paces of Insanity. There’s a lot to be said for a game’s design, though, if I’m willing to put myself through the stickier bits just to enjoy a particular scene or storyline again. Fallout 3 is another candidate for a repeat play-through, provided I can find a way to afford all of the DLC. I think I’d need a magic cauldron or something.
I’ve thought about the replay value of some older games, as well. StarCraft, Full Throttle, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, pretty much any of the Wing Commander games… they’re all games I’ve played multiple times, and even with the gift of hindsight and more advanced simulations at my disposal, I’d happily play any of them again.
Share your thoughts with me, folks. What games have you encountered that, after playing them through, maybe even years ago, you’d really enjoy playing again? What gives a game replay value for you?
I’d really like to say, “This is a subject that requires no introduction.” It’d be a funny way to open up the subject of exposition, since a lot of stories start out with something expository. Especially in genre fiction, more often than not, the world or worlds in which the tale is set will be completely alien to the audience. While this isn’t always the case, it happens often enough that the ins and outs of good exposition are worth talking about.
There’s a method of storytelling out there called in medias res. It’s fancy Latin jargon for “diving right into the good stuff in the story.” Stories that begin this way spend little to no time on exposition. Sometimes this can be pulled off even in genre fiction. Take a look at the opening of the original Star Wars. We get a little text crawl that sets the scene a bit, telling us who the Empire & Rebellion are but not a great deal else, and then WHAMMO. The space equivelant of a beat-up cargo van is getting chased by the mighty, imposing, ball-shrinkingly intimidating hugeness of an Imperial Star Destroyer. The shot and scene are composed in such a way that, without saying another word beyond that opening text, we know just about everything we need to know about who these folks are and what they’re about.
This is an example of good exposition. As Chuck said over on Terribleminds, “[E]xposition is sometimes necessary, but it should never be a boat anchor.” Going on expository tangents is a surefire way to have people losing interest in your story. If you’re lucky, they’ll turn a few pages ahead to look for something exciting to happen, or hit the fast-forward button if it’s in a medium other than print. The classic writers of genre fiction, Tolkein and Lewis for example, could get away with long expository passages because that was the style of the day. However, even as a fan of their work, sometimes I just can’t stand reading another of JRR’s long descriptions of how Tom Bombadil’s hat looks.
Some of the best exposition out there is woven into other things that are going on. Sometimes the best way to do this is to have one character talk to another about something they don’t already know. For example you could have an human explain to an alien some odd human custom that’s become common in whatever year 20XX you’ve set your story. Then, the alien replies that the custom is strange to them because of how things are done on their homeworld. In a few lines of dialog, you’ve not only established a way in which the world has changed, but also how different the aliens are from us.
“Brevity is the soul of wit,” or so we’re told. Or, as Mr. Plinkett puts it, “Don’t waste my time.” If you can find a way to get exposition out there that doesn’t feel like a chore to write, you can tell your audience more about the story without tempting them to reach for their smart phones or what have you. Because if it’s dry and boring to write, you can bet your ass it’ll be dry and boring to read.
Share some thoughts on exposition. What sort of expository passages or scenes stand out in your mind as good or bad examples? How do you get around the difficulty of creating stories in a new world? Help others help you help us all.
“The Enrichment Center promises to always provide safe testing environments. In dangerous testing environments, the Enrichment Center promises to always provide useful advice. For instance, the floor here will kill you. Try to avoid it.”
This is GLaDOS’ way of providing feedback & encouragement. Needless to say, there are some moments in Portal at which this sort of thing is less than helpful. But feedback and encouragement are both important in the creative process, despite being very different animals. With GLaDOS’ help, I’d like to show you what I mean.
Feedback
“As part of a required test protocol, our previous statement suggesting that we would not monitor this chamber was an outright fabrication. Good job. As part of a required test protocol, we will stop enhancing the truth in three, two, o*BZZZT*”
Changes are, if you’re engaged in a creative process, the ultimate goal of that process is to create something to be experienced and hopefully enjoyed by other people. Unless you happen to be telepathic, it can be very difficult to gauge how people are going to react to what you consider to be clever, funny, touching or dramatic. Individual taste needs to be factored into most entertainment or artistic decisions, because the more broad the appeal of a given work, the greater the danger that it will be too bland, generic or safe. On the other hand, going right for a niche risks alienating a great deal of potential audience members.
The most tempting time to seek feedback, in my mind, is while the work is being created. You just hammered out element X or smoothed over passage Y or touched up that corner with color Z, and to you it looks banging. However, there’s that niggling little doubt in the back of your mind. You know somebody – let’s face it, everybody knows somebody – who thinks vampires are over-rated or believes there’s no such thing as too much sex and violence or just blatantly hates the color blue. And you’re worried that they represent the majority rather than just being a kook. So, if you’re anything like me, you begin poking around looking for someone to give you feedback to make sure what you’ve just done doesn’t suck.
Stop.
Especially if it’s a first draft. Just stop right now. You’re writing a first draft. Some of it is bound to be crap. You know it, I know it, anybody who knows what writing is really about knows it. I’m as guilty of this as the next struggling artist, especially when it comes to writing female characters that aren’t shallow stereotypes. I worry like mad over that shit. But sometimes I just have to trust the handful of people who’ve told me I know what I’m doing when I use my fingers to make words come out of my brain, and put my head down to move forward. Once the draft is done, then I can ask people how badly it sucks.
Maybe.
If I don’t go back and edit it myself first.
Encouragement
“Well done, android. The Enrichment Center once again reminds you that Android Hell is a real place where you will be sent at the first sign of defiance.”
On the other hand, there’s never a bad time to seek encouragement.
Let me tell you a little secret. C’mere, I won’t bite. Unless you ask. Wink, wink.
Artists, by and large, suffer from pretty massive insecurity issues. We worry that we’re wasting our time. We worry that our end result will not be enjoyable by people who aren’t our immediate family. We worry that our immediate family is going to have us sectioned. We worry about word choice, color balance, character arcs, plot structure, time constraints, deadlines, unpaid bills, collection calls, getting too fat, annoying our significant others and worrying too much.
We can tell ourselves we’re worrying too much, but sometimes it’s not as effective as hearing it from another person. Feelings of true accomplishment are few and far between. Don’t believe me? Take it from a guy who’s actually published something more than a little article on the Escapist and a short story in a horror PDF:
[Writing] is a game of inches.
You are ascending a mountain. It is slow. It is arduous.
Writing is not a romantic career. Nor is it particularly easy. Every gain is a small one. Yes, some writers take off like a rocket, but most don’t. Most eke it out. Most crawl. Most ascend very slowly toward the light.
So between those peaks that we manage to reach, we look for encouragement to keep going. We set milestones for ourselves. Finish this many chapters. Write this many words. Get to the end of this scene. They’re little touchpoints in the course of a larger work, but to us it can feel like a big deal when we reach them.
We like to share these achievements. We know in our minds that they’re just little things and they’re about as significant as nailing that “Two Points” achievement in Half-Life 2 (but man, is it fun playing hoops with D0G), but they still make us feel good. When we do share them, we’re not necessarily looking for a cookie or a pat on the head or even much more than a cursory acknowledgement that we’ve communicated. Saying we’ve hit one of those tiny milestones isn’t a bid for overflowing praise or an attempt to impress. It’s a personal announcement. It’s a tiny celebratory verbal ejaculation. It’s a yawp.
All I’m saying, folks, is to let artists yawp. Feel free to yawp back. Just don’t smack them with a metaphorical rolled-up newspaper and tell them to keep the noise down. It’s what my mom likes to call “a happy noise.” Happy noises are good.
That’s my two cents on it, anyway.
Other Opinions
“In the event that the Weighted Companion Cube does speak, the Enrichment Center urges you to disregard its advice.”
I don’t know what the Weighted Companion Cube would say about feedback & encouragement, considering it’s pretty much just a box with hearts painted on it, but I’m curious as to what you all think out there in the wilds of the Internets.
So lay it on me. When are good and bad times to get feedback? How do you view encouragement? What do you do to encourage yourself, and why is it a good idea to encourage others, even if it’s just when they say “Hey, I wrote another 50 words today!!” In my view, now’s a good time to ask for feedback, so I’m asking, folks. That’s what the comments section is there for.
“Thank you for participating in this Aperture Science computer-aided enrichment activity. Goodbye.”
I still need a title for the Project. That means I need to talk about The Project. In detail. Seriously, I’ll be talking about when things happen in the plot and possibly even how bits of the story will end. So if you want to avoid even minor spoilers for this EPIC MAGNUM OPUS in progress, or just find yourself unwilling to wade through the following wall o’ text, put your metaphorical fingers in your ears and close your eyes, dreaming about some variation of Trade Wars in your browser courtesy of Yours Truly.
All clear?
Cool.
Chuck over at Terribleminds discusses the ins and outs of titles over yonder. Rather than completely rehash what he wrote, I’m going to tell you to go read it, because that’s the kind of friend I am. And also because he’s brilliant. Not because I fear his beard. Although I kinda do. Seriously, I’m starting to think every manly beard on a friend is concealing another fist or an extra noise-tube full of explatives.
This little exercise is based on his section “Where do I ‘Find’ the title” and deals mostly with the second point he brings up. If any of the half-dozen of you that actually read this drivel want to chime in, it’ll bleed into the first and fourth points as well, like a wordy pool of blood under the corpse of the incredibly generic working title.
Are you sitting comfortably?
Then I’ll begin.
Let’s Talk About Theme, Baby
So this is a fantasy novel.
…
No, that’s the setting.* It’s the where and the how of crap happening. It can’t be the what or why. Theme is less about “what sort of bells & whistles will make people drop $15US on a book with my name on it” and more about “what the hell am I trying to SAY in the next hundred thousand words?” When people ask me what this thing is about, I don’t want to go right into a plot description, I want to actually answer their question. So let’s answer it right now.
This story’s about change. The magocracy** from which our hero hails is about to undergo a pretty big onCONTENT REDACTED The catch is, for hundreds of years the ruling class have suppressed facts about those other societies to better focus their subjects on the development of new and more powerful magical spells. Now, magic here is one of the things that makes this a fantasy novel. I could easily replace magic with mass acceleration technology or rubber band slingshot techniques or guns or taming tigers to serve as mounts in battle. Magic, here, takes the place of technology, and so serves the people in providing mass transit, protection, improvments on quality of life and weaponry.
The way magic is set up in Acradea (that’s the world’s name in case you didn’t know), at least for humans, is that from an early age a given person discovers what school of magic they have a knack for and get trained on that until they’re an adult. Not a lot of dual-classing in the floating Cities of Light, so to speak. Anyway, this means that not everyone can hurl bolts of lightning or turn lead into gold or make you think you’re a dancing pomegranate. However, one of the things that’ll come up over the course of this novel is that several Citizens have collaborated to create a device that allows pretty much anybody to defend themselves at range. The device conjures a small metallic ball at the back of a long metal tube, which is etched with several alchemical sigils called Gravity Wards. They’re what make the flying transit systems work and keep the Cities afloat and they’ve been miniaturized for this. Anyway, each Ward in sequence along the length of the tube makes the ball move, adding a little acceleration each time it passes into the circle of the next Ward. So, by the time the ball leaves the muzzle of the weapon it’s moving faster than the speed of sound.
The novel is less about any potential cool factor of these weapons and more about questions like these: How will these weapons chance the society of the Cities? What was the intention of those designing it, especially considering our hero was instrumental in their implementation? And what happens when an expansionist who controls not only the weapons’ deployment but also the flow of information to the people decides it’s time to get a little payback for the centuries-old incident that drove them into exile from the cradle of their civilization?
That’s the big overarching theme and, I guess, part of the plot as well. There’s also the fact that our hero is dumped in the world outside the Cities’ protective Wall into the big untamed forest/jungle area called the Wilds from the start of the story. So his personal plotline has a fish-out-of-water, coming-of-age theme to it. His brother has something of a quest for vengeance going on, and the girl in the power trio has some prejudices to overcome. Again, I think I’m getting some of my theme & plot elements mixed together, but I hope you can see where I’m going with this yarn.
I’m In The Mood For A Title
Mood ties in with theme pretty importantly as well. And the mood of this is… well, I know the words ‘standard fantasy setting’ have slipped into the common parlance, becoming an indicator of how prevalant escapism has become in modern society (thanks, Yahtzee), but this really is a standard fantasy setting only with more grimdark elements. What elves there are exist either in the Wilds just to avoid getting wiped out entirely (they didn’t begin life communing with the trees or anything) or down in the deepest parts of the world that are habitable. The dwarves live in a police state, ever watchful for signs of Corruption. The dragons are all but unheard of, the giants haven’t been seen in millenia and the humans to the north that exiled the people living in the Cities would rather not have anything to do with anybody south of the mountains.
So everybody’s a little surly towards one another, even moreso than the usual racial tension of the standard fantasy setting. Add to that the mood of the Cities, with a population that is generally happy but a ruling class that is pushing them towards open warfare but couching it in such a way that the people will want a war. It’s totally not a metaphor for modern expansionist thinking, really. It does contribute to the overall mood that this world is a pretty dark place, despite the sunshine and growing green things and sparkly magic and stuff.
Add to that the mostly-serpentine creatures in the Wilds that eat Citizens because magical marrow is tasty and addictive to them, a giant centipede-type thing down under the dwarven mines, necromancy, murder, and just a touch of eldrich abomination from beyond the stars, and I think you can suss out what sort of mood I’m going for.
He’s Gotta Be Strong and He’s Gotta Be Fast…
So this theme and mood are what will propel our hero, Asherian, along the plotlines. He’s an apprentice alchemist, pretty intelligent and willing to get along with people he doesn’t know but somewhat naive and a little too confident in his skills with magic. He was a contributing factor to the Cities’ new weaponry, the son of one of its ruling council members, and pretty much the personification of everything the other socities hate about magic-using humans, at least at first glance. So everybody’s going to be trying to kill him. Part of the drama will come from him just trying to survive, and part will come from the darkening of his otherwise sunny disposition.
The thing that made me want to write more about Ash is that he’s not your generic “Let’s go out and save the world!!1!!” sort of young fantasy hero. For the first third or so of this tale he’s just going to want to find a way home. As things go on and he learns more about what his dad and the other rulers are up to, his goal doesn’t change but his motivations do. It becomes less “I want to go home because it’s dangerous out here and I miss my mom & dad and that’s where all my stuff is” and more “I need to get home because this shit is fucked up and it needs to be fixed.” It’s not that he won’t care about the elves or dwarves or anything, it’s more that he thinks the Cities aren’t living up to what they could really be for the people around them and somebody needs to step up and demonstrate why the rather nasty folk on the ruling council are wrong about wanting to murder anybody who looks at them funny.
And The Title Is…
…Fuck. I still don’t have the foggiest of ideas.
“Cities of Light”? No, the story doesn’t really take place there. It’s sort of about them, but Ash starts out in the Wilds and doesn’t physically get back to the CitiesCONTENT REDACTED.
“Beyond the Wall”? Closer, but it feels so generic fantasy to me. I want this to be about more than just being a fantasy novel, dammit.
“Asherian, His Brother and A Snarky Brunette Travel Across A Continent To Stop The Council of Elders From Being Warmongering Douchebags”?
I think that’s a bit long for most book covers.
Also, ‘douchebags’ might not trend well.
I’m floundering, folks. Send help.
* If you think fantasy is a theme and not a setting, go over here and get that idea out of your brainpan. Seriously. Chuck will chase it out with bullets or flying jets of jism or rabid attack monkeys or something.
** Magocracy is a legitimate word. No, seriously. Gygax coined it first. And you’re not going to question Gygax, are you? ARE YOU?!?
The word “amateur” has a bad connotation. You might look at an art’s student attempt to recreate the Mona Lisa, or a mod for Half-Life designed to make it look like Wolfenstien 3-D, or an Uwe Boll film and say “Ew, that’s completely amateur.” By that, you’re likely to mean “poorly designed, conceived or executed, and in those cases you might be right, though I for one would give props to the mod designers for using a flexible open-source shooter engine to hearken back to those bygone days where your arsenal wasn’t limited to two weapons and your health didn’t come back automatically if you just stood around a corner making sure your shoelaces were tied.
The real meaning of amateur, though, is based in its direct French translation – “lover of”. An amateur is someone who does something for the sheer love of it, not necessarily for the money. Now, I want to get paid for what I do as much as this shouty beard-faced fellow, but the fact that I’m not yet isn’t going to stop me from doing it. It’s just something I need to do on my own time until I can find a way to fool the monolithic corporate world at large into believing that what I do enhances productivity or shifts paradigms or some other such bullshit.
That’s part of the reason why this isn’t getting posted until almost 4 PM, and why it’s so short. That and I do have a day job that keeps me in the category of “struggling amateur” instead of shifting me to “starving amateur.”
