Tag Archives: writing

Past Endurance

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I have been medicated for over a year now, to treat mental illness. I’ve been medicated in the past, but I said I was stronger than medication. I was better than that.  I was trying to write while enduring panic attacks, suicidal depression, generalized anxiety, manic highs and disorganized thoughts. Terrifying hallucinations.

I was coaching myself through a panic attack in a bathroom stall at the newspaper I was working at, when I decided I wanted to be able to actually eat lunch on my lunch break. Not hide in a bathroom stall having a panic attack. I had started to take honest, successful steps with my career. People were starting to hear my name. And I had fallen in love.

The way I saw it, my choices were to try treatment again, or keep losing the battle. If treatment was successful, I’d hold onto words, the love of my life, and actually start living. If I didn’t get treatment, I was going to drown. I didn’t have the mental or emotional bandwidth to keep going.  And you can only hide in a bathroom stall for so long.

That was in 2010. I’ve written through tapering off the pills that didn’t work, through starting new medications, and the awful adjustment periods. There are entire phases of projects that are just a coloured smear of memory. They got done, but goodness knows some bits are fuzzy. If you’re just starting medication, I can tell you that yeah, it’s not easy, but it’ll get easier.

Many of my peers, who are also your peers, are on medication. Slowly, some of them have started to be public about it. About being suicidally depressed. The blown deadlines. The litany of agony and self-medication many of us experienced for years. People I love and respect are medicated. They still struggle, but they use whatever resources they have to stay some measure of sane. And now that I have some small measure of success, and things I love and never want to lose…I emulate that. I do what it takes to stay healthy and sane. I am far from perfect or normal, but I don’t spend every single day panicked, and every morning regretting that I didn’t die in my sleep.

Sometimes success, even the start of it, crushes writers. I’ve lost friends to that moment, when their resources surpassed their ability to hold on.I nearly lost myself to that.  I was lucky enough to get treatment I needed before I could try a second time. The path back from that has not been easy.  I don’t think it is easy, for anyone. I still struggle, often daily, to write around the remnants of an illness the pills cannot cure, to keep fighting through what they call incomplete recovery from my mental illness. But every day I sit down to my laptop, pop the cap on the bottle next to it, and take the pills.

I don’t regret going back on medication. You couldn’t pay me to give up my life, or the things I’ve written, since clearing that hellish fog.

 

On Shared World and Traditional Novels

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 Jeff Grubb is a game designer and writer living in Seattle.  He’s worked in a wide variety of shared universes, including Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Guild Wars, Marvel, and now the Star Wars Expanded Universe.  His Star Wars novel Scourge came out in late April of 2012.

There are two glasses of clear liquid on the counter over there. One is tonic water. The other is gin. But until you cross the room and taste them (and hopefully smell them first, if you are wise), they are apparently identical.

Similarly, there are two novels on the shelf. One is a self-contained story, unique to itself. A traditional novel. The other is part of a shared-world universe. But until you investigate, they are identical. Schrödinger’s books, if you prefer.

This is not to say that one type is superior to the other (that water from the previous example may be pristine or crawling with nasty microbes, and that gin may be gentle or toxic), but merely that that there are two different processes that lead to the same point – just as there are marsupials that evolved into niches held by placental mammals in places that are not Australia and thereby show similar traits. Two different thought processes bring these similar-appearing volumes, containing words and thoughts, bound along the long edge with pages that turn. Yet each tend to have marked differences in origin.

[And as I continue this, I’m going to use the words “tends to” when I mean to say “often is the case, though I don’t doubt that you can come up with an exception”. So let the exceptions test this general rule].

The traditional novel (and by that I mean the one you normally think about as being that type of book, be it Moby Dick, Tom Sawyer, or the Hobbit) tends to come out of the writer’s mind like Athena springing from the forehead of Zeus. Such a novel tends to be a completed work before it sees the interior of a publisher’s office, or even feels the gentle caress of an editor. It may represent a lot of work on the part of the writer without recompense for his time. It may be rejected numerous times, or be written without a clear idea of who will publish it (an editorial friend once noted “It is called the SUBMISSION process for a reason”). The traditional novel may see transformations in the journey to print, but it tends belong to its own universe – Dickens set many novels in England, but each one belongs to its own version of England. The origin of most of that universe is hatched from, or at least strained through, the writer’s mind.

[And I can think of specific examples that cross each one of those above points, but none that invalidate all of them. For example, sequels abound among traditional novels – Huckleberry Finn and Lord of the Rings comes to mind, but they still from that same origin point of the author’s private universe.].

The shared world or licensed novel has a different heritage. It has a universe already in place when the writer of the book approaches it. Indeed, the WRITER tends to be approached for a book about a certain concept in that world, as opposed to author generating that concept. The shared world novel tends to have a predetermined delivery date, and may often have a cover already in the works while the writer is in the process of writing. And the shared world novel has something that seems much rarer in traditional novels – at least traditional novels by previously unpublished writers – money up front. The writer is doing a recognized job, at a particular word count and deadline, and is being recompensed (through an advance on eventual) for that work. It is a little more secure in that way.

But the big difference is that idea of origin. A traditional novel has but one parent powering its genesis (though it may have a host of well-meaning aunts and uncles trying to transform it from duckling to swan). A shared world novel has a number of other authors, all contributing at the same time, and the genus of control shifts from behind the writer’s eyes out into a cloud of individuals, bibles, previous continuity, and the well-meaning aunts and uncles.

The shared world novel has numerous advantages. You get the power of a brand behind it. In raw marketing terms, if you are writing a Werewolf Musketeer novel, you get to stand on the shoulders of the previous Werewolf Musketeer writers. Their success feeds into your success. You didn’t write the previous ten novels, but your initial sales (and popularity) would be higher than if you were launching an original novel by a talented newcomer (or even an established professional). The brand holds strength.

A shared world also has someone else doing the heavy lifting at worldbuilding. Major characters, locations, and items may already exist. Someone else may have established the core ethos and ethics of the universe. You get a big toy box to root around in, as opposed to being given a block of wood and asked to carve away everything that doesn’t look like a race car.

The big disadvantage for shared worlds comes from the name – you have to SHARE them. There are other creatives. There are other worldbuilders. In many cases, there are fans who knowledge of long-running series will outstrip both your knowledge and that of everyone you will ask while writing the book (“I cannot believe that the author had the Werewolf Musketeer reach for the wine glass with his right hand. Everyone who read the 14th novel in the series knows that such a gauche action is cause for immediate banishment”). Your creative universe is a little more tightly constrained.

Finally, shared worlds are treated as ugly stepchildren, looked down upon even in genres that regularly rebel against being looked down upon themselves. Lacking both the journey of the traditional novel and benefiting from established (and often monitored) setting, they feel a little bit like cheating, and their success comes from marketing tricks as opposed to real suffering on the creatives’ parts (though there is suffering there).

The thing you haven’t seen me argue here is a difference in quality between the two. There are great novels in the traditional format and horrible ones. You can find excellent writing in a book from a shared world and execrable manglings of the English language in books of the same series. To say that one type has the inside track on the other is problematic at best, though for literary crimes a traditional novelist may disappear, taking his world with him, while in a shared universe, that particular volume gets excised and the rest of novels proceed.

And all of this is “inside-the-beltway” – worrying more about the process than the result. It is entertaining, no doubt, but in the end it is the quality of the writing, the characters, the plot, and ideas within a novel which gives it its shine, not the provenance of its origin. In the end, you, the reader, are looking at two similar glasses of clear liquid from across the room.

So what is it going to be. Gin? Tonic? Or a perhaps mixture of both?

Origin Awards Interview: Stuart Boon, Author of Shadows over Scotland

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The 38th Annual Origin Awards were presented at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio on June 2nd. Cthulhu Britannica: Shadows over Scotland, written by Stuart Boon and published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment, won for Best Roleplaying Supplement or Adventure. The transcript of my interview with the author follows.

You’ve been involved in the role-playing game community for the past 30 years. How did that experience aid you when you wrote Shadows over Scotland?

I think it helps on a couple of levels.  First, being immersed in the gaming world allows you to appreciate what works and what doesn’t, to be able to differentiate good writing and good mechanics from bad.  Just having read, played and experienced a wide selection of games, resources, and other materials give you a rich composite picture of what can be done in the genre.  It informs your boundaries and your choice of tools for a particular piece of writing.  Second, my experience running games over 30 years provided me with a clear wish list for Shadows Over Scotland.  I wanted the book to be a really solid resource for Keepers—the people running the show in a Call of Cthulhu game—to meet their needs in developing and managing the adventures in 1920s Scotland.  So, that experience allows me to call upon a breadth of knowledge and simultaneously bring a criticality and focus to the writing.

As both player and creator, what aspects of the gaming experience are you most passionate about?

I’m most passionate about storytelling and world-building.  In his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, Tolkien used the terms sub-creation and secondary worlds to discuss the creative potential inherent in stories.  I see that same potential writ large in role-playing games.  Games provide players with opportunities for immersion into fantastically creative, secondary worlds where stories come alive.  One thing that is especially attractive about table-top, role-playing games is the ability to participate cooperatively in the telling of those stories.  Game writers and developers provide the initial ideas, themes, and background, but the story and the world are the creation of those people seated around a table sharing a goal and vision.  That’s exciting.

Shadows over Scotland brings Cthulhu to Scotland in the 1920’s. What kinds of challenges did researching this setting present to you, both as a writer and as an immigrant to the United Kingdom?

In some ways, I think I may have benefitted from not being born in the United Kingdom.  The canvas was uniformly blank to me, if you see my meaning.  It was not coloured by preconceived ideas about what it was like to live in Britain in the 1920s.  I had no close heritage, cultural memory, or recalled stories to draw upon.  I had to research everything, absolutely everything.  The primary challenge was the sheer volume of material to be read and to be careful of unwittingly introducing anachronisms.  But yes, the single greatest challenge was researching the whole of Scottish history, focusing in on what made the 1920s tick, and then making that interesting for readers.  That challenge was offset by the genuine pleasure I took from introducing Lovecraftian themes and the Cthulhu Mythos into the Scottish setting.

What do you feel are critical things to keep in mind while writing Lovecraftian fiction today?

That there is a very real Lovecraftian spirit that we need to be true to.  For me the appeal of Lovecraft comes in his description of the human condition when faced with the unknown or the unknowable.  It is the exploration of that condition that drives my interest in Lovecraft and the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.  In any form, Lovecraftian fiction should seek to produce more than chills.  What you want, in my opinion, is a hint—or an explosion, depending on your intent—of cosmic dread, incorporating a heady mix of potent themes including mutability, madness, and human frailty delivered via suspense, terror, and awe.  Behind all of this, it is the spirit and ghostly voice of H.P. Lovecraft, at once disconcerting, emotive, and powerful, that you want to animate and haunt your own writing.

What advice would you offer to someone who is new to writing games?

First, be passionate about writing for games: understand why you are doing it and what you want to achieve.  You are going to need strong motivation to get you to 80,000 words or 180,000 words.  Second, stick to your guns:  if you’ve got an idea worth flogging, flog it, and keep flogging it.  Use your group of friends and players to talk through ideas and to playtest everything.  Generating a really good piece of writing is all about development over time: use every bit of feedback and every little experience to make your work richer, stronger.  And, third, enjoy and learn from the process.  Carry your experience forward to new projects and use it wisely.  After that, rinse and repeat.

About the Origin Awards

The Origin Awards are voted on by the attendees of the Origins Game Fair and presented annually by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design to recognize outstanding achievement in design and production in games and game-related material.

About Cubicle 7 Entertainment

Cubicle 7 Entertainment is a UK-based publisher of award-winning games, including Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, The One Ring, The Laundry RPG, Victoriana and Qin: The Warring States. For more information visit www.cubicle7.co.uk or e-mail info@cubicle7.co.uk

About Stuart Boon

Stuart Boon was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He moved to Great Britain in 2002 and now lives in Scotland with his wife Michele. An avid film and music fan, and active role-player, Stuart spends entirely too much time indoors. He is currently working on a number of projects involving the Cthulhu Mythos whilst trying to retain his sanity. He blogs at stuartboon.posterous.com.

Origins Awards Interview – Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

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During the Origins Awards this year Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple won the Vanguard Award. This award is significant in that it is not given every year and honors highly innovative games. I recently interviewed Dan Solis, the game designer, along with Ryan Macklin and Lillian Cohen-Moore, the editors. The following is the transcript of that interview.

Bear Weiter: Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is both a game and an exercise in storytelling. How did you design something that balances creative writing with the use of mechanics?

Daniel Solis: Working in advertising, I often get called on to write within constraints. If it’s a TV script, I have to include certain language or disclaimers while promoting a brand. If it’s a billboard, I usually only have three or four words to communicate a much larger idea.

Then occasionally I’ll get a client who says “do anything” and I suddenly go blank. It’s the constraint that inspires creativity. Constraint is the pressure that creates heat. That is a very ancient idea, of course. It goes back to haikus and sonnets.

In Do, I designed a game that is all about constraints and writing prompts. First, the players are all writing a story together. Second, a player can only write one sentence at a time on her turn. Third, the players win by using all of the “goal words” in their story, but can only often only use one word per turn.

As you play, you may get opportunities to use more than one goal word, but at the price of your hero getting into trouble. This acts as yet another prompt for the next player’s turn, as she must decide whether she will rescue a companion even if it means taking his place.

With all these constraints, I was worried at one point that it would hinder a player’s creativity. There certainly are a lot of factors to consider in a single turn. Yet I’m always amazed at the players’ imagination during the game. They’ll come up with the zaniest ways for their heroes to get into trouble or to rescue a friend in need.

BW: As editors, how does your approach differ when you edit a game versus other kinds of manuscripts?

Ryan Macklin: I’m primarily a game editor. A game has many different contextual channels, more than fiction or even most text books. Games books need to serve as instructional text (along with examples and other methods that facilitate learning) and sources of inspiration. That means text flow is as much of a page design consideration as what’s on a given page.

Since people learn by different methods, including having others read a book and teach, a given section needs to take that into account, as well as blend in evocative tone and color to facilitate learning the context of the game and giving additional points of reference to remember a given rule or piece of advice.

Lillian Cohen-Moore: Since I’m primarily a copy editor for games, I have to pay attention to whether I’m reading something with mechanics in it. If I don’t keep that in mind while changing passages to fit a style guide or clear up unclear text, I run a risk of taking a machete to text that’s essential for understanding gameplay.

BW: What were the first games that truly grabbed you? How have your past experiences playing games motivated you to get involved in game development? How did playing games influence you as storytellers?

DS: I played a lot of D&D as a teenager, then other role-playing games in college.

In most RPGs of the time, the critical question was “Does my character succeed at the action I just described?” You rolled dice to find the answer to that question and modified the dice results in various ways to get your desired outcome. This creates very decompressed narratives that, in total, take many hours to describe very little.

My whole perspective changed thanks to two games: octaNe by Jared Sorensen and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis.

In octaNe, the question was “Who gets to decide what happens next in the story?” There were some constraints on scope and character ownership, but otherwise you were given very broad license to just narrate to your heart’s content. You still used dice and still modified those results, but the meaning of those results was very different than a traditional RPG.

By the same token, Baron Munchausen gave even broader license to each player. In that game you’re simply asked to tell boastful lies about one of your amazing, heroic accomplishments. Occasionally other players may ask prying questions that poke holes in your story, to which you must respond with wit and grace. It’s a challenging game partly because you must think quickly without many prompts.

Both games put you much in the position of a writer. That’s probably what influenced me most in developing Do.

LCM: When I was a kid my parents would buy my siblings and I board games every year. We’d get bored of the regular rules and start inventing our own “hard” modes. From there I get into table-top and live-action role-playing as I grew up. Games were always a part of my social circle, but I didn’t realize I could actually get involved in games development till a few years ago. Playing games has had a very noticeable influence on my sense of pacing. Both when I’m writing and when I’m telling stories in casual settings.

RM: I used to play GURPS, back in the day. Mage: the Ascension and Unknown Armies blew my mind, and really got me thinking about writing stuff.

I have a mild reading disability, so looking at the old-school roleplaying games and how they just throw walls of text at you was frustrating. So I started looking to how other books presented information, and have been using that as a guide to developing games I’ve been involved with.

I can’t really answer how games have influenced me as a storyteller. I know that they have, but games are an integral part of my personality DNA. I can’t really remove that to tell you how it’s impacted my life.

BW: You created another game before this – Happy Birthday, Robot! – that is also a mix of storytelling and gameplay. Are there more games to come that feature storytelling so prominently? Do you do any other kind of creative writing?

DS: The irony of all this is that I consider myself more of a board game designer. I just happened to find success with these odd little storytelling games that apply simple board game mechanics to the ephemeral world of creative writing.

I explore this space a bit more with some side projects like the Writer’s Dice. These are dice with the words AND, SO, BUT, IF, AS, and OR on each face. The idea is that as you outline a story, you’ll roll a die between each story-beat to keep the story moving in unexpected directions. You can buy Writer’s Dice from my etsy store at http://www.etsy.com/shop/smartplaygames.

At the moment, I’m developing two new story games using these dice. The first is Pop and Locke’s Last Heist, a storytelling game about a father/daughter heist team recovering supernatural objects from their family of supervillains. The second is tentatively titled Rulers, which is a cross between Fullmetal Alchemist and Hunger Games.

BW: How did you get involved with the project? What were your official roles and were there other aspects you were involved with along the way?

RM: This is the world of game bookmaking; there isn’t much in the way of official roles on small projects. I was the guy who challenged Daniel when he needed challenging on rules presentation, and played clean-up on the text.

It was a collaborative arrangement, not an equal pairing but one of a friend helping another friend make a vision come to life. Daniel had many such folks; I just happened to also be his editor.

LCM: Ryan and I knew each other before working on Do together as co-editors, and was who brought me in to work on the editing with him. Since I was doing copy edits, the bulk of what I did was making sure things looked good after Ryan had come in and kicked the tires.

BW: How do writers who are interested in writing for games get into the business?

LCM: Pay attention to games publishers and industry publications. There’s regular calls for pitches and openings. Just like fiction, those submissions practices are spelled out very clearly. Outside that familiar process, you should be exhibiting the same qualities you do writing fiction. Make your deadlines and don’t be a dick.

RM: This isn’t like the world of fiction. Roleplaying games are a niche market, and you get into the business by doing stuff and being loud. Sometimes, larger companies hold contests or open calls for submissions, always for their established games. But if you have an idea for a game system or setting, just do it and put it out there. Then network. Go to conventions and get to know folks.

Being an independent publisher in the RPG world doesn’t have the dirty stink on it that it seems to have in the world of fiction. There aren’t Big Publishers that will take your new idea. Their resources are stretched working on their own properties. So if you’re going to get out there, you should strike on your own.

That said, places often look for freelancers, but they’ll mostly go with people they know or have met.

Many thanks to Daniel, Ryan, and Lillian for their time, and congratulations on winning the Vanguard Award!

More information about Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple can be found at www.SmartPlayGames.com.

By day, Daniel Solis is associate creative director at Third Degree Advertising. By night, he’s an award-winning designer of storytelling games and board games. He designs in public at www.DanielSolis.com. Follow @DanielSolis on Twitter.

Ryan Macklin is a freelance game designer, writer & editor, and frequently blogs about the creative process at RyanMacklin.com.

Lillian Cohen-Moore is a freelance writer, editor and journalist. Part of the proofing team for “Attitude” from Catalyst Game Labs, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple was her first project as a game editor. She blogs at www.lilliancohenmoore.com. She is also assistant editor here at Booklife Now.