And I’ve been deep in my hole with work to do. All of a sudden the air is crisper and colder, and the leaves are turning. When’d that happen?
Adventures in Game Writing
I do lots of things, some of them for the joy of it like Beltane, some out of anger like politics - I take a very Terry Pratchett / Granny Weatherwax view to anger; I use it to fuel my focus - and some because I need to pay the rent and there aren’t that may ways a trans person in their fifties can earn money, at least not safely. To that end, I just spent the last couple of weeks in deep focus, trying to finish an outline for a narrative game, and then crashing afterwards. I’m going to have to learn to pace myself if I’m going to make a living with it.
I didn’t have any ambition to write games - I wanted to be an astronaut - but I’ve been a gamer since my teens, playing D&D and then all the plethora of tabletop RPGs that came after it; Call of Cthulhu, Golden Heroes, Traveller, Paranoia and so forth. I love game worlds. I’ll buy games and supplements not to play them but just to read the backgrounds and fluff. This has been a thing since I was a kid, the first time I ran across it was in the BBC B game Elite, with the novella written by Robert Holdstock that was included to set the scene.
This turns out to be a thing that games companies hire people to do. But when I thought I might like to write a game and bought a book about games programming, all there was was deeply mathematical tracts about chess engines. 17-year-old me said no thanks and wrote an implementation of Breakout for my sixth-year project. I should have been paying attention though because my computing teacher had got into the guts of Colossal Cave and written his own parser-based text adventures while I was playing Warlock of Firetop Mountain.
Roll forward 35 years, and I’m on the Scottish Book Trust’s Live Literature list, the working writers whom they help to set up with workshop gigs and who are eligible for various residencies and seminars. One of these seminars was a two-weekend workshop on game writing, run by Gavin Inglis in Edinburgh; some of you will know him from the Writer’s Bloc. Guest speakers included Rhianna Pratchett, to talk about writing for AAA companies and narrative doctoring on big games, and Olivia Wood, the editor of Failbetter. There were sessions on game narrative, on writing in Twine, and an exercise to write a demo game.
Olivia Wood had a huge amount of interesting things to say - I’m a big fan of Failbetter games - but I think the most practical one was, if you want to pitch to games companies, have a demo to show them. Interactive narrative is a very different beast from straightforward prose; if you don’t do things to limit and re-use branches (not choices) then they, like a virus we know too well, multiply out of control. You need to demonstrate that you get that; they can teach you everything else. Afterwards in the pub, Gavin suggested that once I have my demo done, I should look at Choice Of Games, which he’d done work for as well as for Failbetter.
… took a while to get round to, but here we are. I’m still in the pitching process, but I’ve got to the point where they’ve paid me for an outline and I’m working with an editor to get it to the green-light stage. Here’s hoping…
Reading
I haven’t had the spoons for deep theory, or really anything at all above the level of popcorn. Although I have - count ‘em - seven upcoming books to read and plug from NetGalleys, so I’m looking forward to some of them.
In the meantime, I bought and binged the second Ciaphas Cain omnibus by Sandy Mitchell. I find tie-in books to be iffy at times, and very much follow authors rather than storylines. I Like Mitchell a lot, as well as Dan Abnett, Bill King, and Graham McNeill. The Cain books are set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40k setting, the original grimdark (straight up, they coined “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war” in 1987). For all that, they are light, and in places very funny.
Cain is a Flashman-style character, someone who is interested only in luxurious living and keeping his skin intact, but who gets into and then out of sticky situations and finds himself increasingly praised for it. I’ve only read the beginning of the first Flashman book; the character, a liar, bully and rapist, didn’t sit well with me. Cain describes himself as a coward but for all that he is cynical and self-interested, he is physically courageous once in a fight, he keeps his word, and - in order to keep up his image of course - he never turns his back on his troops. I read him as more of a Blackadder or Hawkeye Pierce, and that’s the level of dark wit that the books are written with.
Writering
I had some difficulty in finding focus to get work done. With no place to go for a change of scene, and a cat wanting attention, it is easy just to say bollocks to it, and lie on the couch. If I tried going straight to the laptop I bounced off it hard.
The focus practice that I’ve developed is to start writing by hand. I have some Japanese B5 notebooks of nice paper which, importantly, didn’t cost me much. These are my project breakdown notes. I work out the answers to plot and character questions here and then copy-type and expand them into the file, and keep working with that momentum.
So now what? It’ll be a week or so till I get comments back from my editor. A few months ago now I had a short mentoring chat with Kirsty Logan and Heather Parry, on the topic of picking a novel project and finishing it. The outcome was, that I should try writing a full outline and see if that carries me through getting the first draft completed. I’ve just written a full outline for one project, so I’ll get on with doing the same for a novel. This one is an urban fantasy novel set in queer Glasgow, and I’m taking style notes from Val McDermid, Denise Mina, and various other Tartan Noir writers.
For a writing prompt, why not think about someone who really isn’t what everyone says or knows about them, like Cain or Flashman or Hong Kong Phooey? Why is there such a difference between who they are and how they are perceived, is it their doing or everyone else’s? What happens when, like Boris Johnson, people start to perceive the truth behind the character?
Onwards, and stay well
Elaine