Writer's block and room descriptions
Robin Munn
my first game, and I find that writing room (and object) descriptions is
taking me forever. I'll have a mental picture of the room, but getting
it into words on a screen is excruciating; I make five or six attempts,
find myself dissatisfied with all of them, and erase them. Then I give
up for a week or so, lather, rinse, and repeat.
My question is: is this normal, or am I the only one who can't seem to
write anything that satisfies myself? As a programmer, the techinical
aspects of Inform aren't overly difficult for me to pick up, but writing
is a different matter. I love books, I love to read, but everything I
ever produced in my Creative Writing class in college has been buried
deep and will never see the light of day. The only thing I wrote in that
class that I'll admit to is a couple of halfway-decent haiku. The rest,
well, let's just say it Does Not Exist and leave it at that.
I would love to hear other people share their writing experience. Do you
sit down and produce what you want right away? Do you go through
multiple revisions? I don't even have enough experience to know what
questions I should be asking -- please, share anything that might be
relevant.
Thanks.
--
Robin Munn
rm...@pobox.com
Marcia Fine-Maron
believe it when someone says something I wrote was any good, because I know
how hard it was to write, and that I am not really a good writer. I'm
writing my first IF game right now, and I just send every new build to my
friends to beta-test. If they say something is good, I listen to them, not
myself, and keep it in the game.
The other thing I'd suggest is that, if it's appropriate, write the wackiest
stuff you can. Write crazy things, off-the-wall things. Even if 99% of what
you write is crud, you might get a real gem that way.
Oh, and caffeine helps.
Good luck!
-Ethan Maron
dgr...@cs.csuabk.edu
[snip]
> I would love to hear other people share their writing experience. Do you
> sit down and produce what you want right away? Do you go through
> multiple revisions? I don't even have enough experience to know what
> questions I should be asking -- please, share anything that might be
> relevant.
Rather than simulating a place you've never seen or been before, start
with a place you're very familiar with: your own home. Suppose you walk
in after coming home from work. What do you see? How do you feel?
What's usually going on? What do you like the most about a particular
room?
--
David Griffith
dgr...@cs.csubak.edu
Jaap van der Velde
> I have a question for you experienced IF writers out there. I'm working
> my first game, and I find that writing room (and object) descriptions is
> taking me forever. I'll have a mental picture of the room, but getting
> it into words on a screen is excruciating; I make five or six attempts,
> find myself dissatisfied with all of them, and erase them. Then I give
> up for a week or so, lather, rinse, and repeat.
Maybe you're a bit like me and you should try other ways of
getting a room into words. I like to sketch a few quick
pictures of a room and then pick out the most useful
characteristics of my own image. Other times I just think
of a few fancy details, describe those and leave the room
up to the imagination of the reader. Imagine a room with
a grandfather's clock swinging the time away and a dusty
armchair next to the window. What kind of lighting are
you imagining? What can you tell me about the carpet?
Grtz,
JAAP.
Daniel Freas
writing: Write twice as much as you need, make the descriptions *long*
and then go back and find all the boring words. Any descriptive word
that shows up more than once or any generic word. Get out a thesaurus
and replace all those boring words with more interesting equivalents.
Then go through and trim down what you've created to fit into the
space you originally intended.
This has always worked for me, but since my main problem is writing
too much instead of getting blocked it may not be the best solution
for your problem...who knows. Give it a shot.
---Daniel
On 21 Nov 2001 18:15:32 GMT, rm...@pobox.com (Robin Munn) wrote:
OKB -- not okblacke
>My question is: is this normal, or am I the only one who can't seem to
>write anything that satisfies myself? As a programmer, the techinical
>aspects of Inform aren't overly difficult for me to pick up, but writing
>is a different matter.
Personally, I find that the hardest thing is neither the writing nor the
programming, but the separation of the two. It's difficult for me to write
good text when I'm in "coding mode". I try to alleviate this by getting as
much coding as I can out the way before writing. I don't (as some people do)
leave "$$$" or "[To do]" in the room descriptions (usually), but I try to
abstract as much code out of the run-of-the-mill coding tasks (rooms, scenery,
etc.) as I can, so that I'm mainly writing text, with only a bit of programming
thrown in.
--OKB (Bren...@aol.com) -- no relation to okblacke
"Do not follow where the path may lead;
go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail."
--Author Unknown
Alistair
someone else. I've never been disappointed by going to others when I'm
stuck for ideas; a fresh viewpoint, even if it's for a few descriptions,
could set the course for you and perhaps increase your enthusiasm for what
is admittedly a large task.
Graham Nelson's advice, as I have read in an essay of his, is to write good
room and object descriptions as you go along, rather than all at the end (or
beginning). Facing a mountain of the same type of job is trying for anyone.
It probably makes sense this way because, if you're like me, you will modify
things as you progress in your game creation.
And another bit of advice I can offer that might make the task easier:
Don't work to impress by making it self-consciously "literary". Just write
what you think reads well, according to your own style. No matter what you
do, someone isn't going to like your writing style. They'll say it's too
simple, or it's too pretentious. Just follow your own course.
Good luck!
A
"Robin Munn" <rm...@pobox.com> wrote in message
news:slrn9vnrq...@ithaca.homenet...
Dennis G. Jerz
news:9tgu6u$1nr0i$2...@hades.csu.net...
> Rather than simulating a place you've never seen or been before, start
> with a place you're very familiar with: your own home. Suppose you walk
> in after coming home from work. What do you see? How do you feel?
> What's usually going on? What do you like the most about a particular
> room?
>
Of course... but what if the PC isn't supposed to be "you"? You might
instead try dabbling in the Stanislavky Method -- a psychological technique
practiced by actors, who aim to temporarily inhabit the mind of the
character he or she is portraying. This was a response to the melodramatic
acting style.
--
Dennis G. Jerz, Ph.D.; (715)836-2431
Dept. of English; U Wisc.-Eau Claire
419 Hibbard, Eau Claire, WI 54702
------------------------------------
Literacy Weblog: www.uwec.edu/jerzdg
Dennis G. Jerz
news:<slrn9vnrq...@ithaca.homenet>...
> I would love to hear other people share their writing experience. Do you
> sit down and produce what you want right away? Do you go through
> multiple revisions? I don't even have enough experience to know what
> questions I should be asking -- please, share anything that might be
While I am hardly an "experienced IF writer," as the author of what's been
called the best-written but worst-coded IF entry in IFComo01, I might have
something to contribute to this discussion.
For me, detailed scripting in advance is vital to my ability to produce the
effects that many reviewers praised; yet, it not only takes time away from
coding, but also leads me to waste time coding effects that look good on
paper but have little effect on game play.
I try to write out a full transcript of a scene, not only including
responses to "look" and "examine object", but also the refusal message and
character-consistent responses to cheeky commands such as "kiss/attack NPC."
I often write these out in snatches, on my pocket computer. I revise these
constantly, even while coding other sections. When I sit down to code a
sequence, then, I already have a complex web of possibilities, including
dialogue, all scripted out. Since there's some POV-jumping in my game, a
certain subset of objects is seen by more than one person; since these
people have very different world views, the coding is necessarily more
complex.
I've played through the transcripts of two or three judges who were kind
enough to send them to me (thanks very much). While I have no intention of
ducking responsibility for releasing buggy code, the problems that people
encountered in the early stages of the game were all relatively easy to
fix -- and thus make me even more embarrassed.
In one section, players were penalized a point for every turn because
there's a daemon running in the background waiting for the right condition
to run an optional bit of code; that bit of code, IIRC, would have made a
piece of paper flutter about while the car was driving, and float to the
ground when the car stopped. If it had worked, it would have been a nice --
but completely spurious -- touch of verisimilitude, but I wasted a lot of
time on that routine that could obviously have been better spent elsewhere.
Even the fatal error that occasionally crashed the interpreter was the
result of some tweaking I added to ChooseObjects (an Inform subroutine that
helps the parser's disambiguation process) in order to prevent giving away
conversation topics before the PC has asked about them.
So... it seems to me that by preparing a fully-formed transcript in advance,
I locked myself into an IF plot that required a more complex game state than
I was able to handle in my head. I need to learn to figure out, in advance,
what elements of the transcript are vital to the game's success, and what
would be pedantic efforts at verisimilitude. Case in point, the fluttering
paper; or, the fact that I actually coded the mailman so that he "lowers the
flag" if you raise it before putting in your letter, and that he "opens the
mailbox" if you happen to have closed it. These efforts at verisimilitude
were pretty much wasted, because after the initial beta-testing, I
accelerated the pace of the game, so that as soon as you put the letter in,
the mailman will take it out and the next beat of the story will begin. I
think I even wrote out some dialogue that would handle what happens if the
mailman comes when the letter is on the ground or in your hand; does the
mailman ask you for it? What would Aloysius say about your irresponsible
behavior?
I can't say that I completely wasted all that time, because in asking myself
those questions, I was forced to develop the NPCs more fully, so that their
later interactions were richer as well. Further, if I hadn't scripted out
huge sections in advance, I don't think some of the extended gags -- of
which I am very proud -- would have ever developed.
But... who *cares* about stuff like that if the darn game isn't even
playable? Sigh.
Now... where's that can of Raid?
Dennis G. Jerz
news:07UK7.6680$rt6.355012@news...
> Graham Nelson's advice, as I have read in an essay of his, is to write
good
> room and object descriptions as you go along, rather than all at the end
(or
> beginning). Facing a mountain of the same type of job is trying for
anyone.
> It probably makes sense this way because, if you're like me, you will
modify
> things as you progress in your game creation.
But Nelson also mentions the "write it all out in advance, then code" advice
of Gareth Rees. It doesn't have to be an either-or situation, of course.
But it is often difficult to shift modes.
--
Dennis G. Jerz, Ph.D.; (715)836-2431
Dept. of English; U Wisc.-Eau Claire
419 Hibbard, Eau Claire, WI 54702
------------------------------------
Literacy Weblog: www.uwec.edu/jerzdg
>
Alistair
come to mind most vividly as soon as possible, while other parts of the map
will linger unfinished until later. There's certainly no "best way",
although the more options the better...especially when you're stuck! :)
A
"Dennis G. Jerz" <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote in message
news:9th3kl$nhi$1...@wiscnews.wiscnet.net...
Magnus Olsson
Marcia Fine-Maron <mar...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Trust me, it's absolutely normal to be your own worst critic.
If the cause of your writer's block is that your "internal critic" is
too strong, so you never can accept anything that you've writen,
the most common advice is this:
Try to ignore the internal critic. Just write, telling yourself that
"I know this is probably going to be crap, but I don't care just now."
In extreme cases, you may even have to persuade yourself that what
you're writing is *supposed* to be crap; "I'm not writing this for
publication, but just as an exercise."
*Then* go back and revise.
The point with this is to get over some critical mass of text,
so that your internal critic has enough to go on - if YIC is just
looking at, say, an isolated room description, YIC will *never*
accept it as good enough, but if the room description is part of
a game, either YIC will see it in its context, or you will be able
to persuade YIC that OK, it may not be the greatest prose since
Hemingway, but it will work in its context.
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, m...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~mol ------
Robb Sherwin
>sit down and produce what you want right away? Do you go through
>multiple revisions? I don't even have enough experience to know what
>questions I should be asking -- please, share anything that might be
>relevant.
One way to tackle it is to use your IF language's tracking of
visited/not visited tags to your advantage. By that I mean, you can
essentially have NPCs, the player character or the narrator "exclaim"
things the first time the player walks into a room... and so long as
you take care to turn off "SUPERBRIEF" mode and have your if-statement
working correctly for the visited/non-visited state of the room you
can get yourself out of the funk of boredom that writing many room
descriptions at the same time can put you in.
A personal example of this would be the pizza parlor in the last Hugo
game I did -- there is nothing really special about it, it's just a
dumpy little place modeled after a place I hung out in college. When
entering it the first time, one of the NPCs makes a little joke and
its implied that he orders the pizza. I work in the room layout around
that text. If the player then types ">look" they get a more functional
room layout description without me trying to be over-cute on them.
Overall, that's a reflection on the way I play -- usually if I am
typing ">look" in a room in a text adventure it's because I want to
scan the area and see if I am missing something to interact with
because I am a bit stuck. So getting "just the facts" in that way
helps me.
On one hand it's a fair bit of work to have two states for many of
your rooms, but I think it's one of the strengths of the IF medium to
have the option to tell your stories in that way.
Robb
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Robb Sherwin, Fort Collins CO
Fallacy of Dawn: http://www.joltcountry.com/fod/dawn.zip
Reviews From Trotting Krips: http://joltcountry.dreamhost.com/trottingkrips
John Evans
> my first game, and I find that writing room (and object) descriptions is
> taking me forever. I'll have a mental picture of the room, but getting
> it into words on a screen is excruciating; I make five or six attempts,
> find myself dissatisfied with all of them, and erase them. Then I give
> up for a week or so, lather, rinse, and repeat.
>
> My question is: is this normal, or am I the only one who can't seem to
> write anything that satisfies myself? As a programmer, the techinical
> aspects of Inform aren't overly difficult for me to pick up, but writing
> is a different matter. I love books, I love to read, but everything I
> ever produced in my Creative Writing class in college has been buried
> deep and will never see the light of day. The only thing I wrote in that
> class that I'll admit to is a couple of halfway-decent haiku. The rest,
> well, let's just say it Does Not Exist and leave it at that.
Someone famous (I want to say Mark Twain, but I'm almost certainly wrong) once said:
"Everyone has a million words of crap inside them, that they have to get out
before they can do actual writing."
In other words, you need practice. Everyone does. I've been writing stuff off
and on for many years...and I look back on my early stuff and go "Egad! Damn,
that's awful!" But that's okay, because I learned a lot. With everything I write
I learn more. Every little short story or even a fragment of something, I learn.
I don't really know if I can stand on my record as of yet ^_^;, but I can write
stuff that makes me say: "Well, maybe it could be better, but I can leave this
as the description unless something wildly inspirational comes to me". And that
comes from practice.
Well, enough about me. ^_^; I suggest you take Magnus Olsson's advice elsewhere
in this thread and try to write freely. Write a few paragraphs of random stuff,
it doesn't matter if it's bad, and then go back and see what's good enough to
keep. I'd add this bit of advice: If you want to edit, here's how you do it.
Write a bit (or a lot), then go away and spend some time not writing. A week, a
day, even an hour. Let your thoughts settle. Then come back and read over what
you wrote, and say "Whoa! What was I thinking when I wrote THAT?". And then fix
it. Eventually (in theory, at least) you'll start automatically writing in a
fashion that doesn't need editing. Actually, not as *much* editing, because you
can always do more editing. (Sometimes the problem is knowing when to *stop*
editing. But anyway...)
Another thing you can do is get other people to read your work and comment on
it. They're sure to find errors (even typos!) that you missed. However...there's
something you need to remember. Other people reading your work will try and tell
you how you should write it, which is really how *they* think you should write
it. And if you let them influence you, you can get confused about what you're
really trying to write. What other people are most useful for is telling you
what they *think* you're writing, which is sometimes (if you're unlucky) quite
different from what *you're* trying to get across. It can be very enlightening
(and not a little discouraging, but hey, writing is hard!).
There are also probably a lot of writing exercises you can do...I think pretty
much any book on writing would have a section about describing settings. So,
that's all I have to say, I think. I hope this helps a bit, or at least gives
you some reassurance that you're not the first person to struggle with these
problems.
John
>GUESS VERB
You can't see any verb here!
Andrew Plotkin
> In one section, players were penalized a point for every turn
> because there's a daemon running in the background waiting for the
> right condition to run an optional bit of code; that bit of code,
> IIRC, would have made a piece of paper flutter about while the car
> was driving, and float to the ground when the car stopped. If it had
> worked, it would have been a nice -- but completely spurious --
> touch of verisimilitude, but I wasted a lot of time on that routine
> that could obviously have been better spent elsewhere.
I note that you're describing a time-is-precious, deadline-coming mode
of game creation.
If you're not writing a game for a competition, or -- heavens forfend
-- if you started early and have plenty of time, this isn't the ideal
mode of thought. Spend the time on the paper. Then spend the time on
the next thing. It'll be done when it's done.
Obviously you want to re-evaluate every so often, and decide whether
you want to spend as much time on the next chapter as on the last one.
But time spent doesn't have to be wasted time.
> So... it seems to me that by preparing a fully-formed transcript in
> advance, I locked myself into an IF plot that required a more
> complex game state than I was able to handle in my head.
My general problem with transcripts is that some kinds of game aren't
well-described by a static transcript. Some are.
For example, chapter 1 of _Fine Tuned_ probably fit the transcript
very well. It's *literally* a linear story: you go down the road, and
encounter stuff in that order. A linear piece of text covers all the
important interactions, and everything else you put in the code is just
variations and nudges.
The last chapter, in contrast, can go in all sorts of directions --
you can encounter people and places in many different orders. I get
the impression that this is what happened (besides you running out of
time): you wrote code that supported the event-order in your
transcript, but you didn't have enough grasp of how other sequences
should come together to form an equally valid playing experience.
(I know I'm putting words in your fingers, here, so please tell me if
I'm wildly incorrect. :-)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Mike Duncan
>I have a question for you experienced IF writers out there. I'm working
>my first game, and I find that writing room (and object) descriptions is
>taking me forever. I'll have a mental picture of the room, but getting
>it into words on a screen is excruciating; I make five or six attempts,
>find myself dissatisfied with all of them, and erase them. Then I give
>up for a week or so, lather, rinse, and repeat.
>
>My question is: is this normal, or am I the only one who can't seem to
>write anything that satisfies myself?
Normal. I think you have the first step right, though. Please thyself
first. Because you can't expect other people to like it if you don't.
I suggest imitation. Find a description you like and use it as a
template. Or find one you don't like and improve it. You could even
try writing in a style other than your own - write your game in
Hemingwayesque prose, for example: sparse, no adverbs, rich in
inference. Might distract the red pen in your brain long enough to get
stuff done.
Mike Duncan
http://www.boston.quik.com/mduncan/
Mercury
> my first game, and I find that writing room (and object) descriptions is
> taking me forever. I'll have a mental picture of the room, but getting
> it into words on a screen is excruciating; I make five or six attempts,
> find myself dissatisfied with all of them, and erase them. Then I give
> up for a week or so, lather, rinse, and repeat.
Me too. I know where the real problem lies and in this case it has nothing
to do with writing.
>
> My question is: is this normal, or am I the only one who can't seem to
> write anything that satisfies myself? As a programmer, the techinical
> aspects of Inform aren't overly difficult for me to pick up, but writing
> is a different matter. I love books, I love to read, but everything I
> ever produced in my Creative Writing class in college has been buried
> deep and will never see the light of day. The only thing I wrote in that
> class that I'll admit to is a couple of halfway-decent haiku. The rest,
> well, let's just say it Does Not Exist and leave it at that.
The Does Not Exist part spells out a self esteem issue. I also have tons of
self esteem issues, which allows me to notice yours so quickly. Does writing
feel right to you on a deeper level, does it feel like this is the right
time for it? Would not your time be spent better learning to appreciate
yourself and build castles in your head for a little while, learning not to
smash them every night.
Gregg V. Carroll
> I have a question for you experienced IF writers out there. I'm working
> my first game, and I find that writing room (and object) descriptions is
> taking me forever. I'll have a mental picture of the room, but getting
> it into words on a screen is excruciating; I make five or six attempts,
> find myself dissatisfied with all of them, and erase them. Then I give
> up for a week or so, lather, rinse, and repeat.
[snip]
I'm writing my first game as well, but I'm having the opposite problem
that you are. I can write, but I haven't coded in years. On the other
hand, I tend to be critical of my creative writing to a fault. That
is, I write something, review it, decide it sucks, and discard it and
start over. It's a bad habit that I really need to break, because I
wind up getting nowhere.
"How to wite" articles and books vary on their reccomendations for
writing creatively, but almost all of them that I've read suggest
"write first, ask questions later." That is, just write, and when that
critical voice decides it wants to slam dunk something, silence it.
I've been taking the approach of coding a section of my game, and then
when I feel it's basically finished (beta testing nonwithstanding) I
fill in the text. Before that, though, I try to fill in some dummy
text that blatantly spells out what I want to convey, rather than just
being true dummy text.
For example, early on the PC is required to find and use a fire
extinguisher to put out a fire that's obstructing movement in the
hallway outside, and threatens to overtake the PC if it's ignored.
I've made it so that the PC can try and escape empty-handed once, but
if they try again, they die. The text for the second attempt reads
"Imply that the PC panics and tries to make it down the hall to the
next room. Flames and smoke overtakes him before he can make it,
dies." Now, that's not particularly great writing, but at least it
sketches out what I want to convey later without me having to go
through the process of coming up with something brilliant while I'm
trying to code.
Another bit of text says, "PC opens the door and sees the fire for the
first time, which is growing rapidly. PC doesn't think he can get
around the flames, he stays in the room. Suggest that the solution
might be in the startroom, and not elsewhere." This is more practical,
since I want to convey to the player that although it is hidden, there
is a solution to the puzzle in the room where they are, and not
somewhere else.
You don't have coding issues, but this might work for you as well. If
you can literally write out what you want to convey (panic, remorse,
anger, isolation) in the messages first, then you have a basis on
which to build more evocative descriptions later. It's perhaps
analogus to having a clear idea of the basic arc of your story before
coding it. If the base is there before you code, then the game won't
ever feel fuzzy, or the player's motives unclear, but at the same time
there's room for expansion as ideas and tangents arise.
My two cents.
Gregg
Heavy Cat Multimedia Ltd.
>I have a question for you experienced IF writers out there. I'm working
>my first game, and I find that writing room (and object) descriptions is
>taking me forever. I'll have a mental picture of the room, but getting
>it into words on a screen is excruciating; I make five or six attempts,
>find myself dissatisfied with all of them, and erase them. Then I give
>up for a week or so, lather, rinse, and repeat.
>
>My question is: is this normal, or am I the only one who can't seem to
>write anything that satisfies myself?
Happens all the time, and there are literally thousands of theories on how
to overcome it. I'm not particularly experienced with IF (unless our
current project counts), but I am somewhat experienced in writing.
The basic difficulty, as I see it, is the difference between what to say,
and how to say it. When the two become confused, writing becomes very
slow.
A good idea is usually to write without thinking about form or style to get
the concepts together (what to say), then go back and reorganize,
check spelling, form and sentence structure (how to say it) *without
changing the what* It is 99% likely it was right the first time. ^^
...then put it away for an hour, take one more look, then call it a draft.
Anything more complicated than that will probably cause
unnecessary (and not much more productive) delays through endless analysis
and reworking. Writing 10,000 words is difficult enough without spending
eight hours on the first paragraph.
Journalistic style also helps a lot, especially in large volumes of
descriptive text or dialogue. Elaborate descriptions in large volumes
become very difficult to read. (97 sugars in your coffee, sir?) Once the
five W's are in place, add a couple of cool words and a nifty phrase or two,
and it makes a better paragraph/chapter than doing 58 lines on the height of
the infield grass.
>As a programmer, the techinical
>aspects of Inform aren't overly difficult for me to pick up, but writing
>is a different matter. I love books, I love to read, but everything I
>ever produced in my Creative Writing class in college has been buried
>deep and will never see the light of day. The only thing I wrote in that
>class that I'll admit to is a couple of halfway-decent haiku. The rest,
>well, let's just say it Does Not Exist and leave it at that.
>
>I would love to hear other people share their writing experience. Do you
>sit down and produce what you want right away? Do you go through
>multiple revisions?
At some point, the product Must Ship(tm), so even writers have to learn not
to be perfectionists. Again, it is the basics that matter. No descriptive
writing should end with an invisible question mark. In other words, the
reader should not come away asking "what did I just read?" The fastest way
to cause a reader confusion is to over-edit each paragraph.
Just another $0.02 ^^ Have fun!
--
All programs have at least one bug.
All programs can be reduced by one instruction.
Therefore, all programs can be reduced to one instruction..
..that doesn't work.
Scott
Heavy Cat Multimedia Ltd.
http://www.heavycat.com/
http://www.ladystar.net/
Dennis G Jerz
>
> I note that you're describing a time-is-precious, deadline-coming mode
> of game creation.
I started "Fine Tuned" for the February SmoochieComp, and had already
developed the characters and some of the dialogue for a slightly
different game. This is not meant to be an excuse, but because of my
family obligations, I can only code for an hour or two each night,
after I've put my son to bed. So while I started long in advance, and
thus had time to create what I thought were good characters and
settings, and time to plan out some extended jokes, you're absolutely
right -- from February on, every time I sat down at the computer I was
fighting my own need to get sleep. Even though the summer is more
relaxed, since I'm employed on a 9-month academic calendar, I'm a
full-time dad over the summers. Well, this past summer I did teach
one course, but that meant that I had very little time left over for
anything else. The implementation of the later sections required more
planning than I had expected. As I said in a previous post, I have
much more respect for just how much time it takes to polish a work of
IF.
I did seriously consider just ending the comp release of Fine-Tuned
with "To be continued..." at some early point... but I made the
bone-headed decision to press on. Sigh.
I do have a WIP that I started in December, 1998... it may never see
the light of day, but if it does, it will be in much better shape than
Fine-Tuned was.
> [...]
> The last chapter, in contrast, can go in all sorts of directions --
> you can encounter people and places in many different orders. I get
> the impression that this is what happened (besides you running out of
> time): you wrote code that supported the event-order in your
> transcript, but you didn't have enough grasp of how other sequences
> should come together to form an equally valid playing experience.
Yes, I had to re-write sections, becuase some complex actions involved
subroutines that were attached to objects or people that weren't
always in the same place.
>
> (I know I'm putting words in your fingers, here, so please tell me if
> I'm wildly incorrect. :-)
>
You got it pretty much right.
Eric Mayer
>I have a question for you experienced IF writers out there. I'm working
>my first game, and I find that writing room (and object) descriptions is
>taking me forever. I'll have a mental picture of the room, but getting
>it into words on a screen is excruciating; I make five or six attempts,
>find myself dissatisfied with all of them, and erase them. Then I give
>up for a week or so, lather, rinse, and repeat.
>
>My question is: is this normal, or am I the only one who can't seem to
>write anything that satisfies myself?
I'm definitely a writer and not a programmer but as a writer I think
that dissatisfaction with one's own writing is normal. I've had dozens
of articles and short stories published, as well as three novels, and
I have rarely been satisfied with them during the writing. They all
seemed lacking -- to me. (As a matter of fact, the one story I was
happiest with was one that was rejected!) Of course our original
thoughts, what will most interest readers, are not original to us and
so, when we are writing, we are missing out on the best part so to
speak.
One problem is that anything can be written in an infinite number of
ways. When you do multiple rewrites, especially if you set things
aside and then return to rewrite them after a longish period, you run
the risk of seeing not so much the shortcomings as seeing how it could
have been done differently. After all, it is a new day or week, you've
had new experiences, you are in a slightly different frame of mind, so
it isn't surprising that you might be inclined to take a slightly
different approach. I find I have to work to make sure I only do the
necessary polishing rather than endlessly rewriting just because there
are so many ways anything could be written.
I believe it is best to write as well as you can on the first go round
then trust that, having put in the effort, you've produced something
fundamentally sound, even if it doesn't look quite perfect to you.
Again, when you come to rewrite, trust your first instinct, on the
whole, and stick to polishing rather than rethinking everything every
time.
I tend to write sloppily in my games sometimes. Frankly, I write IF to
relax. One problem I encounter when I want to improve my IF writing is
that I get in a coding frame of mind and treat the writing as if it is
simply coding to be filled in. And it isn't easy to rewrite stuff
embedded in code - which isn't necessarily written in a linear fashion
either -- later on . My solution is to write stuff separately in a
word processor - reminding myself that I'm actually writing -- then
copy it into the code.
Another trick I use, if I get stuck on a description is to forget
about "writing" or getting an effect or whatever is usualy holding me
up and simply work to get down a concise, clear description with no
frills. If you manage that you're ahead of 99 percent of what is
written anyway.
--
Eric Mayer
Web Site: <http://home.epix.net/~maywrite>
"The map is not the territory." -- Alfred Korzybski
Peter Verdi
IF-writer, nor am I an experienced novel writer (I have written 2 novels so far
only for myself and friends) and I am currently working on my third novel. I
started writing in August 2001 and to this day haven't even completed chapter
one :)
--
Posted from t1p094.at-732.netway.at [212.27.72.94]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
wo...@one.net
Hi Robin,
>My question is: is this normal, or am I the only one who can't seem to
>write anything that satisfies myself?...I love books, I love to read, but everything I
>ever produced in my Creative Writing class in college has been buried
>deep and will never see the light of day....
>
>Do you...sit down and produce what you want right away? Do you go through
>multiple revisions? I don't even have enough experience to know what
>questions I should be asking -- please, share anything that might be
>relevant.
A couple of observations, if they don't sound too pretentious. First,
you are NOT writing a short story or a novel, you're writing IF and
the rules are a little different.
For instance a novel is almost always written in first or third
person, IF is almost always second person. This makes a BIG
difference!
Second, in IF you have a limited space to describe the room, which
means you have to be much more Zen about describing it than you would
in a short story or novel. In a novel you can spend a page describing
a room or character. In IF you have a couple of paragraphs--at most.
This means most rooms will get maybe 5 sentences, perhaps less. I've
found what works for me is to cover the big stuff first. What's the
most overpowering impression the room gives in a flash view? Where are
the exits?
Once that's out of the way you can think about what little details you
want to include. Alternately you can put the exits at the end of the
room description so the player learns to look for them in the same
place--a courtesy to your player.
Get used to revisions. :) I have to revise often. Usually it's a word
here, an awkward sentence revised there, but sometimes I give up and
start over from scratch. Expect to revise 10-15 times per paragraph.
If you're really lucky you may get away with 5. :)
Practice. Practice a *LOT*. :) The more you write, the more rough
edges you'll knock off your writing. Maybe put away your game for a
while and start writing short stories. Perhaps short stories about
your game world. Include your characters in those stories.
Give your world a history. At the risk of blowing my own horn here's
an excerpt from my PAWS tutorial, from the chapter on creating your
world:
------------------
What if you aren't a skilled writer? In that case you might want to
pick up a few books on writing. They can offer basic writing skills
and point out areas where you could improve your writing. It isn't a
panacea but it will give you a place to start.
In addition, there's another way to improve your writing, one that's
very effective. Actually create your world inside your head. See it,
smell it, taste it! Take time to answer many basic questions about it.
The most trivial detail often adds verisimilitude to your writing.
What does that maid like to have for breakfast? Is the blacksmith
color blind? Is it spring in your world?
No matter what style of game you're creating you've got some really
basic questions to answer.
Setting
-------
First, the setting of your game. Is it an abandoned cave like in
Adventure? If so why was it abandoned? Who made it? Why are there
treasures scattered hither and yon in it?
You're going to do a lot of background work that never shows up
directly in the game. For example, Adventure is based on an area of
Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Willie Crowther spent a lot of time
exploring Mammoth cave. When it came time to write Adventure, he
already knew a lot about the setting since he'd spent a long time
there.
It came through in his writing. When he described the canyon for
example he was describing a place he'd already been, in fact he
probably went back there and took notes!
Obviously if your setting is fictitious you won't be able to describe
a real place. But if you've spent a long time thinking about a place,
to you it is in some sense real.
My wife (who has a somewhat mystical turn) often says 'The more you
dwell on something the more energy you give it. Give it enough and it
will become real, somewhere.'
Plot
----
If a place is the setting, then what happens there is the plot. There
are two driving forces behind plotting a story. First, what goal is
the player trying to accomplish? Is finding out the goal part of the
goal itself? In Adventure the plot was simple, get all the goodies and
go home. In Myst, another classic (graphical) adventure the main goal
is again to get back to where you came from-but you discover, as you
play, there's a much darker and more dangerous plot that you've been
caught up in...
Second, what stands in the way of the player accomplishing their goal?
In Adventure there were all sorts of geographical barriers (locked
doors, cave-ins, chasms), creatures (homicidal dwarves, greedy trolls,
hungry bears), and puzzles (how to catch the bird).
Actors
------
Unless your world is sparsely populated (like Adventure) you're going
to have actors in it. What are their goals? In a murder mystery game,
for instance, who actually killed the victim and what was their
motive? What are they likely to do when the player starts snooping
around? Was the murder done at the bidding of some big shot? If so,
why?
Actors make the plot. It's the conflict between the player's goal and
the actors' goals that make up the story. After all, if the game is
about saving the world, but the world's in no danger you don't have
much to do...
Summary
-------
In short, you have to do a lot of legwork crafting your story's
background. Why is the setting the way it is? What's the player doing
there in the first place and how do they extricate themselves from the
mess about to befall them? Who's out to stop them from doing so? Why
are they trying to stop the player?
A good rule of thumb is that the player will never know more than 5%
of what you know about your world. Did you know, for instance, that
Infocom created a full color map of the Great Underground Empire and
offered it for sale to players? I saw a copy, it was a gorgeous thing.
Showed all sorts of interesting proximities that made perfect sense
when you saw a map but that you would never have guessed from playing
the game.
Take it for granted that knowing what the girl's brother's taste in
cars is won't make it into the game. All the seemingly worthless
background you create that never makes it into the game will still
color every part of the game and give it a sense of reality it
wouldn't otherwise have. It still won't compensate for terrible
writing, mind you, but it will lend your writing a much needed boost,
be you ever so skillful.
Finally, read chapter 7 in the Alan (not PAWS!) manual, the first two
sections (Getting An Idea and Elaborating The Story) offer excellent
suggestions on how you can go about this. You can find the Alan manual
at the IF archive.
------------------
Hope this helps!
Respectfully,
Wolf
"The world is my home, it's just that some rooms are draftier than
others". -- Wolf
wo...@one.net
What he said! Lots of good advice. I especially like the parts about
going away for a few days and the point about what other people think
you're saying.
A further point, to help quiet that internal critic--stay away from
your writing long enough to pretend someone else wrote it. See if that
makes a difference.
Respectfully,