There are twenty-four hours in a day. Let’s be generous and say the average adult sleeps for 7 of those hours. You’re going to need to eat, too, so let’s allot an hour for each meal. That gives us fourteen hours to work with. Fourteen hours seems like a lot of time, doesn’t it? But if you work at an office, you need to get to and from it. There’s a couple hours there. Even if you don’t, there will be tasks necessary to maintain your living space that need doing, taking up another hour or two. The more you think about it, the less available time you have.
There simply aren’t enough hours in the day for us to do what we want on top of what we need.
In the interest of not taking up any more of your time than necessary today, I admonish you to make the most of what time you have. If you want to be a writer, write. Want to be a game designer? Make a game, or at least play something critically. Don’t just lounge on the couch poking the buttons to make the mobs go boom – examine the game and its mechanics, see what works and what doesn’t, find the triggers for the player to become involve and ask yourself why they’re there. Extra Credits has more.
This isn’t to say you need to fill every available hour with work. We as human beings do need our relaxation and decompression time. Not to mention exercise. So go for a walk, play with the kitten, call a friend, watch a movie, masturbate. It’s all about moderation. If you do nothing but write all day, you’ll likely go mad. If you do nothing but whack it all day… well, they say you’ll go blind, but mostly you’ll just have a hard time sitting due to all of the chafing.
It’s a sad state of affairs when we need to do more to pay our bills that takes us away from that which makes us fulfilled. I’m sure some people love flipping burgers or shoveling gravel, but others fill that time mentally being somewhere else, doing something more interesting. Despite the apparent success of some blatantly talentless people, the individual who has the gumption and wherewithal to pursue a passion to the point of profession is rare. Most of us schlubs work a profession to keep ourselves fed and pursue our passion in what spare time we can spare between dodging phone calls and pounding the porpoise.
Enough philosophical wanking, I need to get back to work.
After finishing off A Game of Thrones, the review of which I intend to write up some time this weekend, I started taking my DS on the train instead of a book. I fired up the updated Chrono Trigger. It’s amazing how quickly the game sucked me right back into its story.
It’s made me think. With all of the rendering software, high-definition platforms and cutting-edge AI technology out there, this game, first released back in the early 90s, still captivates me. It’s got 16-bit sprites, music based on the SNES chip and only a few buttons to speak of. Why does this game grab and hold my attention the way bigass mainstream games can’t?
It tells a great story.
Not every game sets out to do this. In fact, most of them get their start due to a new technology, a game mechanic or one of those pithy memos from the marketing department. And this isn’t a bad thing. A game should be seamless in its integration between mechanics, narrative and design. The experience that results makes games as different as night and day. Halo is a big-budget Michael Bay movie. Mass Effect 2 is a season of a science fiction TV series like Battlestar Galactica or Stargate. Chrono Trigger‘s a well-worn novel. These are subjective comparisons, but you get the idea.
As I continue to edit Citizen in the Wilds, get feedback on its query and struggle to conserve enough energy to work on either of those, I find myself looking at games in terms of potential for telling stories just as much as they are diverting little distractions from activities that earn money. World of Warcraft can even be used to tell stories, and not just through the quest log text and boss fight quotes. Especially if one is on a role-playing server, typed dialog, emotes and even the occasional spell can help tell a story that isn’t just interesting to the player but to those around them. Unless your name is Rostal Korobrats.
Of course, these things have to remain on the conceptual level for now. I simply have too many other concerns. The day job, the novel, maintaining an apartment, following up on paperwork for a variety of things while keeping the lights on and food in the pantry… all that typical life stuff that comes with being a responsible adult. However, once I get Citizen more reasonably poised for release to someone who can get it to print and things become less stressful in terms of budget and time constraints, maybe I can explore some of the tools at my disposal.
It’s all conjecture at this point, but it centers around the idea that a game that is equal parts design, mechanics and narrative can be an immersive and memorable storytelling experience even if the technology isn’t bleeding-edge and the budget isn’t in the millions of dollars. It’s the idea behind a lot of the indie games out there. Braid tells an intricate story while being a platformer with an interesting time-manipulation gimmick. Minecraft might not tell much of a story but it does allow its players to build, create, be anything they want, and that in and of itself has the potential for storytelling.
We get inspiration from all sorts of places. Games inspire me. The day may even come when I’m inspired to make a game of my own.
I just can’t do it now. Or any time soon. I like being sane. Relatively speaking.
I’m sure a lot of other people do too. Handheld gaming consoles. Cell phones that also play TV shows. My mother just picked up a new iPod Nano and damn, is that thing slick. Touch screen, bright display, bigass internal storage… as they say, “the woiks.”
Writers especially seem to like gizmos. Scrivener is something of a software gizmo for writers that other writers will not stop raving about. Nevermind that, unlike the true artists out there, I don’t own a Mac. The aforementioned Shuffle’s the only iProduct I own. Still, I see a lot of creative folks making good use of iProducts – Chuck Wendig is using his iPad to tell tales of the Dreaded Dawntaint in his travels.
But I have to wonder. How much of banging on keys actually constitutes “writing”? We bang on keys to communicate, to play games, to balance checkbooks, search for stuff on the Internet, the list goes on. Writing is a different process in our minds, yes, but procedurally it seems like there’s little to keep it from all mushing together into one long amorphous string of fevered keystrokes.
For my part, just like a Nook or Kindle will never replace the weight of a real book in my hands, no keyboard or LCD monitor will ever replace the tactile satisfaction I get by pouring my creativity onto a piece of paper through the medium of pen. There’s a notebook in a vinyl cover from the Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh that contains the last third or so of Citizen in the Wilds. And when the going gets tough in my process, I toss out all the modern trappings and get back to basics. I put pen to paper.
Case in point, the ever-elusive query. I simply couldn’t figure out why the damn thing isn’t coming together in a way that any person who isn’t me interested in reading this book, let alone selling it. So on the train home on Friday, after I finished George RR Martin’s excellent novel A Game Of Thrones, I broke out the binder and my pen and started jotting down notes. I think I have a line on making a query that’s decent but just waiting to be rejected into a query that’ll grab the attention of someone who sees it cross their desk.
Now, I realize that in both typing out this blog post and translating the ideas born from the notes I’ve jotted into an electronic text file, I may come across as being a little hypocritical. But I’m also not going for an “unplugged” sort of lifestyle. Like I said, I love gizmos and I’m going to be using them for many, many years to come.
It’s just nice and fulfilling, on occasion, to do things the old-fashioned way.
This was an image I originally hunted down for use in the potential video project of turning the IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! review of Emperor’s New Groove into an entry in the Escapist’s contest. However, it’s feeling more and more like I won’t have time to even think about seriously working on such a project. More to the point, to work on that project would take time away from the frustratingly gradual process of refining a novel to its publishable form. It’s been bothering me for days, sometime to the point that I can’t even stand to look in that folder’s general direction.
The query for Citizen in the Wilds has been the major struggling point for me. A lot of the sentiments and experiences I’m about to convey are going to feel like a pale echo of stuff that’s been said before and in a much better and more useful way here. And, at the expense of tooting my own writer’s war-horn, I’m making progress. I’m confident enough in my skills to say that what I’ve written (in the novel, mind, not the query, that’s still kind of meandering around) is good. I just worry that it isn’t good enough.
Why?
I feel I may be too close to it.
Hence the Police-flavored title. See what I did there?
Anyway, my big fear along with the usual little ones of not being good enough, smart enough, charismatic enough or prompt enough to grab and hold the attention of an agent is that I’m too close to the work. I’ll be looking for grammatical errors, hunting down darlings and re-examining passages with such myopic focus that I’ll miss some big glaring issue that will keep this from getting published. I think it’s part and parcel of being the sort of person who fixates on games along with being a general media sink: I’ll zone in on something of a particular interest to me, at times to the exclusion of all else. In other words, expect my blog posts to be a bit less substantial in content when Cataclysm actually releases, in other words, provided I haven’t decided to play through the Mass Effect games for the seventeenbazillionth time instead.
I’m wandering off my point again, but this is less of a coherent advice-focused blog post and more of a stream-of-consciousness infodump. I’m sure you’ve picked up on that already, and if you didn’t you’re either on some other, better-written site or looking up an old ICFN to hear me rant about how badly something sucks because we just don’t have enough Internet critics yet.
My point is that I am aware of the fact that this myopia is a problem inherent with geeks in general, gamers in particular and me most of all. Compounding the problem is the fact that I don’t know what the Achilles heel of my own work is, because in the act of creating it I have inextricably put myself in very close proximity to it. I’m not about to run to the mountaintop declaring that the salvation of fans of high fantasy is at hand with this tome, fuck no, but I’m also not operating under the impression that it’s absolute shit. What I will say is that my goal is mostly to have it not be mediocre, the sort of easy-to-crank-out guaranteed-to-sell-to-morons schlock I’ve decried on many an occasion here. But my dilemma is while I strive to avoid those things that piss me off about said schlock, I may be writing a different kind of schlock entirely and not even really know it.
I can say “this doesn’t work and needs a rewrite” or “this is unnecessary and I need to bypass it before I take it out back and put a bullet in its brainpan.” What I’m struggling with is saying “Overall, this book is really about X in the context of Y but element Z undermines or detracts from that central theme or narrative throughline.” This is probably why the query is such a tremendous hurdle for me to clear. Ultimately I am unsure if the proper course of action is to hand it to someone I trust to read critically from start to finish or to put myself through the editorial process as many times as it takes, but the fact I can’t shake is that I might just be too close to it.
It’s a “forest for the trees thing.” I can tell this tree is an oak and that over there’s a pine, but I have no idea how big the forest actually is, how close the nearest river or roadkill-strewn freeway might be or how much (if any) of it is on fire because I forgot to stamp out my stogy properly and now HOLY SHIT IT’S SMOKEY THE BEAR AND HE’S PISSED OFF AT ME RUN JUST GODDAMN RUN. I wouldn’t see it coming. I’m nose-deep in bark and needles trying to get the sticky sap out of my beard and the sharp plantlife out of my eyeballs. I’m too obsessed with details to realize that the kind and gentle guardian reminding me that only I can prevent forest fires is only wearing that park ranger hat because he ate the last park ranger that trashed his woods.
I really don’t know how else to express this impasse I seem to have reached. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m writing this properly. I’m uncertain if I should be pestering those brave souls who’ve volunteered to test-read the thing to give me more feedback, or if I need to keep to the writer tradition of the bitter isolationist hermitage into the editorial chambers. And I remind myself that no matter what I do I’m likely to still receive a shitload of rejections long before I even remotely grab the attention of someone in a position to help me turn a hundred thousand words of fantasy fiction arranged in a particular order into something that actually pays my fucking bills.
I do this because I’m crazy. I do this because I hate myself. I do this because I’m sick of working dayjobs.
And, deep down, I do this because, frustration and depression and bad metaphors and all, I love it.
I just need to not be so close to it. Otherwise, I may lose sight of how good it actually is.
Remember Captain Pendragon? I’ve been making an effort to keep in touch with Polymancer Studios on the work but so far the efforts have been fruitless. I still think the work is viable and, looking back on it now, could use some tweaking or perhaps even expansion and clarifying.
Since I will unfortunately be missing out on VACATION HELL due to saving the work-in-progress to the wrong place yesterday (I blame the old cheese, long story) my mind has turned to other projects. The pitch is still in need of polish before shooting off to Query Shark, I have a D&D campaign to plan, Alchemist At Sea is kicking around in my head especially now that I’m reading more George RR Martin, and I have until the 29th to figure out if I really have the time, material and gumption to give IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! the video treatment for the Escapist’s competition this year.
But what of Captain Pendragon? It’s a fun little escapist romp (bit of a segue, see what I did there?) that isn’t difficult to write and should have a broad audience appeal – steampunk, adventure, post-apocalyptic, characterization, etc – yet I hesitate to move forward with anything related to it given it’s current limbo status. I’ve sent a final missive to Polymancer pursuant to publishing the first little bit of it, but since I haven’t seen anything with their signature on it, the rights are still technically mine.
So do I wait to hear from them? Or do I move forward?
Do I take it as-is to Duotrope? Find time to edit & expand it to make it better? Perhaps even lengthen it to novella-size and toss it up on PubIt?
Give me your thoughts, Internets. I’m feeling a little lost here.
