Once more, with feeling
Hrmm.. it’s been too long since I’ve written here. In the interim, I have been doing quite a bit of reading about writing (a weak excuse, I know).
Dwight Swain’s ‘Techniques of the Selling Writer’ in particular is a classic, amazingly written in 1965 but as fresh and inspiring as ever. I can also recommend James Scott Bell’s ‘Plot and Structure’, a far more recent but just as useful exposition on the nuts and bolts of building stories. Anyway. Enough about that.
You see, in some respects, I’ve gone and made this all rather difficult for myself. Which is rather typical of me, by the way. Most writers sensibly start with aiming at something small, like a short story or even a poem. Me, I had to pick a bloody novel. Which makes that whole virtuous feedback loop that comes from starting and then finishing something all rather distant. Hell, it’s makes it largely non-existent!
But I have more ideas than seems to fit in a short story and they are the ideas that I currently have and they are what excites me – when they’re not making me despair at how much work I’ve taken on that is.
To be fair, in the interim, I have had the odd germ of an idea for a short story. Maybe I should follow that whim, finish something and get some closure. But the black hole that is this ghost of a novel sucks me back in with it’s gravity, dragged into it’s unholy orbit, where it tears me apart sentence by unwritten sentence.
How did I get here?
This fictional work all originally started as a roleplaying game project – yes, I’m a roleplaying gamer – have been for some 25 or so years now, on and off. Yes, I’ve earned my geek stripes, thank you very much.
Actually, I’m more often in the role of game master, which for those unfamiliar with the structure of gaming is the one who shapes the world and plays all the other parts (large and small) that are not played by the protagonists or major characters of the piece which are enacted by the other players.
Being a game master is a lot of work, a real labour of love. If you want to do it well, it is anyway. That probably sounds rather arrogant and elitist. Bugger it – it’s still true!
Anyway, I was toying with the idea of running a game which combined as many of my favourite genres and ideas as I could, both ones I had done before, and others I’d like to do.
In the past, the longest running games I’ve run have been grounded in fantasy with an occasional flirtation with horror.
(For those of you that care, RuneQuest in Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha, Elric/Stormbringer in Michael Moorcocks’ world of the Young Kingdoms, and Call of Cthulhu in H P Lovecraft’s world of the Cthulhu Mythos).
But I also have a love of science fiction (Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Ian M Banks, etc.) as well as a smaller interest in the Technothriller genre (think action movies like Die Hard, anything by Tom Clancy, etc).
So since I was looking for a break from running fantasy, I was keen to try something a bit different. Perhaps I could try to combine horror, science fiction, and possibly the technothriller genre all together into a coherent (hopefully!) whole.
Anyway, as I was working on building this fictional world for gaming purposes, it started getting a bit daunting and hard to sustain forward momentum – too many directions to go in, pieces to design and detail. As usual, I had gone and picked something overly ambitious and damn difficult.
Then I had this great idea! Maybe if I put myself in the head of the characters, I can get an idea of the directions the other players might go in initially and thus pare down and focus the number of questions I had to answer and develop up front. That’s the ticket!
But then bugger me if these damn imaginary characters I came up didn’t start taking on a life of their own. Dialogues, conflicts, histories, back story, I was getting more interested and invested in them.
That’s when I finally started to realise that what I actually wanted to do was tell a story. In fact, a fair bit of my gaming has really been about trying to tell stories all along. I just didn’t know that.
Until now.
Of course, I know now that writing a novel is just as much work (if not more) than building a gaming world, just a different kind of work. So much for that great idea.
I’ve also realised that underpinning all of this are a number of deeper, more personal themes.
But they’ll have to wait for a different post. After all, I’ve got to have something left to write about.