Archive for the ‘Life as a Creative’ Category

When you’re writing a book, it’s crucial to know who your audience is and to write for them.

That sound obvious, right? It’s harder than you think. Many indie peeps will write to the audience immediately around them, the folks I call alpha fans. They’re super easy to write to, because they already have a buy-in to what you think. You can engage in minimalism with them to a lazy degree. And if they’re the only people who you expect will ever buy your book or play your game — like you’re just making something for your friends — cool.

But a writer honest with him- or herself has to go farther than that, to imagine what other people outside of the alpha fan group will likely be checking this out. After all, how else are you going to grow that group? (I should point out that you’re doing this for two sets of folks: you, as a creator showing that you care about a broader group of people; and your alpha fans, who probably want more great people to play with.) So then you have to consider who, realistically, is going to check out your fan, should for some reason you break out of a small circle of folks who know about your thing and into a the notice of a larger population.

This isn’t just fantasy land. Look at Wil Wheaton pimping Fiasco. Something like that could happen to you, perhaps at that scale, perhaps smaller but still larger that your own sphere of influence.

So, who is that group? That’s something we had a discussion about with Fate Core, which ended with to following notions of audience:

• There are a lot of alpha fans of Fate. They get the ideas, which is to our benefit. So we shouldn’t write solely to them. We’re still writing for them, but we should be writing to their friends, folks they want to introduce to Fate.
• There’s a non-insignificant who want to get away with reading as little as possible, until they’re sure they’ll like something. These folks are more focused on kinesthetic learning (whether due to preference of brain makeup, whatever). So let’s make it so they only need to read the short Basics chapter, as long as someone (ideally the GM) reads the rest of the thing. And we’ll declare that to be the case upfront.
• The Fate veterans will need to have spelled out some of the terminology & rules cleanup we’re doing for Core. Since there are a bunch of different implementations of Fate right now, we don’t know which ones someone will have in mind when they’re reading Core for the first time, so we’ll have to make sure we don’t confuse them while writing to their friends.
• We will not be writing to an audience not aware of roleplaying games. Evil Hat doesn’t have the sort of advertising budget to reach out to totally new people. Like with almost every other RPG producer, we rely primarily on word of mouth & exposure to get new people to try out games. Very few people are actually exposed to our hobby directly from a book these days; they are from friends who have already been exposed. So we’re not going to waste time trying to explain our hobby to someone completely new.
• And because a game can live and die by the loudness of its alpha fans, we’re definitely still writing for them. Just not solely to them.

This conversation about audience came after some of Fate Core was written, and Lenny & I had a sit-down to talk about how we need to reflect to our audience. This solidified which of the two approaches for Core we were looking at:

• The first was a purely toolkit model. After the Basics & Aspects chapter, every single thing in Fate is entirely modular. We were going to focus solely on how to built your own Fate game from that modularity.
• The second was to take a slim setting example and build around that, so we had some finalized Core rules that embodied Fate Core, the sort of thing we could use to start with, and then drift from that central point in future discussions of toolkitting.

Because we realized the primary text focus should be to folks new to Fate, not new to roleplaying, and likely have a friend around who knows this but not necessarily, we went with the second approach. Once we understood this model, we were able to put the toolkit element — which is critical to Fate Core — in context.

What that means for the text, well, we’ll show you when we can. But for now, I just wanted to write a bit about thinking on your audience.

- Ryan

P.S. This is the core of my problems with I used to talk about Apocalypse World’s text. Which I stopped doing because rather than actually engage in conversation, the fans I talked with just said “Well, I don’t see that” and shut conversation down. Of course you don’t, you’re in the alpha group. But that’s a possibly future post, about how that phrase is toxic slime in various geek cultures.

After talking about second drafts last week, let’s dive into first drafts! We all know the whole deal about how first drafts will always be shitty[1], right? That’s writer 101. If you don’t believe that, then I don’t know what to tell you. Don’t get into writing. :)

But that doesn’t stop us from questioning what we’re writing. Sometimes when we allow ourselves to “write shitty,” we’re focused on being okay if a sentence sucks or is unclear and we move on, knowing that either it’ll get fixed or cut in revision. But when it comes to ideas that take a lot of words — 500, 1000, 2500, whatever — there’s a sense of commitment that we believe we’re creating in putting that work in.

And then we start questioning that commitment. “What if this idea sucks?”

In this first draft I’m working on, I had that thought a few times. “What if presenting the setting as vignettes totally missing the shit out of this?” “What if these rules totally suck?” “What if…” all over the place.

Part of the HK-TK experiment was to make myself write in spite of that feeling. The game, as I assumed and found out in the first playtest, is broken as fuck (which I still need to blog about). But if that stops the writing process, then writing would never get done. I wouldn’t have found out what does work, why some things don’t, and build off of that.

Which is why I’m writing this. You need to bullshit your way through that first draft. You need to accept that some of the ideas that you feel like you’re committing to will be wrong, but you need to write it because you won’t know which will be wrong, and you won’t know why some things work and some things won’t. Be bold; press on and be willing to bullshit.

Because that’s what every writer does. It just doesn’t look like total bullshit because of revision, peer review, beta readers, editing, all that work. But I assure you, a first draft is born of bullshit.

How do you bullshit? When you come to a point in your writing where you need to make a decision, just make one. Then write on from there, until you need to make another decision, and just make that one as well. Keep going. Don’t pause to muse on one and turn it into a catalyst of procrastination. To quote the brilliant Kit La Touche: “The beautiful thing about making decisions is that, once you’ve made them, you can evaluate them, and change them if need be. if you never make them, then you can’t do that.”

- Ryan

Oh, and if you want to know more about the bullshit process that is writing (and I say that with love, else I would not keep doing this), you should devout the shit out of Chuck Wendig’s blog & books on writing. But I’m going to assume you’re doing that already. :)

[1] One of my favorite bits about this comes from Anne Lamont’s Bird by Bird, her chapter on Shitty First Drafts. My magazine writing teacher years ago had us read this, which caused me to get the book.

(I’m sure I’ve shared this trick in the past, as I do often with people, but here it goes again.) Say you need to revise a piece you’ve recently written. Best thing to do is shelve it for awhile, until the text isn’t fresh in your mind. But you don’t always have time for that. Such is freelancer life.

What I do in those situations is twist the layout in Word. Let’s start with the first page of a draft, my story from Don’t Read This Book. Here’s how I start, with the defaults in Word for Mac 2011:

Then I do four things:

• I change the layout from portrait to landscape.
• I switch to two-column layout.
• I change the font family. If I’m using a serif font, I’ll go sans-serif or monospace. Vice versa. Sometimes I also change the font size.
• I use line-and-a-half spacing. This is partly a holdover from back when I printed material to revise or edit.

With that done, a really neat thing happens: the line breaks shift. See, we’ll often get hung up on text as it is on the page, not just the words as they are. So by changing that, making the lines look different and the font making the letter shapes slightly different, it shifts from pure visual memory into a fresher space.

See, when we’re reading the familiar, we fill things in our minds — not just textually familiar but visually so. This is to short-circuit that.

See for yourself. Grab the PDF with both versions as two separate pages.

Granted, what I’m showing you is the final version that you’ll see in Don’t Read This Book. I’m a bit too embarrassed by the first draft to share that one. :) Anyway, I hope this trick helps you out.

This idea has inspired Rob Donoghue to try something similar — use one writing tool for initial writing, and another one with a different layout for revision. I look forward to hearing about his results.

- Ryan

If you’re a writer looking to be published, second drafts are a way of life. But to new writers, there a bit of confusion about what a second draft actually is and what you should be doing with it. Since I’m about to tackle the second draft of a project, I figured I would share my thoughts.

First of all, let’s start with what a second draft isn’t.[1] It is not just taking what you’ve written in the first draft and doing some light copyediting. That’s the lazy high school approach to a second draft, and it doesn’t work in the real world unless your first draft is 95% on the mark already.

During your first draft, you’ll discover ideas that you didn’t have in your outline or (if there’s no outline) initial thoughts that triggered whatever you’re writing. It could be that you’re writing an essay piece and you have come to a somewhat different conclusion — that happens sometimes when you’re making your thoughts more concrete by the process of writing them down. It could be that some part of your fiction change because, now that you’ve seen it on paper, you see different problems and different solutions. Whatever it is, things happen between “I had an idea” and “the first draft’s done” that can change things.

That’s the point of a second draft. These ideas may come within a few minutes of putting pen to paper. They may come midway through the process. Perhaps some come right at the end. And often, they come after you’ve finished the draft have put it away for an hour, day, week, whatever. It’s usually all of these.

Those that come early are pretty easy to deal with. It’s those midway through and later that cause issues. No doubt you’ve seen people (maybe even yourself) write sentences that seem to have completely changed partway, as if the writer’s brain shifted to something totally different and didn’t realize it. That happens at different scales, where a sentence might show that change in thought, or two sections are contradictory because one is based on an earlier idea and wasn’t changed in that first draft. When you have new ideas midway through, you’re going to have vestigial pieces.

The ideas that happen after you shelve it and your mind starts processing it in the background can only happen after the first draft is done. So naturally those can only happen after that’s over.

But the biggest benefit I see between first and second drafts is that of voice. Voice is key in text; it’s what gives a piece flavor & emotional resonance that will connect with a reader beyond just transmitting facts. Frankly, when it comes to RPG text, voice is one of the most powerful tools in getting people to remember whatever the hell your rules are. And voice is something that gets discovered over time.

Part of the reason I have had to rewrite a lot of Mythender is because of voice. Early drafts were technical & purely procedural — playtest stuff. Then I wrote drafts that were trying to be serious, an RPG text that was also trying to be like a saga. That was the wrong voice, one I wasn’t having fun with. The most recent voice, that of, well, me when I’m GMing the game, is the one that’s right for it. But it took writing it dry (so I knew the content) and writing it saga-ish (which, like any experience, taught me what worked and what didn’t) to get to where I am with the game.

And that’s what I saw as I went through Don’t Hack This Game submissions over the last few weeks. I had to reject some because they were effectively cleaned-up first drafts, devoid of voice. Voice is hard as hell to get right in the first draft when you’re not sure of the entire contents of said draft, and it needs that second draft to fully develop. And without that voice, you aren’t going to get anyone to give a fuck about your game, article, whatever, when there are plenty of people who do develop voice also producing great stuff.

I know some folks who do entire rewrites on second drafts. Others (like me) like to print out hardcopies and mark them the hell up with revision notes, so as to remove the temptation to nickel-and-dime revise as I’m going through. There are various ways of tackling the job, as long as you go from simple copyediting to examining the piece’s structure & voice, and making sure that from start to finish, it reflects your latest thoughts and doesn’t hold onto any old, erroneous stuff.

- Ryan

P.S. I rarely do a second draft of a blog post. When I realize one is crucial because my idea shifted, I tend to shelve it for days (or longer, with some remaining unfinished). But that’s partly because blogging is an exercise in Being Done, and no one is paying me to create fully polished text.

[1] Side note: defining by the negative first is one of those things I tell people to never do when I’m editing their work. It’s a specific tool. But that’s another post.

Yesterday, I got this tweet, so today I want to talk about it:

I wrote this game over the weekend” is like saying “I painted the Mona Lisa in a day”; it makes the rest of us #jealous

Putting aside the self-deprecating ”trust me, HK-TK is no Mona Lisa,” that it’s only 6500 words, and that other people designed most of the parts to this — that reaction is something I’ve thought about my whole adult life, as it’s been said often to me ever since college.

Except it was said about being a programmer. A few of us were always done with coding labs within ten minutes, when we were given an hour. Other people who were struggling in class would ask us how we were so fast at it. The answer was both simple and useless: in my case, I’ve been fucking with computers since I was six years old. And while the specific subject matter is new, it builds on subject matter I’ve been contacting with for years and years. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to finish these exams back then (putting aside that I might have just walked away to find a juice box).[1]

No, I know I’m not a particularly fast writer; at least, not consistently so. On the other hand, my friend Matt Forbeck is known for his Herculean writing feats. He’s often teased on Twitter as a robot, or we “lesser” writers tease each other about our own tiny wordcounts. Matt’s an icon when it comes to our industry. But, just as I wouldn’t be able to do the coding things I can without the nearly-three decades of practice and scholarship, neither could he have done his tremendous daily wordcounts right out of the gate.

Well, unless you believe some of the Myths of Forbeck, in which case he was born from the written word itself, so yes, he could.

That’s because what we’re doing in a day or weekend or whatever relies on what we’ve been doing for years before that. I’ve been solidly fucking around with RPG text & game design since 2006, and half-assedly well before that. So I have a sense of what reactions & rewards I want, which pieces produce what reactions, what happens when you put different pieces together, how to present them in text, etc. I’m not saying HK-TK actually works; it hasn’t been tested. But it certainly isn’t something I could have written in 2006. Or 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Maybe I could have last year.[2]

I’m sure it’s the same thing with John Harper’s Lady Blackbird, which was also quickly written up & visually designed if I remember right.

With time & practice comes understanding of your craft, and with that comes loads and loads of little tools in your mind that allow you to do things faster or better. And while this might impress some people, the reason I’m not self-impressed is because I see all the little marks of time in this document, the mistakes I’ve made in the past or seen others make, places where I am trying things that have worked in the past, stuff like that. I see five years of practice in a hastily written, unedited document.

Pretty much anyone can do that. Just takes time & practice. Which means it just really takes passion. So if you’re passionate about something, start putting some more time & practice in. It’ll pay off like you won’t believe.

And with enough passion, time & practice, perhaps any one of us could ascend to be like Forbeck. ;)

- Ryan

P.S. And just because something looks easy to another person doesn’t mean it was. But the hardest parts of writing HK-TK is another post.

[1] And I certainly wouldn’t have been able to finish them without exposure to how other people do things, learning from them. Not unlike taking pieces other people have designed, seriously thinking about them, tinkering with them, and putting them together. Same principle: no one of us is an island.

[2] Disregarding the fact that I wouldn’t have been inspired by Push until 2009.