Category: writing process (Page 5 of 14)

Solo Old School

March 13, 2023 / / 0 Comments

A few years back, I first discovered Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, and then I found my way into the old-school renaissance sub-genre of table-top gaming, and since then, I’ve become obsessed with games like Old School Essentials and Maze Rats, and adventure settings like Dolmenwood.

Unfortunately, I’ve had little opportunity to play any of these old school-inspired games. I’ve got a sporadic DCC RPG campaign going, but we’ve been meeting less and less frequently. And I’ve only ever DMed ONE session of old school D&D (Rules Cyclopedia version).

My gaming group is more interested in 5e, so that’s what we play. There’s nothing wrong with 5e. It’s not a bad system.

It’s just… not my favorite thing. It doesn’t sing to my soul the way the old school stuff does. The simplicity of the old school games (and old school-inspired games) coupled with the grittier, more classic sword and sorcery flavor excites me a lot more than the rules and flavor of 5e.

For many players, the fun of 5e is in character creation. The character-building process is a huge part of what they like about role-playing. They can choose from a host of different character options: different feats, different skills, different race and class combinations, different bonus actions and powers. For many players, the fun isn’t just playing at the table, it’s creating the character and studying the supplemental books, looking for cool stuff to add to that character.

As a mostly-DM, I’m less enamored with this focus on character creation, but even as a player, I’m not particularly interested in it. Making the character is one part of the fun, sure, but it’s not the main part. I would go so far as to say that playing the character (as in, playing “in character,” i.e.: talking like my PC, exploring my PC’s backstory, etc.) is not the main attraction for me.

What I love about RPGs is the exploration. I get to imagine myself inside a fantastical world. My character is my window into that world, but it’s the world that I’m interested in, not the “character build.”

Of course, I enjoy playing a character and growing an attachment to them, but I’m not interested in “playing a part,” like an actor. I’m interested in discovering a new world, of seeing what’s around the corner of a dark dungeon passage, or what’s hidden in the depths of an enchanted wood. The character’s growth happens when they explore the world. They change as they explore, not by leveling up and gaining new feats and skills.

The other thing I love about old-school RPGs is the aesthetic, which, I’ll admit, is my personal preference and nothing more.

And there’s nostalgia too. Old school RPGs take me back to Saturdays at Waldenbooks looking at all those Dragonlance covers on the shelves. They take me back to third grade when I discovered the Endless Quest books, to playing MERP and HeroQuest, to watching movies like Legend and Dragonslayer over and over and over again. The old school gaming stuff–even when it’s really weird and acid-y like Ultraviolet Grasslands–gives me the same vibes I used to get as a kid. I don’t think it’s the rules per se that do it; I think it’s the DIY spirit of the scene and the messy creativity.

But yeah, the rules are great too because they ARE simpler. The rules leave a lot of things open to the imagination of the DM and the players. I like that freedom.

I sometimes think of 5e as one of those adult coloring books with amazingly detailed and gorgeous pictures inside. They are  fun to color because at the end of the process, you have this amazing piece of art. But old school games are more like one of those “Child’s First Art Book” things, where on page one there’s an outline of a fishbowl and the directions say to draw a bunch of fish, but what the fish look like, how they’re shaped, what they’re doing, and what else is inside the fishbowl is entirely up to you. And each page is like that: a suggestion of what to draw, but everything else comes from your imagination. That’s what old school gaming feels like. Suggestions and outlines, but you get to draw the world.

So anyway, I wish I knew more people who wanted to play stuff like OSE and DCC RPG. When I’m feeling in the mood, I sometimes roll up a couple of characters and start sketching a simple dungeon and wilderness area, and then sorta run my own  adventure in my head. I know it sounds lame, but sometimes it’s all I can do to satisfy my desire to play old-school stuff. Sometimes I read modules and adventure settings and get ideas for games I want to run or even for stories I want to write. Even if I’m just flying solo, the old school stuff ends up feeding my imagination. I might not be able to play a campaign with a full table of people, but at least I can let the old school stuff inspire me.

Writing By Hand

December 14, 2022 / / 0 Comments

My writing has been hampered lately by a fear-based mindset. Every time I sit down at the computer to work, I look at my work-in-progress and worry that whatever I write next will be garbage. I’ll ruin the whole story.

This fear is crippling. I know rationally that I can always write a sentence and then change it if I don’t like it. But this doesn’t solve all the insecurities and fears that aren’t rational. It doesn’t address all my doubts.

I sit at the computer and doubt my judgment: Will I have the necessary skill to recognize a bad sentence, a bad plot line, a bad detail? What if my judgment is faulty? What if I write badly and can’t see it? Then I’ll have ruined my whole story. No one will like it. No one will read it. I’ll embarrass myself.

I hate these thoughts. I hate having these insecurities. But it’s very difficult to suppress them. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of them. I’m looking for ways to overcome them, but I’m not sure what to do.

In the past, I’ve used 4thewords to help me get through these doldrums, but the more I used this online writing game, the more I felt like my stories became a means to an end. I wrote not because I wanted to spin a good yarn but because I wanted to earn points and level up in the game. This is an issue with gamification in general: extrinsic rewards supplant intrinsic ones. When I was using 4thewords to get my stories finished, I ended up thinking of my stories as vessels for earning points. What I wrote wasn’t important, it was just the amount that mattered. I needed enough words to defeat a bunch of monsters, not to tell a compelling story.

I stopped using 4thewords because I didn’t like that it was training my brain to write for points. But I can’t deny that it helped me get over a lot of my fears about the blank page. I’m sure it works very well for many writers, but for me, my brain was learning all the wrong lessons.

What I’d like to discover this time around is a way to get over my fears that doesn’t involve gamification or substituting extrinsic rewards for intrinsic ones.

(Side note: I know I probably need to work on figuring out why I have these fears in the first place and put effort into changing my mindset. I’ve tried addressing my mindset in the past, and while I’ve seen some progress in tamping down my perfectionism and imposter syndrome, I’ve not made enough progress to alleviate writer’s block entirely. One of the best strategies I’ve come across is to switch what I’m working on. I’m kinda doing that now, in fact… writing a blog post instead of working on a story. This old switcheroo is great for getting my fingers typing again, but it creates a problem when it comes to finishing things. If I’m always switching projects, I’m never finishing them. This strikes at the heart of the problem: I haven’t truly addressed my fears. Switching projects might help the initial block, but it doesn’t help my overall perfectionism and self-doubt.)

The only strategy I can think of at the moment is to leave my screen behind and switch to drafting on paper. I love writing by hand and do it everyday in my Writer’s Notebook, but when I’m working on an essay, newsletter, or fiction story, I tend to write on the computer. I can type much faster than I can handwrite. If the ideas are flowing quickly, my keyboard is the better tool for getting words down faster.

But the computer screen invites a kind of formality into the process. I don’t know why it does, it just does. I sit at the computer, stare at the screen, and feel like whatever words I type on the screen are THE words. They are weirdly hard to extricate from the story. I know deleting things on the computer is super easy. One strike of the keyboard and whole pages can be swept into nothingness. I know this, but yet my brain sees those words on the screen, existing with all the other words I’ve already written, and it starts to believe that those words are practically published, practically finished and ready for the reader to see.

Maybe I should blame blogging for this development in how my brain works. After all, I type the words into the text field on WordPress, and with one click of a button, they are published to the internet. How could my thinking not be affected after more than a decade of blogging, of composing words on the computer and expecting them to be published with one click?

But my Writer’s Notebook is different. In my WNB, I handwrite everything. I don’t show anyone my notebook. It’s not meant to be published. If I write something in the notebook that later becomes an essay or newsletter or story, I usually change things when I retype the handwritten words into the computer. A word here or there, adding things, cutting things, etc. The handwritten words are for me and me alone. Only when I type them up do I decide they might have merit for another reader.

Because of this habit, I know my brain associates handwriting with experimentation, privacy, and play. Typing is for “professional” stuff. Handwriting is for me. It’s where I go to enjoy myself. Just as typing up blog posts has trained my brain to associate typing with publishing, my WNB has trained my brain to associate handwriting with joy and relaxation.

What I need to rediscover is the intrinsic reward of writing a story just for the pleasure of writing a story. No more points or leveling up. No more typing on the computer always with an eye towards the “publish” button.

What if I told stories to myself, handwriting them on a yellow legal pad or in my Writer’s Notebook? What if I thought only about the fun and experimentation that comes with writing by hand? Will this free me from the pressure to be “good”? To escape the trap of perfectionism that always seems to creep up when I’m typing on the computer?

Whether this is a quick fix or a permanent solution, I can’t say. I do know that when I think about that yellow legal pad, when I imagine myself scribbling words onto it, I get excited. Handwriting means experimentation. Play. Joy. When I’m writing by hand, the pressure is off. Thinking about that yellow legal pad, about the movements of my fingers as the black ink streaks across the page, I suddenly want to start writing the next sentence of my story. I want to see where my hand will take me. The computer screen feels like a closed, sterile room. The handwritten page feels like a wild and winding path.

The Bamboo Curtain

August 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Today I finished another chapter in Avalon Summer. It’s called “The Clay Mines.”

Not sure about it yet. The novella itself is based a lot on my memories from childhood, and sometimes I’m just writing things as I remember them, not really thinking about plot or structure or conflict or tension or anything, just seeing everything in my mind’s eye and transcribing it on the page. The ending of “The Clay Mines” was like that. I was just remembering things and putting them in there, hoping that somehow my subconscious was making connections.

When I go back and reread my words tomorrow, maybe I’ll see things that don’t fit and I’ll cut, or maybe I’ll see a place to add more, but sometimes it’s hard to judge. Everything is hard to judge when it’s your own work. There’s the version in your head and the version on the page — and they don’t match up — but it’s hard to know if what you put on the page is trash, or if it’s just that artists can’t judge their own work.

I think it’s probably better — as the artist — not to judge at all. Just put it all out there and let the readers decide.  This is where enjoying the process — the crafting of the story — is more important than the finished product. Whether the “Clay Mines” chapter works or not is/should be an after-thought. I had fun writing it today. I had fun remembering and trying to picture everything clearly, and to my delight, I remembered a detail about my grandparents’ basement that I hadn’t thought of in years.

That memory alone was worth all the time I spent writing the chapter. Suddenly, with the memory of that detail, an entire vault of other memories opened up and came back to me. That experience is part of the reason I’m writing this book in the first place. I want to remember those forgotten details of the past and put them into some kind of coherent narrative, to lift them out of memory and bring them to the present. Today, I did that.

Music = Flow

August 16, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been writing a lot of words this week — including finishing Gates to Illvelion — and I’ve been listening to a lot more music lately. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Music has always been — and continues to be — a major source of inspiration for my writing.

When I don’t listen to enough music, my writing well runs dry. When I’m saturated in good music, then my cup overflows. So simple, but sometimes I forget it.

Drawing a Picture of Structure

August 14, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I was experimenting the other day with drawing pictures of the structures of my two works-in-progress (Gates to Illvelion and Avalon Summer).

Avalon Summer was pretty easy. The drawing was like a bullseye target with my main character, Sarah, moving through each ring of the target until getting to the center. The novella is very much an interior journey for the characters. Each ring of the target is an experience or set of experiences that leads to insight, facing fears, internal change, etc. I could visualize what I was doing very clearly.

For Gates to Illvelion, however, my first attempt at drawing the structure was a mess. I had these venn diagram/concentric circles going around and then in the middle of it all I drew a “traditional” plot structure (the old linear up and down lines leading to a climax). Somehow I was trying to express the story’s circular nature as well as its linear progression. As a drawing, it was a mess.

Does that mean Gates to Illvelion is a mess too? I don’t think so.

I tried to draw the structure again.

This time, I drew two jagged lines, one on the left side of the page, one on the right. These lines weren’t slowly going up, though, they were going down to a point in the center. This point was the low-point for each of them, the characters of Gwenhivar and the Queen. They were on parallel but also crisscrossing journeys, and I realized that what I had drawn was a mirror image.

THAT is the structure of Gates to Illvelion. A mirror image. The young girl and the older woman are on mirror-like journeys, one going down into the depths and the other trying to find her way back to the surface. A much better image than my first attempt.

Why even do all this drawing anyway? What does this have to do with storytelling, with writing, etc.?

I guess I just wanted to have some fun. To see what my stories would look like visually instead of verbally. I suppose I also was hoping such drawings would help clarify things for me. What kind of stories I was telling, how my imagination should experience them. I don’t work from an outline (not anymore, anyway), so visualization is important. I need to see the movie unfolding, flickering into view from the darkness. But I also need to have some idea of the form my story is taking. This isn’t the same as an outline, but it is a way to “see” what I’m making. Outlines are too plot-focused for me. If I outline, then I get bored of the story when I actually sit down to write it.

But if I discover the story as I’m writing, the experience is thrilling and a lot of fun. No boredom.

However, at some point in the process, I need to have a feeling for the form the story is taking. I need to feel the shape of the story without necessarily knowing what will “happen next.”  I don’t think it would be useful to draw a picture of the structure too early in the process; that would be too much like making an outline.

But once the story is a living, breathing organism, then a picture can help. It can show me what kind of organism I’m dealing with. I still don’t know what will happen next in the plot, but I know what kind of story I’m telling, and that lets the movie images flicker more clearly through my mind so I can transcribe them onto the page.

Really Wanting It

August 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I hadn’t written any fiction for several days — lack of time, lack of ideas, stress — but today, as part of my daily notebook writing, I started visualizing a future in which I made all my income through writing books. At first I just imagined a kind of ideal day: writing in the morning for several hours, doing publishing and marketing related stuff in the afternoon, reading books, taking a long walk, etc. But then I started to realize how my three hours of writing time in the morning could add up to some serious word count totals. Even if I struggled for the day and only managed 2,000 words in my three hours time, that would add up to hundreds of thousands of words if I stayed consistent and wrote six days a week for a whole year.

I was confronted — once again — with the reality that if I wanted to be a full-time author, I would need to commit to writing for several hours per day. Not anything exorbitant — not seven or eight hours — but simply two or three hours. An afternoon, perhaps. Or a couple of hours in the morning. Or at night after the kids are in bed. But I would need to be consistent. I would need to stay motivated.

I would need to really want it.

Yes, of course, I’d really wanted to be an author, from the time I was a kid, but what I was reminded of yesterday is that if I was going to be a full-time, making-money-from-my-books kind of author, I would have to write A LOT more books. A lot more. I would need to commit to those two or three hours per day.

Which means I would need to be desperate for it. Not just wanting it in that dreamy, wouldn’t-it-be-great sort of way, but in a visceral, my-kids’-lives-depend-on-it sort of way. Not that my kids’ lives depend on me writing 2,000 words per day. After all, I can always get a “regular” job (or go back to teaching… heh). But if I was serious about being full-time, I would need to write as if my kids’ lives depended on it.

What would I do if it meant my kids’ survival? I would sit my butt in that chair and write like my hair was on fire.

Maybe even then, maybe after ten or fifteen or twenty books I still wouldn’t be making a full-time (or part-time) income, but I would need to do it first — I would need to seriously try — to know if it could work. I would need to write with a kind of furious determination.

So after that little notebook reality check, I sat down at the computer and hammered out 1,500 words. It took me a little over an hour (and then I had to get dinner ready).

Can I keep this energy going? Can I sit for two hours every day and write with this same gusto?

If I want to make a living at this, I’ll have to. It’s as simple as that.

Reading Challenge Update:

Mostly Pachinko today, though I did read a few more essays from the Sarah Ruhl book. Even though Ruhl is writing about theater, I’m finding a lot to think about as a fiction writer. Good stuff about plot, structure, character, etc. Love the essay on Ovid and transformation! It speaks to the fantasy writer and fairy tale lover in me. Might write more about it for a future blog post or newsletter essay…

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