11.09.07
Towns and Dungeons
This is gonna be one of those weird, “you got your gaming in my writing!” posts, so for those of you interested in only one of those particular topics, please bear with me. I promise it makes sense if you just bend your mind around the paradigm for a few seconds.
There are two pretty big non-secrets about me. The first is that I’m a major game fanatic, and I’ve played far more than my share of 40-hour, multi-disc RPG epics along the lines of Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. The other is that I’m a nascent writer who has the usual tendency in geeks to overanalyze my work, and how I work, and what works about how and why I work. So, it’s only natural that I would wind up getting some cross-pollination in terms of these interests. Prior to this, it pretty much was limited to standing up, banging my hands on the nearest desk, and shouting, “This game is poorly-written crap! I could do better than this, and in fact, I believe I have!” whilst pointing at the screen dramatically. The preface of “Objection!!” is usually optional.
What’s happened recently, though, as I’ve immersed myself in NaNoWriMo, is that I’m seeing my writing as a game in and of itself. There’s a score (the word count), a progression of levels (the outline), and the two basic types of stages that make up those levels– towns and dungeons. Those are a bit harder to define, so let me detail what they’re like in the actual game before connecting them to the writing.
In a console RPG, the player is usually presented as being on a journey of some sort, with his travels punctuated by visits to various towns. It’s a staple of the genre and one I don’t see dying off anytime soon, as the few console RPGs that rely on a hub area do it rather poorly. Each town is a haven, where the player can restore his or her health and stock up on restorative items and new equipment for the road ahead. Towns are also important places because usually, through conversations with the populace, the plot of the game is progressed, and the player is given direction on where to go in order to proceed with his or her quest. A town is a welcome sight for some RPG players, because it gives them the rush they usually are looking for in the game.
Contrast this to a dungeon; by dungeon I mean any area in the game that’s not considered the ‘overworld map’ or a town. To pin it down more specifically, the concept of a dungeon is a roadblock; it’s a battlefield where the player must struggle through long stretches of combat in order to accomplish some goal. That goal could be as simple as crossing to the other side of a forest full of bandits, or claiming a treasure at the bottom of a cave. It could also be as complex as breaking a political prisoner out of the Evil Empire’s highest-security clink whilst evading guards and stealing security plans. It varies in structure from game to game, and even sometimes from point to point in the same game. Some RPG players live for these challenges, and view the plot as being largely irrelevant in the face of ever-tougher dungeons.
The process of writing a novel, therefore, doesn’t seem immediately obvious as having any relevance to a traditional console RPG. Like I said, it makes sense if you think about it for a second.
One of the biggest problems I’ve been having in my writing is getting mired in long stretches of connecting passages, where nothing that’s in (what I feel is) my well-crafted and perfectly-paced outline is actually happening in favor of getting the characters to the next outline point. For example, I found myself wondering how the children in my story would handle a car trip of about 90 minutes or so, and went off on a slight tangent on that before realizing that I was really not even all that interested in that answer because it’s boring. At the same time, though, I knew that actually figuring that out would flesh out the characters more, as these kids are the main characters over the next XX,000 words, and that a detail in these stretches could be important later on, and could help me break through a logical inconsistency later (hey, it’s already happened more than once in my past writing, and a time or two in this book so far).
The plot points are the towns, which I want to get to; the connecting stretches are the dungeons, which I want to skip over. Of course, if you try rushing through the dungeons early on in a game, avoiding battles and just dashing from town to town, you quickly find that your characters aren’t strong enough to overcome the later dungeons. Likewise, if you overdo the dungeons in the early part of the game, the rest of the challenges seem trivial and boring, and it lessens the impact of the plot.
It’s not easy to know how to balance towns and dungeons in a game; most just go for an alternating sequence, which gets irritating and predictable at times, but it undeniably works to pace the plot somewhat well. In writing, it becomes much, much harder. As a writer you have to be able to flesh out your characters, not just for your reader, but for yourself. If you know these characters, you know all these incredible details that are wonderfully fascinating to you but completely irrelevant to the reader. Does it really matter that Jeanne’s favorite food is chocolate ice cream? Maybe for you (the writer) it does, but for me (the reader), unless it adds something to the plot or the story at large, it’s just an extraneous detail, just filler.
I’m not saying that you should hide everything. Hide what needs to be hidden for the sake of keeping the reader intrigued, and hide what doesn’t need to be said at all. Jeanne’s clothing choices should be “odd” after you’ve established how strange they are; you don’t need to detail just how garishly she’s decided to clash her t-shirt and shorts every single time after that first one. Likewise, after you detail the evening routine the first time, don’t repeat it unless something changes or is important. Phillip’s going to have to put the kids to bed in a different manner now that the other two are home; but after that first description, bedtime is pretty much summed up by “Phillip put the kids to bed, then went to sleep himself.”
(For those of you wondering “who the hell are Jeanne and Phillip?”, all I can say is “be patient”.)
A truly good writer, which I don’t claim myself to be, will find a way to make the transitions between dungeon and town completely seamless. There actually won’t be a transition, in fact; the reader won’t be able to pick out a point at which the story is lagging under the weight of having to get to plot point X. I ran into this a bit when I was screening fanfiction for RPGamer. Sometimes I would see a writer with some brilliant concepts get horribly bogged down in minutae; other times a writer would be in such a slapdash rush to get through his or her concepts that they would gloss over elements they didn’t want to write, but which seemed like they should not have been skipped. The canonical example I can think of is someone, now anonymous due to dignity and courtesy, wrote the following passage and actually submitted it for consideration:
[Protagonist] opened fire on the [enemy soldiers], taking out a good half-dozen of them before they could react.
There’s six shots there, at the very least. I don’t know anyone who could realistically fire a gun six times in rapid succession “before they could react”. More than that, there’s a lot of detail there that could be of help to the writer, depending on where in the story it is. If I had to rewrite that sentence, here’s how I’d do it:
[Protagonist]’s weapon was in his hand before the first [soldier] could react. The trigger was squeezed, and the [soldier] fell; [protagonist] smirked with satisfaction as he swiveled to the next target. The trigger was pulled again before the shell casing had even hit the ground, and a second [soldier] died while reaching for his own shouldered weapon. [Protagonist] dropped to his knees and leaned to the left, evading the first return fire and shouts of alarm; another squeeze of the trigger, and a third [soldier] caught lead between his eyes. Three down, and hundreds more to go, [protagonist] thought grimly. “Three points for the element of surprise.” He rolled behind cover as the soldiers got a better bead on him.
See? Far more dynamic, far more effective at expressing the nature of the scene. It shows that the protagonist has speed on his side, and some relatively good aim and combat sense, but that he’s not an invincible killing machine whose skill dumbfounds his enemies into inaction. More than that, he’s aware of the impossible odds against him and doesn’t just stand there, firing foolhardily into an advancing army. By reducing the number of shots from six to three, it adds some openings for continuing the action. Is the protagonist making a one-versus-the-world stand, or is his partner going to lay down cover fire? Is he even firing on the right soldiers? What cover did he roll behind?
If you’re having trouble with the dungeons in your story, take some time and think about how to turn them into towns. Expand on some elements that are just touched on, and skip over things which you’ve said before. See if there’s some bit of characterization that you’re missing, and put it in. During the first draft, don’t be afraid of having too much or too little detail, though. You can always go back and expand or cut some things which on later reflection seem to be leaning too much towards dungeon. Like games, it’s one of those things that sounds easy enough in theory, but seems impossible at the outset; I can say with authority that it does become easier with experience.
Anyway, as you can see from the Twitter thingy up there, wordiness is a problem for me, and I’m sincerely not looking forward to tearing this story apart. I do, however, think it’s one of the best tales I’ve come up with to date, and I am looking forward to the ultimate final product. (Optimism is also one of those pesky traits I’ve yet to purge myself of as a properly-jaded member of Generation Y. …dammit, that’s a good line for the book.)
I’ll catch you all tomorrow with some Bailout (for real this time) and after the weekend we’ll probably talk more about writing. Seeing how as I tend not to shut up about whatever it is I’m currently doing, at any rate.