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Pacing
I was seventeen when I finished my first "novel". Except that it was more like a novelette. I think it was around 50,000 words; hard to say, since it was saved in five files and I've lost all of the first file and most of the fifth to disk corruption. In theory, it was to be book one of a five-book series. This is part of why I think of Prophecy as my first book, and not book one of Riddlequest. (Leaving aside the fact that Riddlequest is utterly dreadful in most ways.)
But one of the problems I had when writing as a teenager was "What comes in between?" True, most of my writings were fragmentary: bits from the beginning and sometimes bits from the middle, with no end in sight. But on the occassions where I not only had a book idea, but I knew how it began and ended, I still didn't know what happened in the middle. With RiddleQuest, I knew that the protagonist had to solve five riddles, I knew why he had to solve them, and I knew what the solutions were and generally how he arrived at them.
But what happened in between "This is the riddle" and "this is the solution"? I had no idea. There were a handful of in-between scenes in Riddlequest, most of which had nothing to do with the plot. They were just things that happened on the way between finding out the problem and getting to the solution. Other things could have happened instead. It really didn't matter.
And even so, I couldn't pad out the story to novel-length. It was short and I knew it. But I didn't know how else to write it.
Fastforward to 2005: Now I can't remember how to make a story short.
Prophecy can, perhaps, be forgiven for running 210,000 words: it's in the Big Fat Fantasy genre and I wanted it to be long and complicated.
But Silver Scales is pushing 100,000 words and I'll bet it's got at least another 50,000 to go.
My RPGs are the worst offenders. They explode in all directions in terms of length. "Mirari" was supposed to be a "short story" of an RPG, and Tufty and I anticipated wrapping it up in 6-8 sessions. Two years and 120+ sessions later, we finally brought it to a close. Just Trust Me? Also meant to be a short story. It was shorter than Mirari but still ran for over a year. I'm not sure how many logs, but at least sixty. Game of October has been going since last July and the average player has progressed maybe ten days in that time. Time moves at equally sluggish speed in the Silver Scales setting -- a hundred entries later and thirteen days have passed.
That's part of the issue, I know. I'm afraid to speed time up, especially in campaigns. I want the players to control the actions of their characters, and that means I don't want to zap past whole days or weeks without giving them a chance to do things. To make choices. Even if I don't have any interesting plans for the next twenty days of game-time, I don't want to take away the opportunity for them to do things in that time.
Silver Scales is a bit of the same way. My mind is always thinking "And what do they do now?" I don't want my characters sitting around twiddling their thumbs in the reader's mind. And in both case, it seems easier to write what's happening now, to throw in those details that may or may not matter, then to skip them. "But what if I need that later?" I'll think. "What if that turns out to be important?" In Silver Scales, of course, I could backfill, but the audience reading along would notice if I did. In a campaign, though, you really can't. Once that opportunity is past, it's gone.
I wrote above, "it seems easier to write what's happening now". That's a key part, too. Sometimes I'll want to start a scene that's set "some hours later". And I have a hard time getting into it, figuring out the bits I need. When that happens, I turn back the clock. "What happened right after the last thing?" Especially in RPGs, this is true. I'll often turn the clock forward in my initial log starter, and then wind up ratcheting it back, thinking that my problem is that I'm glossing over too much, that I'm dictating the PC's actions instead of letting the PC make decisions. Moving the action earlier is good for filling time and pages. But not for being concise.
I don't know how worried I really am about this. On the one hand, I do fret over boring my players, or my readers. On the other, I'd rather spend time writing unnecessary words, than time stressing over how I could skip writing those unnecessary words. Writing is not only more fun than stressing, but it also takes less time.
But it does seem ironic to me that twenty years ago, I couldn't figure out how to fill pages, and now I can't remember how to stop.
But one of the problems I had when writing as a teenager was "What comes in between?" True, most of my writings were fragmentary: bits from the beginning and sometimes bits from the middle, with no end in sight. But on the occassions where I not only had a book idea, but I knew how it began and ended, I still didn't know what happened in the middle. With RiddleQuest, I knew that the protagonist had to solve five riddles, I knew why he had to solve them, and I knew what the solutions were and generally how he arrived at them.
But what happened in between "This is the riddle" and "this is the solution"? I had no idea. There were a handful of in-between scenes in Riddlequest, most of which had nothing to do with the plot. They were just things that happened on the way between finding out the problem and getting to the solution. Other things could have happened instead. It really didn't matter.
And even so, I couldn't pad out the story to novel-length. It was short and I knew it. But I didn't know how else to write it.
Fastforward to 2005: Now I can't remember how to make a story short.
Prophecy can, perhaps, be forgiven for running 210,000 words: it's in the Big Fat Fantasy genre and I wanted it to be long and complicated.
But Silver Scales is pushing 100,000 words and I'll bet it's got at least another 50,000 to go.
My RPGs are the worst offenders. They explode in all directions in terms of length. "Mirari" was supposed to be a "short story" of an RPG, and Tufty and I anticipated wrapping it up in 6-8 sessions. Two years and 120+ sessions later, we finally brought it to a close. Just Trust Me? Also meant to be a short story. It was shorter than Mirari but still ran for over a year. I'm not sure how many logs, but at least sixty. Game of October has been going since last July and the average player has progressed maybe ten days in that time. Time moves at equally sluggish speed in the Silver Scales setting -- a hundred entries later and thirteen days have passed.
That's part of the issue, I know. I'm afraid to speed time up, especially in campaigns. I want the players to control the actions of their characters, and that means I don't want to zap past whole days or weeks without giving them a chance to do things. To make choices. Even if I don't have any interesting plans for the next twenty days of game-time, I don't want to take away the opportunity for them to do things in that time.
Silver Scales is a bit of the same way. My mind is always thinking "And what do they do now?" I don't want my characters sitting around twiddling their thumbs in the reader's mind. And in both case, it seems easier to write what's happening now, to throw in those details that may or may not matter, then to skip them. "But what if I need that later?" I'll think. "What if that turns out to be important?" In Silver Scales, of course, I could backfill, but the audience reading along would notice if I did. In a campaign, though, you really can't. Once that opportunity is past, it's gone.
I wrote above, "it seems easier to write what's happening now". That's a key part, too. Sometimes I'll want to start a scene that's set "some hours later". And I have a hard time getting into it, figuring out the bits I need. When that happens, I turn back the clock. "What happened right after the last thing?" Especially in RPGs, this is true. I'll often turn the clock forward in my initial log starter, and then wind up ratcheting it back, thinking that my problem is that I'm glossing over too much, that I'm dictating the PC's actions instead of letting the PC make decisions. Moving the action earlier is good for filling time and pages. But not for being concise.
I don't know how worried I really am about this. On the one hand, I do fret over boring my players, or my readers. On the other, I'd rather spend time writing unnecessary words, than time stressing over how I could skip writing those unnecessary words. Writing is not only more fun than stressing, but it also takes less time.
But it does seem ironic to me that twenty years ago, I couldn't figure out how to fill pages, and now I can't remember how to stop.
no subject
With Game of October, I can't blame you for the slow pace here: There are just so many unknowns, and inevitably, the players are going to have to bumble about to find things out. They're going to look in the wrong places - or look in the right ones and not realize that they've found something important - and then have to spend quite a lot of time just talking about what they've found. That sort of thing is inevitable in most of the types of campaigns I run - and a big challenge for me is to figure out the appropriate ways to give the PCs the boat-loads of information they need - at last - to start making educated decisions rather than random guesses, before the big finale.
In a story, if you played out every last bit of that back-and-forth, of hypothesizing and being wrong, I think it could really kill the tale: sometimes, we just need to get to the point.
For Prophecy, I figure the story had better be big. It's the fate of the world we're talking about, after all! ;) It deserves epic proportions.
For online roleplay, I can't be terribly surprised when a plot runs into years - That's just the nature of the game. After all, you might meet with a player only once every two weeks, and play for a few hours, and the amount of onscreen action doesn't even amount to what could be accomplished in a chapter of a decent book. (And in those logs where a lot does get said and done, it's usually either an especially long log, or else there's a whole lot of "talking past each other" that goes on.)
What amazes me, though, is the thought that you could have wrapped up Mirari in 6-8 sessions. 6-8 sessions?!? Good grief! That would have only happened, I think, if you had given the players very straightforward details on what they needed to do and how, and skipped over any sort of character development.
Hmm. As for writing short stories, I'm reminded of one thing that I found to be interesting in the Mutant Chronicles RPG book - the original one, at least. The sidebars had bunches of short-short stories - "vignettes", maybe they're called? - that didn't necessarily have a distinct beginning, middle and end. They were snapshots of a sort, that served to give a glimpse of some character, some situation, and they served wonderfully to bring to life the world of Mutant Chronicles - far more than dry sourcebook text could manage - and in nice little bite-sized chunks.
I remember when you were writing those short little snippets and were pondering what you should develop into a story. For instance, there was that one about the fellow who apparently dies every now and then. A very curious situation, one that presents questions rather than answers to the reader, but it seemed to serve nicely as a "hook".
If you worry that you're getting overly wordy, maybe you need to write a few more super-short story fragments - to see how much story can be told, however incompletely, in a "snapshot" piece? Just a thought.
no subject
Here's one from my files:
no subject
She may be greedy, but she successfully resisted the urge to lick her lips.
===|==============/ Level Head
no subject
no subject
You would not belive just how common this acutaly is. :)