Monthly Archives: January 2012

Busy Hands

31 Tuesday Jan 2012

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post that challenged people to try to do nothing but think and see what pops up. I’m not sure which is more difficult than the other, but here’s another take on it–activities you can do while thinking about your stories. The activities are usually the sort that require minimal brain power for focus and a repetitive physical activity. I often hear them referred to as “meditative.”

These are my primary “meditative” activities:

  • Knitting memorized patterns or spinning at my wheel
  • Taking walks
  • Cooking a familiar recipe
  • Drawing or doodling scenes, characters, maps, plot-diagrams, etc. from the story

You could also do some chores, which I should probably do more often (but knitting is more fun):

  • Folding/hanging the laundry
  • Dusting
  • Washing the dishes
  • Cleaning windows

All of these help my brain shift into auto-pilot and let me think on my stories. Drawing is a bit more involved since I don’t draw on auto-pilot, but it means my thoughts are focused on the story at hand, without being focused on the pressure of making words happen.

(As a side note, all of these assume a level of competency. I assure you that when I was learning how to spin or knit it took up all of my brain power and the words crossing my mind had nothing to do with my stories.)

Those are just the things I do, though. What do you do that keeps your restlessness at bay and lets your mind wander?

The Three Foci in Games

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in Gaming, Mike, Theory

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Oh hai, I’m moving my posts to Fridays. Ann will occasionally post on Thursdays, so from now on we’ll be posting two to three times a week: Tuesday, sometimes Thursday, and Friday.

Telling Stories in Games Series: Part I

There’s a chance you didn’t know this, but most (but by no means all) of my writing and editing experience comes from tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs). When Ann and I mapped out what we wanted to do with this blog, I knew that I wanted to do a series of posts about telling stories in games (I’m going to aim for one or two per month). The recent announcement of D&D Next (aka 5e) makes this series seem somewhat more timely than it would have been otherwise.

Overlap exists between telling stories with games and telling stories in other media–after all, a story is a story is a story–but some differences persist. Everything Ann and I cover in Story Papers is applicable to game-based storytelling, but I’m not sure the reverse will always be true. Still, even if you don’t play games with a narrative, you might find something helpful in these posts.

Last week, I talked about the Three Foci of Stories as a sort of baseline for all future theory-based articles I write. It seems reasonable, then, to start off this series of telling stories with games in the same way.

Setting Focus

Last week I advised you to avoid setting-focused narratives, unless you’re Tolkien (and even then…). Well, for game-based stories, you can just throw that right out. Setting-focused narratives have been the default for at least fantasy roleplaying games since the invention of the genre in 1974 and they remain popular today in most genres I’ve experienced.

If you’ve played a fantasy roleplaying game on the tabletop or as an MMO you are already familiar with the concept:

  1. The characters are in a settlement with a problem.
  2. The characters go to a nearby bad place and “clear it.”
  3. The characters uncover some clue that leads them to the next bad place.
  4. The characters travel to the settlement closest to the new bad place.
  5. Repeat 1-4 as much as desired, making the problems and bad places larger and more challenging as you go.

That’s a pretty bare-bones macroscopic example of how such stories run.

A small-scale setting-focused story–say, a single adventure–instead details a single location (or if it’s really elaborate and ambitious, several). In fantasy RPGs this is probably a “dungeon;” in science-fiction RPGs a spaceship, spaceport, or a point of interest on a planet; and in modern-day RPGs it might be an office building, some old ruins, or a military base. Whatever the location is, it and its history are at the center of the story.

The first RPG adventures dispensed with any kind of external plot at all and simply began the adventure at the door to the dungeon. Questions about why and how the characters arrived there were irrelevant; the point of the adventures were to explore a new location and uncover its mysteries. Modern sensibilities require a little more plot than that, but a “dungeon crawl” remains a story about a place and what goes on there.

And remember that being setting-focused doesn’t mean your story is limited to one small part of the setting. A story of exploration is setting-focused (maybe with some character focus on the side), whether that exploration covers a single underground complex or an entire world.

Plot Focus

RPGs today are often more interested in plot, especially if they aren’t of the fantasy genre (and even then, plot-based adventures seem pretty popular). Many plots involve saving someone or something from someone or something else–giving the otherwise non-heroic characters a chance at being something more than mercenaries or self-absorbed jerks. The monomyth provides a basic example of an outline for these kinds of stories in any medium, although in games (at least in tabletop roleplaying games) you have to alter it somewhat to account for multiple primary protagonists.

The scope of what the characters save tends to increase as the overarching story progresses. First it’s just a village, hijacked airplane, or doomed freighter adrift in space. Eventually, it’s the entire country, world, or galaxy! (Not always, of course; sometimes the scope only increases to the next-largest nearby town.)

As I talked about last week, plot-driven stories are everywhere. Examples abound! Some of the more common plots that work well in games:

  • Save this place
  • Free the people
  • Stop the bad guy from regaining power
  • Throw down the bad guys
  • Rescue the princess!*
  • Slay the dragon**
  • Destroy a MacGuffin
  • Recover a MacGuffin
  • Escort the important person
  • Take this there

Many of those plots work in multiple genres, even if they appear on first blush to be specific to just fantasy or science fiction.

Character Focus

In many ways, a purely character-focused game lacks story. Or, rather, it lacks a story told by the gamemaster, narrator, storyteller, or host (whatever your title is). A pure character-focused game is pretty much a free-form roleplaying session, where the players take on their characters’ personas and simply interact. You might have a plot you want to introduce, but if the players are having fun in their free-form roleplaying there’s a good chance they will completely ignore it (don’t let it bother you; sit back, watch, and enjoy!).

That’s a pretty extreme example, though, and only barely constitutes an actual story. It’s most likely to happen as a break from your plot- or setting-based story, when the characters have a chance to just interact and the players are in the mood to really get into their characters. These kinds of “filler episode” sessions can be important to the pacing of your game and the enjoyment of your players.

If you want to try to run a game that is largely character focused, you’re definitely going to need the cooperation and interest of all your players. Some might take to the idea and provide long and detailed backstories as well as goals, desires, wishes, and fears of their characters. Others might just show you a character sheet. You’re better off, in that case, with running a plot-focused or setting-focused game instead and integrate player-created stories as best you can. This idea deserves its own post, really, so I’ll come back to it in the future.

Final Challenge

Here’s a challenge for you: Start with a story seed of your liking. Now, produce a one-page outline for it focusing on setting, a one-page outline for the same story focusing on plot, and finally a one-page outline focusing on characters. If you try it, let me see what you came up with!

*Actually, for all that it is considered a cliche in fantasy, I’m not aware of any professionally produced RPG scenarios that blatantly use the “rescue the princess” trope.
**Also an under-utilized trope.

When Should You Break Up with Your Story?

26 Thursday Jan 2012

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Note: Sometimes I want to say more than I can manage in one column a week, so you get a bonus double-feature! Also, I promise that we’re going to stop stringing out this analogy.

Last week I took my own advice and wrote a love letter to the story I’d been working on for the last few weeks. I tried it three times, and I had a painful realization–my heart and passion wasn’t there. Even my love letter felt like rote chore. I still find the concept intriguing, but somewhere along the way the excitement of the story has faded away or I lost it completely.

After a couple of days of denial, I decided to try writing a love letter for a story I haven’t worked on since November (mostly cast aside when the holiday madness swept through). In this letter, I felt the passion. I got excited. The grass was a beautiful and lush green on the other side of the fence, and I wanted to play in it.

I know, I know. Discipline! Sometimes, though, discipline isn’t discipline at all. It’s a chore-based motivation that we mistakenly flog ourselves about. I have a few novel-length works that I wrote simply as a chore. The passion was long gone–and it shows. I’ve learned not to do that anymore, but I’m not always fast to recognize it.

(I think that’s another post for another day.)

Sometimes we’re just procrastinating or scared. Sometimes the story just isn’t as relevant to us as it used to be when we originally conceived it. Sometimes we need to take a break, and that break might be a short one or a long one. This isn’t something quite as extreme as a genre change, just a story change.

I know I’ll come back to Ghosts. It’s been haunting me on and off for years. We’re just not in a place right now where we can give one another the attention we deserve, and those things that bring me back to the story every few months will resurface again.

Breaking up with your story is difficult decision (and a huge topic I’ll probably revisit a few times as this blog continues), but the biggest things to weigh in is your motivation for continuing or not continuing on a story. My love letter showed me the love isn’t there right now and I’m under no obligation to write the story, so I’m going to move on.

Lists and Possibilities

24 Tuesday Jan 2012

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“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” -Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

We use lists all the time–to-do lists, shopping lists, bucket lists, etc. But what about lists as a set of possibilities for your story?

When I’m feeling stuck on a certain situation or character in my story, I oftentimes just start rapid-fire listing all the possibilities I can come up with. All of them–good and bad, serious and silly–and seeing which strikes me the most.

For example, if I’ve created an event in a story, but I’m still not sure who is responsible for it, I might start by listing potential suspects. (I’m notorious for coming up with problems before I assign people to cause them.) Or, in reverse, I have this cool antagonist group, but I’m not sure what to do with them, I might start listing ideas about them–their wants, their motivations, their fears….

Perhaps I’ll do a list for my protagonist, too. If I later compare those lists, I might find intersecting points in which their interests cross or conflict, which will be the impetus for a story to happen. This might even happen between two protagonists and two antagonists, depending on the depth of your story’s characters.

Listing can also be used for plot points–simply writing out all the scene or moment ideas you have and figuring out how or if they fit into the overall story you want to tell. One exercise in the Donald Maass Breakout Novel series (which I highly recommend) has you listing out the stakes of a story, and then, when you think you’ve thought of all the ways the situation can get worse, to list out even more things. And when you think it can’t get any worse, think of even more things that will make it worse. It’s quite the exercise, and I’ve applied it to other parts of my storytelling as well.

There are a hundred ways you can use lists for your writing–but I think one of the most important things to remember is that you don’t have to keep anything on your list. It’s an exercise, not a contract set in stone. By using lists and whipping out ideas in short form as fast as you can come up with them, you’re able to exhaust your possibilities and find the ones that work best or are the most exciting among those that might be bland, predictable, or otherwise undesirable.

When you are listing, I suggest free-forming it. Don’t bother with what kind of numbering or lettering or which bullet-points you should use (unless that will help spark your creativity). Possibilities might be as serious as the death of a protagonist’s loved one to as whimsical as unicorn farts. All that matters is that you exhaust your ideas, and when you think you’re done, come up with even more. Anything. Everything.

Ideas are a dime a dozen and we’re under no obligation to use every idea that flits across our imagination (I suspect even the most prolific of storytellers would have trouble doing this). For all of the awesome ideas we have, we usually have had a thousand zip by. But sometimes all those extras come in as noise that block us from hearing another possibility (or they might even belong in a different story). Use your lists to get everything out–the good, the bad, the irrelevant–and then keep only the ideas that really sing for the story at hand.

And don’t censor yourself–you’re the only one who is ever going to see it, and sometimes our best ideas are the ones we’re afraid to write down. That might not be the case every time, but you’ll never know if you don’t try it, right?

The Three Foci

19 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Mike, Theory

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So let’s talk about actually telling a story. I think Ann and I have been writing so far under the assumption that everyone who reads this blog is a practiced, experienced storyteller. That might be the case, but we’d also like to be accessible to newcomers as well. And those of you who are seasoned storytellers might still find something interesting. :)

As a quick definition, pretty much every story needs these three elements: character, plot, setting. I’ll talk about all of these in greater detail (especially characters) in later posts. For now, though, let’s talk about stories that focus on each of these elements.

Character Focus

Character-focused stories generally take an ensemble cast with a variety of personalities and put them all together into a situation that allows them to interact. The plot is usually relatively simple and exists mostly to give the characters something to talk about. In many, the setting is minimal.

These kinds of stories rely on well-rounded, complicated, believable characters. They should have the same kind of beautiful fallacies, imperfections, contradictions, and hypocrisies that real people do. The real challenge when focusing on such flawed characters is to assemble and present them in such a way that the audience cares about them. Or at least most of them.

Stories about the interactions of people, often done in a way to draw out strong emotions, as well as those that tell the life story of a single person (fictional or real), are hallmarks of character-focused stories. Sitcoms and slice-of-life entertainments (which only occasionally are actually stories) also fall under this broad heading. Examples include stories from such different eras and media as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; the manga and anime Azumanga Daioh (and its myriad imitators); many of Shakespeare’s romances; or movies like Good Will Hunting and Steel Magnolias.

Plot Focus

Probably the simplest of the three story foci are plot-focused stories. Genre and speculative fiction rely heavily on this kind of story, as do many of the old epics that form the backbone of human literature. A plot-focused story needs a strong (often familiar) plot, a number of characters to make it happen, and just enough setting to make the audience care about the stakes of the story.

These kinds of stories can be pretty epic (saving the world!), but you can also tell more intimate stories as well (such as a locked-room murder mystery). Your plot can be extremely complicated, with multiple twists and turns and surprises to keep your audience guessing, or it can be extremely straightforward and linear. There are benefits to each, but also some serious drawbacks, so unless you’re a practiced hand at one extreme or the other I recommend moderation. If your story is too complex, you will lose your audience and it will cease to care. If your story is too simple, you will bore your audience and it will cease to care. Once your audience stops caring your story is over.

Fortunately, though, plot-focused stories are pretty easy to do and you have a lot of examples to choose from. Most popular and famous stories focus on plot. Where do I even begin? Well, how about the beginning? Gilgamesh, Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Iliad, the stories of The Bible–pretty much all of humanity’s first several millennia of myths, legends, and literature focus pretty heavily on what happens in the story (myths do so for reasons other than mere entertainment, as Geoff talks about here). More modern examples are no less abundant, and include summer blockbusters out of Hollywood as well as almost every fantasy, science-fiction, horror, mystery, or action/adventure book, game, television program, or movie. They are everywhere, and we love them.

Setting Focus

More travelogues than anything else, setting-focused stories go into great detail about the world in which the story takes place, with the plot and characters there merely to guide the reader. Probably the most famous example of a setting-focused story is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I don’t really have a good feel for how popular or common these kinds of stories are anymore, but my guess would be “not very.”

Honestly, if you’re heavily invested in a world of your own creation, I recommend that you tell your stories of it through interactive means. Introduce your world to others via games and actual character- or plot-focused stories, then provide additional background information to those who want it.

Final Challenge

Here’s a challenge for you: Next time you finish a story you enjoy (in any medium) take a moment to think about the story’s focus and how you could rewrite the story (with the same characters, basic plot, and setting) to focus on the elements the storyteller did not.

The Virtue of Being Bored

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

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Why do we get our ideas in the shower?

Those of us in American culture take pride in being busy. Really busy. We have to fill every moment with something “productive”–checking our smartphones at the bus stop, taking part in a ton of organizations, working late, jotting down a few hundred words for the day, or a thousand other ways we cram something into every second so we’re not caught doing nothing and can continue to check things off our to-do lists. We feel a strange, sometimes distressing, pride when we can say, “Oh, I don’t have time for that kind of stuff; I’m way too busy.”

And when we’re not “busy?” We collapse in front of the TV or something else mindless to get swept away in.

I recently read about a study on how children who are over-scheduled–those whose every moment of their day is packed with clubs and activities and school and homework–come out with stunted imaginations. They’ve never been bored. They’ve always had their activities provided for them, rather than thinking about how to entertain themselves.

Since the imagination is also critical for storytelling (and other creating) adults, I’ve been wondering just how much of this relates to adults who are always busy and over-occupied. Some people manage to carve out writing time, only to be disappointed in the results because they only think about their story when they sit at their chair to make their daily word count. When you’re dealing with something that is completely in your head, thinking about it is a key factor in creating it.

Let’s return to my original question–why do we get ideas in the shower? I believe it’s because that’s one of the only times we slow down. We can’t have our smartphones with us in the shower (yet). We can’t be checking our email or doing business. We’re doing something monotonous that we’ve done every day for tens of years. Those are precious, guilt-free moments of nothingness that let the brain noise quiet just long enough to let our imaginations play. There are other moments like this, like when our brains stop just enough for us to fall asleep.

Today, I give you permission to under-occupy your brain and think about your story.

Take a walk. Sit on the couch with a warm beverage. Take a long bath. Stare out the window while you ride the bus.  If you can’t stand the lack of background noise, turn on some music. Don’t turn on the TV, an audio book, or talk radio. Don’t dink around on your phone, update Facebook, play Angry Birds, or check your RSS reader. Let your mind wander. Don’t try to force yourself on to the story, but when something mundane demands its way in, acknowledge and then dismiss it. This will probably happen a lot at first. Have paper and pen nearby if you like, but this isn’t carving out writing time, this is carving out thinking time.

Chances are, you’re going to feel restless, edgy, and–dare I say it–bored, if you’re one of those particularly busy-busy sorts (guilty!). You might even feel lazy. But keep at it, and see what happens when you give yourself permission to do nothing but think.

See where your mind goes. See where your story goes.

Seeing Someone Else

12 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Inspiration, Mike

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For more than a decade I thought I wanted to write an epic fantasy novel. I diligently outlined the story, started it, and subsequently restarted it numerous times. One day, though, I realized I hadn’t read a novel in that genre for years. I was no longer in love with the genre. I felt a little lost. The oldest memory I have of my mom reading to me was The Hobbit, when I was around four. Fantasy had always been a part of my life, and indeed I have written many thousands of published words within the genre (and edited countless more).

It might happen to you as well someday. Maybe not the same genre and maybe not after a lifetime of reveling in it, but one day you might realize–as you agonize over a story you’re struggling to even write a love letter for–that your tastes have changed. That you have moved on. That realization can be scary, but don’t panic.

This is an opportunity.

The first thing you should do is stop. Stop feeding your brain with the stories you no longer love. If you can find other kinds of stories to write about, or draw, or film, or otherwise create, then by all means continue to do that. But stop putting into your story brain things you don’t like.

The second thing you should do is start. Start looking at other kinds of stories. Don’t limit yourself to any one kind of genre, medium, or set of tropes. Explore what exists. And a lot exists.

When you’re exploring, remember to not just look outside the genre you no longer love but also the medium in which you create. Novels remain a dominant storytelling form, but movies, sequential art (comic books, webcomics, manga), modern computer roleplaying games, and even some television programs (not reality TV) offer compelling and well-crafted stories. Thanks to the Internet, other forms of storytelling keep cropping up as well (such as Youtube, Escape Pod and its kin, Echo Bazaar, and Homestuck). The Kindle might also bring a resurgence of short stories and novellas.

Ann and I will undoubtedly revisit this list in the future, but the important thing to note for today is that you have many, many options when you’re ready to feed your brain with new kinds of stories. (To say nothing of opportunities for telling stories!)

Of course, this advice is helpful even if you are still madly in love with the genres, media, and tropes you’re creating in. Storytelling isn’t a monogamous relationship; you should experiment around a little. You don’t have to dump your true love to learn something new, and the stories you tell in your chosen genre will be better for your exposure to other types. If you haven’t had enough analogies yet, think of it as cross-training for your story brain.

Today, epic fantasy and I are on friendly terms. Fantasy still informs my works; it continues to have an impact on the stories I tell. For now, though, I have a pretty good idea of what I love and the stories I want to tell, but I also know those might change in the next ten years–and if the change does happen I won’t panic, because I’ll know what to do.

Writing a Love Letter to Your Story

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

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A couple of years ago, I had this idea for a reincarnation story set in an art school.  I wrote a lot of notes, abandoned it, remembered it existed every few months, but never got anywhere with it.  In the last few weeks, I’ve been going at it fervently and it has gone through a series of revisions.  For example, it includes neither an art school or reincarnation anymore.

At least, I don’t think it does.  It has ghosts now, and I think if they’re still ghosts they’d have trouble reincarnating (Geoff would know the answer to this one, I think).  I think it’s a haunted house story now, but I’m not sure.  There are still artists.

This is one of the many issues I’m running into to.  The themes have been changing, too.  The characters have largely stayed the same, but their evolutions are getting stunted as I figure everything else out.  I even changed the working title, and that’s a big deal because the old working title was the culmination of the story.  If I changed the title, does that mean the entire point of the story has changed?

Um, maybe?  I’m not sure.

There’s a lot in this story that’s just not going right for me at the moment.  I’m doing a lot of free-writing, list-making, and brainstorming trying to figure it all out, but I’ve run into a lot more walls than doors.  Yet I still want to tell this story.

It’s at this point in a story that I need to stop and evaluate it.  I don’t need to evaluate what’s wrong with it–at least not right now.  That’s too large of a subject, and I don’t have any direction.  I need to evaluate what I love about it.  I need to sit down and gush about what gets me excited about this story, and why I so want to see it come into fruition.  This is where I talk about themes that speak to me, the characters who drive it, and the scenes that inspired me to want to see how the rest of the story unfolded.

This is where I write a love letter to my story. Instead of throwing myself against walls and going through doors just because they appeared–and not because they were the door that would lead me back to my love–the love letter tells me what’s right about the story and re-kindles the passion. And once I know what I’m in love with, I can better figure out how to build the rest of the story around it. This is not a time to be critical.  This is a time to be completely subjective and self-absorbed with your story and characters.

Are you working on a story right now that you’re stuck on?  Feeling like you’re not getting anywhere or want to give up or put it away for a while?  Do you not even remember what the point of the story was that inspired you in the first place?

Try writing a love letter to your story.  It might help.

There is No New Thing Under the Sun

05 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Inspiration, Mike

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The title of this post comes from the Bible (an under-appreciated source of some very interesting stories), in the book of Ecclesiastes, which was written about… oh… two millennia ago. While I think perhaps the writer was using a bit of hyperbole to make a point, the attempt to do something completely unique can seem pretty daunting. We’re faced now with four thousand years of world literature, and the number of stories being told every year is not going down.

Don’t worry about it.

You can spend all your life wracking your brain to create something wholly new and not at all derivative of anything else ever done since the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BCE)… or you can just tell the story you want to tell, with the characters you like.

Guess which will let you get more done?

Sometimes you won’t realize how much you’ve drawn from some source or another until you’re all done and can see the big picture. Don’t despair! Try to resist the urge to go back and redo the parts you feel aren’t new or different enough, because chances are (1) you’re the only one who notices and (2) whatever you change it to is also inspired by stories you already know. (There’s probably a neat creative exercise we could do about exchanging one inspiration for another, but let’s save that idea for later.)

How about a personal example of what I mean? I spent months writing this week’s Open Doors column and it wasn’t until my third read-through that I realized how Arthurian it is. The King Arthur stories never consciously entered my mind the entire time I was writing that piece, and yet the inspiration is clear to me now. (The blatant call-out to Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, though, was completely intentional from the beginning.)

I could go back and rewrite it all again, of course, taking out all the bits I feel are too derivative, but in so doing I’d likely just put in something inspired by some other story I might or might not remember, and then I’d be right back to where I am now (minus the self-awareness, most likely). That would be a waste of my time; I have other stories to tell now! Were I not writing this post shortly after scheduling that column I probably never would have mentioned the perceived link to anyone, but it happens to be a pretty good example of what I’m talking about here.

So, in short (too late!): go tell your stories. Write. Draw. Film. Whatever. Enjoy the stories you are telling. Enjoy the act of creating them. Because even if they are “just like” something else out there, whether you’re aware of it or not, they are still your stories–your take on something that you and others clearly enjoy.

Story Papers is not the first blog about telling stories, but it is for us! We hope you enjoy our insights from our own processes of creation and that you join us when we challenge you (and each other) to try new creative techniques and new ways of telling stories. We’d love to hear back from you, so please always feel free to leave a comment or email us! Thanks for reading!

Works in Progress

03 Tuesday Jan 2012

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Welcome to Story Papers! Mike and I enjoy concocting stories in a variety of formats, and we wanted a place where we could talk about the creative processes and storytelling–and learn from others, too. These are things that have and haven’t worked for us–and I must begin with the standard disclaimer that there is no one true path as a storyteller. Something I mention here may not work for you, but I hope in those cases, that in itself may bring its own inspiration.

What’s the difference between being a writer and being a storyteller? Writing encompasses everything from how-to articles to fiction, whereas storytelling is a specific piece of that pie, and usually includes writing as a medium, but it certainly doesn’t have to. In my case, I’ve had stories in my head for as long as I can remember, and I’ve tried to express them in various prose fiction (flash, short stories, novels), roleplaying games, and even illustrations. I’ve found novels to be my true love in storytelling, and despite a difficult and identity-altering burn out a few years ago, I’m returning to them. I know now that I need a different kind of relationship with them than I have in the past, with less of a focus on getting published (and all that entails), and more of an approach of playing around and experimenting.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

One of my latest experiments has been re-approaching the same scene seeds or situations over and over (how many of us do this for real life moments?). Each time, I change the point of view, the dialogue, the overarching theme, and even the background.  It’s incredibly inefficient and messy and I have scene bits scattered between physical notebooks, cloud documents, and hard drive documents….

I’m loving it.

You’ll see that technique here as well. Improving a craft is about experimenting and pushing beyond our perceived capabilities, and we may broach a topic one week only to revisit it from a completely different (and contradicting) viewpoint shortly after. You won’t find a lot here about publication, marketability, time management, or the nuts and bolts of grammar, but rather a focus on creativity/creation in storytelling and activities that encourage (or discourage) that.

We aim to update twice a week on average. Any more than that and I feel like we’re both distracting ourselves and you from the stories we all want to tell.