Let’s talk about the things you can write that are not typically what we talk about—formats that aren’t novels and short stories. In this episode, we’re thinking about scripts, RPG adventures, video game dialogue, etc. What other forms are out there, and how can you apply the skills you already have to a new form? 

[“Dark One: Forgotten” Deep Dive Ep. 3] 

Homework:

Take something that you’re working on, and identify two other formats that might work well for it (audio, video game, you name it). Think about how you would pitch—and tell— the story differently for each format.  

Thing of the Week:

Severance (2022 TV Series) 

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Branching out! Writing is not just novels and short stories. Gaming, other genres, role playing game adventures, TV shows, movies, stage. Diversify your income! Teach. You need to be able to say what you want to say so that the reader gets what you wanted to say out of it. One difference in game writing or script writing from prose writing is the degree of control you have. Scripts and games are more collaborative. Watch out for emergent gameplay, where the players go in a different direction than you expected. Think of it as wine in vessels. Listen to the actors, watch gameplay, and learn to be a better writer. Think of writing as an act of hospitality. You are collaborating with your audience to create an understanding. Throwaway details in a short story make the world bigger, but are problems in tabletop games. Think about what you can do in one format that you can’t do in others. Audience participation comes in two flavors, something that doesn’t change the story, or something that makes a difference. Game writing teaches you how to try to keep people’s attention pointed where you want it. Narrative wayfinding, signaling people where they should be going. 

[Season 18, Episode 26]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Broadening Your Writing Wheelhouse.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.

[Howard] And I like to write things other than comics.

[Dan] Prove it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] No. That’s what we’re talking about today. I’ve got a class that I teach called All of the Eggs in All of the Baskets that’s basically about the time when my career stalled and I wasn’t able to sell books for a solid three or four years. Then I started branching out into other things. I started working in the gaming industry, writing science fiction, writing role playing game adventures. I was a staff writer on a TV show. I’ve written for my own movie, I’ve written stage. I’ve written all kinds of extra stuff. We thought it would be good to take an episode today and talk about all of the things you can write that are not what we typically talk about, novels and short stories.

[DongWon] From a business perspective, I think this is a really fantastic thing to talk about. Unfortunately, one of the things that we’ve seen over the last 40, 50 years of publishing is a contraction in author advances. Author advances are not as large as they were in the 80s and 90s. So, when you hear about sort of mid-list authors being able to have a sustainable career delivering only novels, that has become less and less tenable as time goes on. Authors have needed to diversify their income. There are a number of ways to do this. Especially on the literary side, a lot of people teach. But in genre fiction, what most of my clients tend to do if they don’t have a day job is write in lots of different formats and lots of different arenas. So sometimes that’s doing an adult novel and having a young adult or middle grade career. Sometimes that’s writing for video games. Sometimes that’s writing comics. TV and film writing, also. These are all great ways to bulk out both your throughput… Other things that have happened in the publishing industry means that the pace of front list publishing has slowed down. It’s now about one book every 18 months or two years tends to be standard. So being able to fill in those gaps between your front list novels with other income streams, whether that’s comics or games or whatever as we’re discussing, that can be a really important thing to building a sustainable writing career.

[Howard] The skill set… And I’m going to go ahead and put a stake in the ground as an absolute, just so people can at me in the comments the skill set that you need for that if you’re writing novels or short stories already is being able to say what you want to say and have the reader get what you wanted to say out of it. Because if you can do that consistently in your prose… I mean, consistently and deliberately. Then you’ve already got the skill to begin translating that into other things that you write. You’ve already figured out how words work. There’s a whole bunch of other things you’re going to have to learn about how to put the words on the page. Which ones go in brackets and which ones go in italics and so on and so forth, but that skill, saying what you want to say so that it is read the way you want it to be read, is the key.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to make sure right at the beginning to point out that while I kind of frame this in terms of my own experience, I don’t want to present the idea that types of writing that are not novels or short stories are somehow lesser or different or other. They’re all completely valid, and there are many writers around the world that that is their entire career, is only game writing or only TV writing or something like that. So, don’t take my personal experience as a sign that one is better or more desirable than another.

[DongWon] Right. My framing is really driven by the fact that I work primarily with novelists. So that is also why I’m framing it similarly.

[Erin] One thing I’ll say to, like, writing the words and then having the reader take them in, is that one of the things I often tell people when they’re asking me what’s the difference between doing game writing, doing scriptwriting, is control. So, one of the things that you do have a lot of when writing prose… Granted, your editor may have their hands in it or whoever… Ultimately, you get to control the way that people take in the content. A lot of what writers do, I like to think, is control. The way we try to use, like, different punctuation even to get a rhythm going. But if you’re writing a script, you’re going to turn it over to actors. It’s more of a collaborative medium a lot of times working in scripts. When you’re dealing with a game, you can’t control exactly what people do once they’re in the game world. There’s a whole lot of things that we talk about in game writing called emergent gameplay, which is when you think the game is about X, but people decide to go off and play Y. They get obsessed with looking in random things, in crates for items, they go kill all the dragons in Dragon Age instead of saving the world. Or, in a tabletop game, you’re really turning it over to a storyteller to use the backdrop that you’ve set up and then decide where they want to take it. So you have to become comfortable with giving up that control. Otherwise, you will be really upset when people don’t take in the story the way you’re expecting them to.

[Dan] Yeah. Absolutely. The flip side to that is that that loss of control that you have with something like a script when you are giving it over to actors, I have found can improve the pacing of my dialogue so much. Because I can just have people say things without all of that extra narrative stuff that we talked about in a previous episode about narrators. Sometimes, that can slow down the jokes so that they don’t land in the way that I want them to. Whereas when I adapt it into a script then it flows perfectly.

[Howard] We’ve… I say we. Sandra and I have seen this as we’ve worked with Schlock Mercenary bonus stories. Moving from the script to having someone else handle the illustrations. When I script things for myself and draw them, I know what I meant. When I script things for someone else, often what I have to do is very explicitly say, “The punchline for this script depends on the following elements, which need to be present in this panel. But we don’t want to telegraph the whole joke, so be careful about it.” That’s a lot to say. With some artists, you do have to be that explicit and say it. Similarly, when you’re writing an audio script, and you have notes about what the background noise should be, it can be helpful to say, “We need this background noise because we’re trying to create a mood of normalcy that we can then put an undercurrent of suspense in later by adding something.” Those sorts of notes, knowing how to write not just to the audience as a reader, but to the audience who is a director, or the audience who is an artist, or the audience who is a sound designer, you as the writer need to be able to make your words say things to those people.

[Mary Robinette] The way I think about it, frequently, in writing, is that it’s… That you think of it like a novel is a clear glass vessel. You can put anything into that vessel that you want. Then you’ve got games, which is a different shape of vessel. But, again, you can put anything into that vessel. So if you want to put horror into this vessel and horror into that vessel, they’re two different things. But it’s got elements of the same ingredients. Right? Then, the reader, when they come to it, are coming to it with their own vessels. So if I’ve written something that is pinot noir shaped, and I’m serving it out of a carafe, my intention is that it’s supposed to go into a Reidel. That’s going to be beautiful and lovely. But if someone comes to me with a red Solo cup, they’re still going to enjoy that pinot noir, not the way I intended, but there’s still going to enjoy it. If they come to me with… But at the same time, if I have made something that’s like a hot apple cider, and they come to me with a Reidel, and I pour that in, that glass is going to shatter. So one of the things that I think when you’re jumping forms is that it enables you to have a broader understanding of the different ways audience interact with the media that you plan. You can take the tools that you learn from one into another, and use those ingredients, those recipes, those formulas, to shape things. Like, I came from 20 years of puppet theater preloaded with an understanding of how body language and dialogue worked. I could translate that onto the page. So I had this immediate level up. But those are like… Puppetry… Writing for puppet stage and writing for novels? Like, that writing looks nothing… Nothing alike.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that’s one of the fun things about kind of giving up control a little bit, and putting more of the control, I think, in a lot of formats in the audience’s hands. Because you learn in a different way how your writing lands and what happens. So if you give a line to an actor and they interpreted in a way you didn’t anticipate… Sometimes they interpreted in a way and you’re like, “Wow, that actually was a stronger choice. Why didn’t I think of that? How could I think of that in the future?” Or, if you… One of the things I did when I… When Journeys to the Radiant Citadel was out is I watched actual plays of people playing in my adventure to see where are there commonalities? Where are the things that I wrote that everyone incorporated into their gameplay session? Where were there things that people sort of decided that they needed to work around? Then I can take that in and learn and be a better writer for the next adventure because I’m seeing where things are showing up in actual people’s tables when they’re playing.

[Mary Robinette] I do that with reviews. I read my five-star reviews and I read my four-star reviews, because the four-star reviews… I have to be in the right mood. To be clear.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have to be in a healthy frame of mind. But the four-star reviews are gold, because these are people for whom it almost everything worked and there’s one thing that didn’t. If I can spot a pattern in that, that’s a pattern that I can iterate on. It also, again, helps when I jump from one form… From one medium to another. It’s like, oh, this is a thing, and it’s clear now why it’s a problem. Like, jumping from short story to novel, I rush my endings.

[Dan] Let’s take a pause here. When we come back, I want to talk more about this because it’s fascinating.

[Dan] Our thing of the week this week is a TV show that the rest of you all saw it last year. I only just came to it, and watched it and loved it. Which is Severance. This is one of the best science fiction TV shows that I’ve seen in a very long time. The basic premise of this is that there is a corporation that’s come up with the technology to bifurcate your memory. When you are outside of the office, you have one set of memories, and when you are inside of the office, you have a completely different set. Which effectively splits you into two people. They use this not only as, like, a corporate workplace dystopian satire, but also just a really compelling story about grief and trauma, about kind of group dynamics and politics. It is a slow burn story, but even in the slow parts, it is completely compelling and builds toward the end of the first season’s one of the best hours of TV that I’ve seen in ages.

[DongWon] I love this framing of talking about writing in these other formats as sort of changing the way the audience participates in the storytelling. But there’s another way in which it doesn’t fundamentally change things. One of my clients and very good friends Amal El-Mohtar talks about writing as an act of hospitality. When you write a novel, when you write a story, you are inviting your audience into the space that you’ve created. You’re collaborating with them to create an understanding. For me, I love watching actual play TV shows, I love GMing tabletop games. So, as Erin was saying, I find that that has improved me as an editor because it lets me make more space for the audience and how they’re  reacting and interpreting what’s on the page. A novel is a little bit more about control, but you still… Going back to the metaphor of the vessels as well, your reader is an empty vessel as well. You need to figure out how am I signaling them what they should be bringing to this table to properly receive what you’ve created for them.

[Erin] I think I love this idea of hospitality, because I think part of… If you’re switching from format to format, is much like moving from one person’s house to another. What might be a lovely act of politeness in one place doesn’t work as well in the other. One of the big lessons that I learned when I first started writing for tabletop, coming from short fiction, is that if you want to make your world feel bigger in a short story, sometimes you’ll just throw a detail in that you’re never going to follow up on. You’ll be like, “Ah, yes. Like when we came through the purple door.” Like, that doesn’t… It’s not a part of the story, is just to make the world feel wider. But when you do that in a tabletop game…

[Laughter]

[Erin] People will be like, “What’s in that door? Why can’t I go through that door? What’s behind that door?” So it’s actually sort of rude to suggest things that you’re not planning to follow-up on in a way that it would never be in a short story prose format.

[DongWon] I think every GM has made the mistake of making the bartender slightly too hot…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And then all the characters go chasing off in the other direction. You’re like, “That was one random NPC that was here. This was not a major character.”

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This was… Interestingly, I discovered that also going from novel to short form. That in novel, people assume that… Because they’re there for immersion, that if you don’t include it, you’ve forgotten about it. In short story, they’re like, “Well, obviously, you’re not going to include everything, so if you’ve included it, it must be important.” It sounds like it’s even more so with games. It’s just like… Oh…

[Howard] In Xtreme Dungeon Mastery, both the first and the second editions, Tracy relates the story in his early gaming years of the DM saying, “There’s a pillar in the middle of the room with unreadable runes on it.” To the DM, unreadable runes means this is flavor. Just skip it. That is not what his players did. At some point, when you have this happen, you have to be willing to just break the fourth wall and say, “I’m sorry guys. I screwed up. I didn’t want anybody to be paying attention to the pillar. Just pretend it’s not there. It’s nothing. Move on with the adventure. Stop holding the gnome upside down in front of the pillar with a mirror trying to find a way… Please, just stop that. We want to go kill monsters now.”

[Dan] So, another way that I like to think about these differences between formats is what can I do in this one that I can’t do in the others? One thing that I hear a lot about interactive fiction, whether it is for a videogame or a role-playing game or whatever, is that the players are going to screw it up. That you have a cool story in mind, and they’re going to mess it up. That is a way to think about it, but it is not a helpful way to think about it. It’s an obstacle to deal with, but I think the other side to that is to say, “Well, when I’m writing a game adventure, I have access to a bunch of extra minds and a bunch of extra collaborators which gives me as the person writing the adventure to fill it with opportunities for them to contribute.” I did an adventure for a science fiction horror called Grimmer Space where they go to a planet that kind of, in a very cosmic horror way, started screwing with their memories. I got to throw out that, say, “Well, okay. Point to one of the players and ask them to tell you about this specific memory that they have about some horrible thing that happened with their family.” That sort of thing. So that as they’re walking through this world, they are contributing to it, and they are adding to their own sense of spooky horror, which is not something you can really do in a novel.

[Mary Robinette] The thing that we would always… That you make me think of, that there’s audience participation in children’s shows. There’s kind of two modes, one of which makes me a little cranky. That is, “Now everyone is a tree.” So everybody stands up and they’re  a tree, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t stand up and you’re not a tree, there’s no problem with the story, the story continues. That’s safer for the actor. But the way that is more impactful is if it makes a difference. That’s “Clap if you believe in fairies.” Where if you do not participate, the story fundamentally breaks, the show fundamentally breaks. That brings the reader, the viewer, deeper into it. So what you had to learn to do was to make the audience think that they had a choice, and be prepared for both outcomes. Which has been… One of my favorite tricks to use in stage, but I also found that when I started writing games, that it was a very, very useful thing. That I made it look like people had a choice. Then, in some cases, there were two possible outcomes are multiple possible outcomes. In other cases, it’s like either choice, all right, I need them to get to this building. Which path on the road do you take? Whichever path they take, that’s the one that’s going to take them to the building for me.

[Erin] I also think you learn… Because part of the thing that’s fun about writing across formats is what you learn and can bring with you. One of them is how to sort of breadcrumb your audience into wanting to go the way that… Like, where you’ve actually prepared all the stuff and you… The building has so many cool things in it and you want them to get there, and they want to get there, so that’s consistent as well. I think what you learn from that in stories is sometimes when you get feedback from a workshop or a critique group that… They might say, “I was reading your story, but really I was wondering whatever happened to that dude?” Or, like, “We never found out how the water system works.” There losing attention. One thing that I think game writing teaches you a lot about is how to try to keep people’s attention in the direction that you kind of want it to go. Because there’s nothing more satisfying than when you… They choose to go to the building that you wanted them to go to, and it is a free choice, but you sort of let them know that this is the choice that sort of will work really well for them.

[DongWon] I think of this as narrative wayfinding. Right? So, wayfinding is a design technique that helps signal people where they should be going. So the most basic sign is the bathrooms are this way on a big sign. But there’s all these other signals that go into designing a space or writing a story that will take your audience from point a to point B. Right? I think a mistake that novelists make sometimes is thinking that, oh, because I’ve written it this way, they’ll happily go along with me. But readers have their own agency and if you run contrary to their expectations, they will get frustrated and stop reading your book. Right? So I think this is one of the ways in which learning to write for other media, whether it’s interactive stage experience, whether it’s games, will help you learn to accurately signal the direction in which you want people to go, when to have a heavy hand, when to have a light touch. How to signal this is a horror story, this is an adventure story. If it’s a horror story, then you go through the scary door. If it’s an adventure story, you go through the nice door or whatever it is. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] You go into the tavern that has the nice music playing. So I think learning what the signals are depending on what genre you’re in, depending on what story you’re trying to tell. Sort of locking into the narrative patterns that people expect from fiction will help you build the story that you’re trying to build, and really like… Again, it’s an act of hospitality. Make your table inviting for your guests to sit down at and know that I’m getting a seven course tasty menu or I’m getting a burger and fries.

[Dan] Yeah. I mean, as an example of this, I’ve learned from game writing and from running games so much about how to change the audience’s attitude about characters. How to make sure they really hate the villain and they want to hunt them down and kill them. Right? That is a skill that works in a game. That is also really valuable in a novel. How do you make them love a side character? What are those little tricks? So there’s a lot that can kind of cross pollinate between different formats and so on. 

[Howard] One of the pieces that… One of the tools that has served me really is the skill I’ve developed at never throwing anything away and being able to very quickly file the serial numbers off of a thing I pulled out of the trash in order to put it someplace else. When I have a chapter or a section that didn’t work in a story, but I really liked it, I don’t throw it away, it just goes into the boneyard. Then, remembering, there’s that one thing… Pull it out of the boneyard and realize, oh, nuke this, nuke this, change this, change that pronoun. Done! That is so much fun. Yes, I’m lazy. Yes, my boneyard takes up a huge amount of space in my head. But being able to repurpose things in that way is such a valuable skill. Any time you’re… Especially for the working writer, because I think it was Erin said, “I like money.”

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, we kind of all do. At the very least, we like eating. Indoors. And sleeping. Indoors. Being able to pay the bills by writing.

[Erin] Yeah. I think also, I love that idea of taking things out of the boneyard, because sometimes different stories work well in different formats. Occasionally, you’ll have a story that maybe it’s in the boneyard because, like, that story just isn’t well suited to the format that you wanted to write it in. But it’ll work somewhere else. So one of the pieces of interactive fiction that I’ve written was originally a short story that I could not make work, which is about somebody who wakes up with no memory of who they are. They’re trying to kind of buy their memories back to try to figure out like what’s going on with them. I wanted the reader, the audience member, to really feel that sense of loss. But you’re in the person’s head, and it was just very difficult. Doing it as a game, where you literally have to decide which memories you’re going to buy from, like, the Siri like in this piece of interactive fiction, put the player in the exact position that I wanted them to be in, so they could feel what the character was feeling. It worked a million times better.

[Mary Robinette] I had a very similar thing. My very first novel began as a piece of flash fiction, completely wrong for that. Then I thought, why don’t I adapt this for audio theater? Which is the perfect thing you want to do a visually based magic system.

[Laughter] 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I love this. I have a project I’ve been working on recently with a client that we’ve gone through 4 to 5 iterations of trying to frame it for different media as we’re like zeroing in on the thing. I think what we realized is the world building in this particular thing is so crazy that we’re like I think it needs to be visual. I think people just need to see it, and they’ll accept it more than trying to describe this scenario. So we’ve moved from short story to novellas to audio to now it’s a graphic novel pitch. It is sort of… It has finally like clarified and locked into place so, sometimes you can have this idea of you know what kind of story you want to tell, but certain mediums will work better than others for what you’re trying to accomplish. Right? Don’t be afraid to experiment. Don’t be afraid of stretching a little bit and seeing what if I write this as audio? What if I write it as a script? What if I write it as an interactive experience? I think that can be really enriching and fulfilling for you. Maybe you come back to prose, but, like, it can be of you locking in on what’s truly important to you about the story, what works and what doesn’t work, and how do I frame it to make sure that it’s landing the way that I need it to.

[Dan] That feels like a wonderful note to end on. We have some homework that kind of talks about that a little bit. Erin, what’s our homework?

[Erin] Our homework for today is to take something that you’re working on, some piece, some story that you’re doing, and identify two other formats that might work well for it. Think about how you would actually pitch the story differently for those formats. Could be audio, could be a game, could be anything else. How would you tell that story differently in those formats?

[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we unpack the frames that surprise us and learn why DongWon isn’t a fan of epistolary novels. Until then, you’re out of excuses. Now go write.