Fractals, Scenic Time, Dramatic Writing, Weak Default

I've been reading *Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative*, as recommended in this excellent talk by Christopher Morrison. This is fantastic -- one of my favourite writing-focused books I've read for a while. I strongly recommend it.

This has had me thinking (more than usual) about design and pattern in *games* narrative. I have already been preoccupied by some of the ways in which games lacks the affordances of writing in other mediums. A lot of core dramatic techniques that we take as given in those require intentional design choices to show up in games.

A big one is the tendency for games to use contiguous time -- with the player not breaking continuity of experience with the character they are playing (not just in time, that, but perspective overall). *Meander, Spiral, Explode* contrasts 'scenic time' (time unfolds proportionately on the page with the speed of time passing in the story world), 'summary' (the page affords proportionally less space on the page to the events taking place in the story world -- an afternoon passing in a sentence, for instance), and 'dilation' (a lot of space on the page proportionate to time elapsing in the story world -- a frozen moment).

Games most often seem to unfold in 'scenic time' -- or at least, the speed at which time passes in the presentation to the player remains consistently proportionate to time unfolding in the story world, certainly as far as the narrative is concerned. We might show some short of summary or shortcut, but most often when the player character is also experiencing that in the world, e.g. by sleeping or waiting. That's not quite summary as it appears in prose, in terms of effect, and the proportion of passing times feels consistent there, to me.

(It is more complicated than that -- time between plot beats can be wildly long or short, depending on how long a player delays a given objective. But I think, generally speaking, *as far as the narrative is concerned*, those tend not to be significant.)

Even the basic notion of having *scene*, a given in most other forms of dramatic writing, in games only arise out of specific narrative design choices. They might just not be in the envelope for a given game, in which case, a lot of assumptions and advice about writing go out the window! For instance: the notion of tight framing -- jumping into a scene as late as possible, and cutting as early as possible. Even the notion of cutting!

(I said 'most other forms of dramatic writing' -- I'd perhaps flip that to say 'not all games seek to be dramatic writing' to begin with, and are in fact Something Else, whereas dramatic writing tends to be the default state for a lot of other mediums that look somewhat similar at a glance -- TV, film, novels, theatre, etc. It becomes a problem when your default assumption is that games *are* dramatic writing and you use lenses and tools for your writing that are rooted in *dramatic* writing specifically.)

There are, pretty obviously, examples for all of the above where games *absolutely* have those affordances. A game that incorporates prose writing has access to many of the affordances of prose, of course. But rather than disproving it, I think that *is* my point -- games have access to these only as a result of design choices; in other mediums, they are the default position.

I think games writing is, if it has any kind of default state, fractal. You are replicating the same structures at multiple scales. Telling many stories that all tell one story.

This is the root, in my mind, of why games treats narrative design as a (somewhat) distinct and specialised discipline, in a way that other mediums don't. Other mediums have a strong default set of design choices (so strongly that they are often not perceived as design choices at all), and don't deviate from them without good reason. As far as games have *any* kind of default, it's a weak one; you're not quite figuring things out from scratch every time, but there are design decisions that *need* to be made (separate from the story design decisions required of all comparable writing), which benefits from specialised knowledge.

Then, in the writing itself, you've got to understand what you're working with this tim around -- the lenses and tools that you need to use for this specific project. And here, a toolbox geared solely around dramatic writing may work against you more than for you. (And I think this encapsulates the major stumbling block for non-games writers picking up games projects. You can be the best at dramatic writing that there is, but those might not be the tools you actually need here. And the real arse of it is when *that isn't obvious*, so you don't know there's a problem to disentangle.)

(The original thought that inspired this wander was about economy in writing. I learned to write through short fiction and games -- two forms that really emphasise *economy* in how much you are writing. Write short, okay? It's something I have to unlearn a bit when thinking about other things, e.g. long-form prose -- where brevity isn't necessarily the goal.

Coming from that starting point, I have internalised thinking of economy in writing as a strict virtue -- which it isn't. There are all kinds of effects that contraindicate economy that are valid and good. Prose can be meandering or all the rest and still very good. One of the reasons this doesn't tend to work in commercial games is that, in those mediums, *the writing isn't competing against other elements of the work*. That's a constant tradeoff in games -- what else is the player doing? (which means you can't rely on the writing having their full attention), and what else do they *want to do?* (are you just holding them up from getting on with the next level, which is what they really want). Which means you need to think about economy of writing as part of building the desired player experience. (And recognise this continually when in might actually be *faster* to write more.)

(Which is to to say that in other mediums the work as a whole doesn't have to compete to hold the audience's attention -- it does. It's just that the work doesn't have to balance how it competes with *other aspects of itself* for their attention.))

New rule of thumb for these posts -- when I start double-nesting parentheses, it's time to stop.

Falling back on the fundamentals

A nice reminder of the importance of some of the fundamentals of the work. I'd been struggling with a little with some chunks of writing, for various reasons that I won't go into. But, I managed to turn out something, and each section definitely needed work, but the nature of the thing was such that my usual, higher-level lens and filters weren't really applicable. I didn't have a clear pathway to making it better.

Two things that I'm not entirely rigid about these days but which always help -- reading the text aloud, and Procrustean cutting.

I think about rhythm a lot when reading and writing, so reading things aloud really helps me zero in on what's working and what's not. I get about 90% of this just from reading things properly in my head, but there's nothing like a forcing function to really make sure.

Cutting text down, especially in games, is also so important and powerful. Working on The Last Clockwinder, I had to cut the script in half, then in half again. It's amazing how sharp you can make things when you break through the boundaries of what's really necessary. I'm naturally quite concise and sharp, I think, but there's a huge difference between one's baseline writing and what happens when you make yourself cut away more than you thiunk you can.

I use a heuristic of 20%. Cut 20% of the words of a given section. I rarely do this exercise explicitly, any more, but it never fails to improve a piece of text. I try not to weasel out of it, unless I'm certain I can't take anything more away without breaking something fundamentally important about it.

Problem Solving -- Making Two Birds Crash Into Each Other

One of my favourite things to do during the revisions process is figuring out how to solve problems with other problems (or, certainly 'to collapse two problems so that they can share one solution'). This is partly born of laziness, but it's also really efficiency (isn't all laziness really just efficiency?*). With limited time and energy to spend on revisions, especially in a commercial writing pipeline, you're already in the business of prioritising fixes and deciding what's 'good enough', so anything that lets you do more with those constrained resources is good. (It's not so much killing two birds with one stone as making two birds crash into each other.)

In something I'm working on at the moment, one of the big early scenes had -- or perhaps was -- a big pacing problem. It did not advance the story sufficiently relative to the space it was occupying/what it was demanding from the audience. At the same time, to my reading, people would be reaching the mid-point of the story with a shaky grasp of an important character. An unclear understanding of why he was the way he was, leading to -- most probably -- being emotionally underinvested in what happened to him and significantly undermining the later parts of the story (which were largely fine on their own merits).

My answer was to basically gut large parts of that early scene, keeping the core structure of it, but realigning it to be more about getting angles on that character, and trying to create some stronger, quieter emotional moments amid everything else.

If you looked at that scene on a plotting sheet, it would still largely be doing the same thing in terms of moving the story forward in a macro sense, but the focus of its constituent parts had changed a lot.

That's often what these sort of consolidated changes end up being for me -- throwing something out and realigning the purpose of a moment or scene or concept in the service of some other part of the story. This is one reason that the revisions phase feels much better to me -- the picture of the whole has emerged, and it's much easier to make decisions that converge on that. It can be plot or character or aspect, or just aesthetic details that didn't become concrete until later in drafting -- but this is the stage where everything starts to knit together, like feathers on a pigeon.

---

*No.

Metamanagement: more of everything you mean to do, less of everything else

Part one of the Narrative Hyperobject is 'Metamanagement' which is my needlessly fancy way of saying 'the bit the contextualises all the other bits for me'. The process as a whole is a set of phases any creative project or deliverable I've worked on seems to have gone through.

The boundaries between those phases are permeable and my divisions of them somewhat arbitrary, but these are the ways in which it has made sense for me to chunk up my tools and thinking.

Those phases, then, are:

• CONCEPTING/IDEATION
• DEVELOPING
• BREAKING
• DRAFTING
• REVISING
• FEEDBACK

This is not linear. One does not start at the top, 'concept' to completion, then advance. It's looping and self-referential. Sometimes you have to step backwards or reach ahead. Moving back to a previous phase with new inputs. But there's a notional trend line that tells me where, really, I am with a given piece of work at any given moment, and thus which hat I need to be wearing. I have, it seems, a lot of hats, and many need to be stacked on top of one another.

If I were to make a heat-map of the phases, the bulk of time and energy would be spent around BREAKING and DRAFTING. They also often end up being the 'least fun bits' in terms of effort expended to positive feeling about self and work. But they're trunk-legged and necessary.

Each of these phases has a smattering of tools and techniques I find useful to apply, plus a bunch of lenses and filters I use to squint at things and try to diagnose problems and either pre-empt them emerging at a later phase, or fix something that's already manifest.

A lot of this division also represents a form of psychological trickery. Or possibly sensible expectation management. I know what things should feel or look like at a given phase, which has the benefit of making it easier to handwave a way (to myself) the bits that still feel rubbish or wonky or worrying because it's not the time for figuring that stuff out yet.

I suppose all of this comes down to the general maxim I realise I try to bring to everything, which is trying to do more of what you're meaning to do and less of everything that you're not meaning to do. Which includes drawing boxes and boundaries round things you will mean to do (and need to), but don't mean to do just yet. Something can be important without being important yet, and if you try to solve all of the problems at the same time, you don't solve anything.

The Narrative Hyperobject and exploding your own head

#narrativetoolbox #narrativehyperobject

Morven looked her up and down. “You haven’t asked the question yet.”

“What question?”

“Well, different people ask it differently. I figure you don’t make it this far without being at least a little open minded, but most folk can't just reboot their worldview at the drop of a hat. So even though the company makes no bones about what it does, and even though they take you through all this in orientation, people always have to ask. They can't help themselves."

"Ask what?"

"Is this magic shit for real?"

Nomi frowned. “Well, of course it is.”

“That simple, huh?”

“CCI is a three-billion-dollar business. You don’t get that big without having something to sell.”

Morven snorted. "Then I've got a bridge you might be interested in."

---

I have a long-neglected novel kicking around that's about 30% through a major redraft. One day, I will get back to it, but realistically, that will not be for a long while.

The central conceit is 'magic is real, magic has always been real, and Silicon Valley has finally gotten ahold of it and is selling it as a service'. You can probably imagine how I'd feel about that.

Magic in the book, at least at time of writing this, is a vastly complex mental contortion, pulling energy from Elsewhere and constructing a sprawling mental model to manage and direct that flow to produce effects in the physical world. 'Props' help -- physical artefacts or magic circles that represent tangible analogues to elements of the model. But, fundamentally, a practitioner has to build, hold, and manipulate some hideously complex system in their mind, without screwing it up and exploding their own head.

(One of my rough sketches for this idea was: if the Craft Sequence is 'what if magic were law?', this is 'what if magic were architecture?'.)

I bring this up for no reason that really has anything to do with the book. I made the connection because I felt like I reached this point with my own mental model of 'how writing works' (which is, in fact to say 'how my writing works'). I had so many scattered pieces of insight and tools and lens and a sense of process that I just stopped being able to hold it all in my head at once. Which meant I wrote it down.

Obsidian was great for this, actually -- building a navigable, wiki-style map of my writing process, with all the little nooks and crannies to stash 'sometimes advice' without getting in the way of a clear process. Now, I literally walk through it whenever I'm working on something, recognising the step between phases and reading the traveller's notes I have written to myself.

I introduce this concept here because I might talk about various bits and pieces of it in future shards. Hopefully without exploding my own head.

Anyway, here's an unpolished quote-dump from the WIP manuscript which I haven't touched since squints May last year.

---

The walls, floor, and ceiling of Remote Viewing Suite 3 were polished obsidian. Vast panels of the stuff, unbroken except for some clever affordances to allow the door to open, and sixteen recesses where shard-like slivers of the rock had been meticulously cut out and extracted.

It must have cost an unthinkably large amount of money, and CCI had four others just like it. Every time Morven came into one of the rooms, she couldn’t help but feel genuine awe that people had been able to make one of these – mixed with the pit-of-the-stomach disgust that came with understanding the social politics that meant anyone could afford to.

Combine that with what these rooms were used for, and she pretty much wanted to throw up every time she stepped inside. Vertigo induced by intersecting ley-lines of capitalism.

Morven placed four candles on the floor, lit them, then closed the door. The polished black glass cast cascading reflections. It didn’t magnify the dim light of the candles as much as refract them into infinity, a thousand points of light insignificant against a vast, swallowing blackness. Morven was surrounded by uncountable images of herself. In the unbounded space of the viewing room, her red hair was black, her normally pale skin dark. The expressions that looked back at her were not kind. She looked away reflexively.

She laid a thick aluminium bar in the middle of the candles and painted a trail of silver-infused ink to connect candles and bar. Remote viewing over any distance requires intense amounts of energy, even if you were just doing it through the compact scrying mirror that traditional practitioners usually preferred. Powering a whole room was a different order of magnitude altogether. These items were Morven’s safety valve. Next to it, she set a handheld audio recorder she’d checked out from the desk when she’d turned over her bag, which contained all her electronics.

...

Morven marked out a set of geometric glyphs on the wall in the same silvered ink. She took her time. Normally, she’d be building her mental model while she laid in the physical geometry, slowly gathering the energy she needed for the working, rather than performing a big draw all at once, but the viewing suites required such a high throughput of energy that she’d have to start big, and it wasn’t worth the risk of starting that until everything was set up.

She settled herself in the middle of the room, candle circle on her right, recorder close at hand to her left, and checked everything one last time. Satisfied with the physical arrangements, she closed her eyes and began to focus. She spent a few minutes just breathing, clearing her head of anything outside of the room. Then, she began laying down the foundations of the working’s mental model.

She reached out with her consciousness, and in her mind’s eye, she saw the great wilds of energy swirling around in what she had come to call ‘infinite arcane space’. She represented herself as a tiny dot, insignificant against the roiling storms, but still a gate through which that power could be drawn.

In her mind, she wove together an architecture of silver conduits that would haul in the energy, with locks and irises and channels that would direct and control that flow. She built great sweeping pools to hold the energy and distribute it wherever she needed. The whole form stood in her mind, a complex, revolving pattern aligned with her intent. She touched each element in turn, and then, finally, she was ready to begin.

Slowly, she opened the floodgates.

The charge rushed into Morven’s mind, so quickly at first that it threatened to overrun her model, to drown out her control and crash through her physical form and shatter it like glass. She breathed, refreshing her mental image and relaxing, allowing the energy to pour into the great pools. They filled quickly, and her brain began to itch, aching to release the power building there.

She tested her insurance policy. With her eyes still closed, she opened her connection to the candle circle, sending the power down through the silvered ink at her feet. Through her eyelids, candles erupted with violent fire, flare-bright. The first time she’d tried that in a viewing suite, her eyes had been open, and she’d almost killed herself. The mirrored space had made the light dazzlingly bright, enough of a shock to threaten the integrity of the model in her head.

The power-sink worked, the metal bar warming and thrumming with energy. If things started to spin out of control, she’d have somewhere to dump the power aside from her own limbic system. She throttled the connection, and the candles dimmed, the excess energy she’d dumped there escaping as heat and light.

Morven reached out to close her connection to infinite arcane space, to stem the influx of power, but the reservoirs were filling too swiftly. It was time to put the gathered power to work.

She opened her eyes and shunted the energy towards its real purpose – the silver glyphs on the glass all around her. It spidered out from the marks over the surface of the obsidian, a spreading cloud of inky black erasing the reflections until Morven seemed to float, suspended in a void.

She took a breath.

Across the city, the first set of sibling shards – pieces cut from the obsidian of this room and planted on-location by CCI field staff – began to vibrate. There was a set of these out there for each of today’s assignments, forming a sympathetic connection which Morven could exploit to focus her working.

Black gave way to bright white and then resolved into an image: an office building seen from above – a hawk’s-eye-view from just below the clouds, rendered in full 720 degree panorama over the entire room. Morven hovered in space above a city block, brushing aside a small revolt as her eyes and inner ear fought over conflicting information.

She revolved the model in her mind, as if the whole thing were mounted on a gimbal, and the world shifted in response. She was a disembodied eye floating in space, an entity of air and vision, able to move and observe as she chose – at least within the boundaries created by the sibling shards. She groped to her side, hit the ‘record’ button, and began narrating what she saw with the clinical boredom of a dentist or mortician.

Once the recorder was set, she let the last vestiges of being a body in a room melt away. She took a moment, revelling in the feeling of flight – of unfettered movement through air. She descended, sliding unresisted and unseen through the ceiling of the office block, clipping through the ducts and HVAC conduits, until she was on the top floor that housed the boardroom and executive offices.

Then, she went to work.

Know, don't tell

Blogs still somewhat erratic while I'm balancing various things. An idle thought, today, on the subject of preserving mystery while avoiding vagueness or unspecificity.

Know, don't tell.

Yes, it's cute, after that oft-misinterpreted writing truism. But I think it's a useful thing to remember. You don't have to explain everything on the page -- it's probably boring if you do. But you should know the answers (or at least one reasonable version of the answers). If you don't have that, what you show in the work is going to hang together less well and by generically 'mysterious' without feeling like it has meat behind it.

Unexplained things can feel deep, iceberg-like. Or they can feel weightless and insubstantial.

So, know what you're on about. And then hoard that information like a dragon.

Breaking and drifting

I was sick last week, hence skipping a bunch of posts. I am now crosseyed from finishing up a draft of something, so this may be rambly and unfocused.

I do a lot of front-loaded work before approaching any piece of writing. If you want to use the traditional false dichotomy, I'm very much a plotter, not a pantser. (I struggle to imagine that anyone working a day job in games writing can really be a pantser in all contexts, given the common requirements of brief-driven narrative, but that's an idle thought.)

By the time I start drafting in earnest, I should -- in theory -- already have produced one or more detailed breakdowns of what I'll be writing. Specifically, breaking down plot, story, and scene information into the form-specific narrative units I'm working with. For the Fallen London content I've been working on today, for instance, I produced a spreadsheet containing the various storylets and branches, with details of the narrative function each, plus notes on what mechanically it would need to do.

I usually, at this point, feel like I have essentially written the story, but for the actual 'getting words down' bit. That's partly a false feeling -- I haven't, in fact, written any of the story yet in terms of visible final output. But it is also partly true, because the work of solving those narrative problems and proving that the whole thing can exist, theoretically, and occupy the shape it's meant to, is a big part of the intellectual work. I'm even able to pinpoint gaps or redundancies across the units and adjust accordingly, before having set down words in earnest.

The balance for me is in working out what work should be front-loaded like this, and what can't be. You could, in theory, map out everything, in perfect detail, without ever writing a word of final-output content. But at that point, you may as well just be writing the story, so get on with it.

The exact point of diminishing returns generally depends on the complexity and scale of the project. For instance, I don't need to spend several days breaking a spreadsheet if the final output is intended to be simple, short, and sweet -- I can probably just sketch some scrappy points out on paper and go. But even with the most complex projects -- where there are lots of moving parts and where you'd better know how those parts are going to move ahead of time, lest you decapitate someone important -- there's only so much you can accomplish in the planning stages. There are certain things that only become apparent through the actual writing -- things that you thought would work that don't; things that are way better than what you came up with that only became manifest when you're down in the weeds. The map is not the territory; it is an abstraction and simplification. If the map were detailed enough to fully describe the territory, it would just be the territory.

To put it another way: the planning stages are about sketching and designing the narrative, but there are always exigencies that present themselves in execution that no sketch can capture. At some point, you're better off just getting on with it and seeing what breaks rather than trying to design something that won't break to begin with (because: you can't).

This was all sparked by thinking about scene framing. I might go into more detail about that another time, but when I'm breaking stories now, I spend a lot of time thinking about scene framing: Where is it set? What's happening -- especially outside of the mainline story beats? Where do the audience and the characters enter the scene? What do we find when we arrive? These are all ways of having a scene do more work, focusing it, putting pressure on the characters to make things less boring, and generally sharpening the writing and storytelling. Understanding the high-level function and effect of the scene is one thing, but you can fix -- or improve -- a lot by reconsidering the framing. So I try to nail down that in the breaking stage.

BUT things are always different when I sit down to write a scene. There's the matter of 'drift' -- it might be days or weeks since I broke the scene originally, and I don't have the same imagination of it loaded so readily in-memory. It's important to recapitulate what it's meant to be doing. But it's one thing to have planned myself a good location setting for a scene when breaking the story. It's another to conjure a clear mental picture of a physical space to contain an action scene, for instance. I could do all that work with the rest of the breaking. But that's a level of vividness that's hard to record, and most useful when I'm ready to get the words down, so it would probably be wasted effort.

Being messy on paper

I write a lot of things longhand these days. I've found that, over the past year and a bit, the kind of (games) projects I've been working on have benefited from starting in very rough form for draft content.

Starting on pen and paper gives everything a 'rougher' feel. I often refer to it as 'implicit permission to be shit'. The output doesn't look anything like a finished draft. It has no pretences. You can scribble things out, insert words, draw arrows and lines to reroute meaning.

Technically, you can do most of the same sort of thing on a screen. But I find that, in addition to the implicit sense of 'this should be better because it looks more presentable', typing directly into a word processing program forces my brain to work more linearly. In Notepad++, for instance, I do find it reasonably easy to 'explode' a paragraph, throwing down some disjointed fragments and stitching them together. Which is fine if I have a strong handle on what I'm trying to say and the order in which I want to say it, but that depends on the level of organisational complexity for the writing and the amount of existing work I've done on that when breaking a story.

Also, if you're working on paper, you inevitably have to type it up if it's going to be usable. Which bakes a light-but-mandatory improvement pass into the process. This, like the other factors, are mostly psychological props, but they are important onces.

I've been thinking about this more this week. In theory, it does take a bit longer to get to usable draft content this way, since you're writing it out at least twice to begin with. The gamble is over whether generating raw material more quickly because you're getting out of your own way outstrips that doubling up.

Often, for me, it does. But I was curious about when that stopped applying. I can't really imagine writing a whole dang book this way, for instance. Which had me asking: is this a thing that works for me in games and not elsewhere? Or are there other conditions which make this the more or less effective approach.

In my current draft (still games), as I've moved into the middle of the piece, I've experimented with going back to typing-first. And that's actually been okay! I've still needed to work out some pieces on paper (usually the flow of what's happening and in what order -- what information does it need to convey, and how do we progress between the required start state and the necessary end state for onward flow to make sense -- although also filling in details like scene framing can be what's missing), but those parts have been more bare-bones, and I've been able to turn out quick first drafts directly in a text editor (and definitely more quickly than typing it out twice).

My current working theory is that the paper-draft approach is most useful in a few situations:

• When you're trying to find your way into a new piece of material
• When the content is especially 'bitty' e.g. several storylets that all represent separate slices of different scenes, rather than something more contiguous. This is definitely a common one in Fallen London, where you might be putting together a mini scene that's no more than a single storylet or branch.
• When you're stuck for some nebulous reason. There are definitely other tools that help 'unstick' me, and it usually comes down to looking back to purpose and effect or some aspect of scene framing/the place of this element in the overall story -- but sometimes the best thing is just to 'get writing' by throwing a bunch of bad words down, and then parleying them into better words, or using them as diagnostic inputs to the other tools.

Which means that, the more settled one is with a project or the more contiguous a project's narrative units are, the less useful this approach likely is for me.

Breaking the story

Notes from a work in progress. Might not be very coherent, as I suspect yesterday's wasn't, as I'm running on a frustrating sleep deficit and words are much harder than usual.

I'm working up a new story from a bullet-point outline. The outline details backstory and 'forestory' i.e. the events that I was expecting to happen 'on the page'. In my own... I guess I'd call it a 'personal writing manual', I break the writing process into five stages: Concepting, Development, Breaking, Writing, Revising, and Feedback. It's not actually a linear process that advances between those phases, but they represent the broad trajectory of a piece of work, and each have different lenses and techniques that are helpful.

Bullet-point outlining is one of my breaking tools. It's where I take all the information from Concepting and Developing and trying to organise it into something the shape of a story. It forces me to get somewhat structural and specific, and start spotting gaps or things where I'm vague. It's still, though, somewhat loose.

Where I've progressed from there today, and what I really consider 'breaking' the story: I started by breaking it into scenes (dramatic units, if you will). Some of this is intuitive, in that elements in the forestory go together in sequence with logical breaks. But it also means thinking about backstory and where things get surfaced, specifically (where they need to be at all).

For each scene, I broke out Content, Effect, Framing and, because this is a video game, Verbs.

Concept: What is this scene trying to accomplish? What information does it need to convey? What, essentially, is its function in the narrative?

Effect: What do I want this to achieve stylistically? How do I want it to reach the audience? How do I want them to feel? Chaotic and action-packed and high-stakes, or subtler, creepier, etc.

Framing: What's the in-fiction context to this scene? Where does it take place, what are the characters doing, when do we come into and leave this scene? This can just be a way of thinking about 'cool stuff' to get into the story, but it's also an opportunity to support other aspects of the narrative. If I'm worried about space to convey everything in Concept, can I bake something into the framing? Can I just better support things by using scene-framing?

Verbs: What is the player actually going to do? Ideally this is super-specific and potentially unusual, but if nothing else, it's a forcing function to ensure that they are doing something and not just talking or passively receiving information.

Once I'd got all this down and eyeballed it till it just about makes sense, I moved on to breaking into form-specific units. In this case, that meant using a spreadsheet, mapping those scenes onto the specific units of the game. Translating from a dramatic layer to how this actually works 'on the page' [screen], and adapting accordingly.

I don't quite do Concept/Effect/Framing/Verbs with each of these. That would take ages and have fairly low returns. But, I refer back to the scene-level CEFV when constructing, and try to mark up each unit with what information it's conveying or how it's moving the story forward (and if it isn't doing those things, I capture what its function is). It's a good forcing function to be super clear about what I'm trying to do, and spot duplication, wishy-washy non-specificity, and gaps where more is needed.

Working back through this list, I looked for opportunities to collapse or eliminate elements with a view to the overall 'weight' of the story. Sometimes, units or beats end up doubling up, or are better collapsed into one another. Other times, it's the reverse, and things need more room to breathe/I anticipate needing more space to do what I need to with the writing. Generally, though, I'm keeping tabs on the issues that are sticking out to me while stretching the skin of the story over some bones, and trying to resolve what I can at this stage.

It's also important to compare the final result to the aspirations for the story from the previous stages of the process. Some things may change because the ideas just don't survive contact with applied narrative. Other things may just have slipped my mind or have been mistakenly assumed.

This is one of the most fun (and tricky) bits of the writing process for me. It's where I feel like I'm doing most of the real work, and it's looking to snap everything together nicely so that first-drafting doesn't feel too painful. It's where, for a little while, everything feels like it actually might work.

For all this, you can't actually write the story before you've written it. This is all just trying to make that work as direct and enjoyable as possible. And then you need to write fast.

A notes from the revisions desk

No further resketch today; I was doing some work on a short fiction piece last night and briefly wanted to document my process.

• This is the same 'space wizards' piece I was talking about back in Oblique Reflections on a WIP Short Story. Specifically, I was working on point 5: Thematics.
• The story wasn't clicking for me. It was fine, but felt like a Set of Neat Things that Happened, or perhaps some fun action figures to play with, rather than something that was singing.
• Specifically, there was a disconnection between the main character and the events -- she was a bit 'along for the ride', I don't think the basis for her decisions were clear enough, and the ending didn't feel like a kind of inevitability when you got there.
• I think it just about worked, but I wanted it to do more than just 'work', hah.
• So I reworked some aspects of the MC's background. Not radically, to be honest -- mostly deepening/expanding on some threads that had come out while writing. This was 'off the page', in a notebook, just to figure things out.
• This also meant connecting more specifically with something else I was snagging on: a lack of clarity over what the story was really about, in terms of it's thematic core.
• On reflection, due to the deuteragonist and the story that unfolds, I realised it was really about the shapes the world fashions us into, and what it means to reject that.
• Specifically, the secondary character is a kind of weapon. Circumstances and the world have explicitly fashioned her as a weapon, and doesn't particularly want to be one.
• The main character's own background and arc (such as there was one) didn't really snick together with that. So I did the above to find ways that she could fit into place with that. How her own story was similar to and different from this other character's, in a way that would make sense of their relationship in the story.
• In some ways, it's less about making the MC's story connect with that other character's, and more about making it link back to the piece's thematic core. It just happens that the thematic core builds on this other character's story.
• Having figured out that in the abstract, I tried to block out some specific ways I could show that on the page without massive rewriting. There are some lighter options like background or 'cosmetic' details which point to it. Framing scenes in ways that help reveal it. And dramatising it through existing or new scenes.
• From this, I figured out a new scene that I think will really strengthen the piece and solve a separate pacing issue. (Ignoring for a moment that its wordcount is already well over where I want it to be.)
• But I want to get a lot of this information right up front for the reader, and this new scene wouldn't fit there. (Well, it could, but I think it would wreck momentum and pacing while undermining the value of the new scene.)
• So I broke out the current first scene (which I also thought wasn't pulling its weight and had flagged to collapse anyway) into its key functional points (starting to think in terms of Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units|sequences as narrative units), married that to the list of new thing I was hoping to accomplish and surface about the main character and the stakes for her, then reworked the scene.
• This meant some new writing and throwing some stuff out, but not too much.
• Now, I need to type that up and fettle it a little, before moving on to the next problem. I'm trying to avoid solutions that don't require lots of writing generation, particularly when I'm anticipating having to cut and throw out a bunch anyway, but this felt like the right move.
• I'll eventually have to simmer everything down a whole bunch. It's knocking on 6,000 words without the whole new scene, either. There's a bunch of loredumping I know can be thrown out, but if I want this thing to be good and also hopefully saleable, I want that wordcount to come down notably.

Layers of Craft

Late blog today. I blame the promised storm not arriving yet plus the fact that I'm on Day 1 of ditching caffeine for a month. I spent all my energy credits for the day already.

Thursday: Thinking out loud about narrative units
Friday: Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units

I realised today that my budding division there -- between i) Dramatic Units, ii) Form-Specific Units, and iii) Atomic Units -- maps loosely to something else I've had in my head a long while. Writing as a craft is a gestalt of many different skills -- broadened further by the way it plays in the tidepools of different forms. Good writers are good at lots of different things, and have suitable levels of proficiency in the various elements -- but they're not equally good at all things. You need to be good at at least a few things and know how it all fits together, but you can suck at a bunch of craft-related stuff and still be a good writer. (Though it helps a lot if you know where your balance of strengths lie and choose projects that fit that. )

You can't really separate all those different seams out, but you can loosely group them in a useful way. I've tended to think of that craft into three major 'chunks':

• Devising stories. The nebulous craft of 'worldbuilding', having interesting ideas, coming up with interesting characters. Sharpening all of that until you've got something worth telling.
• Storytelling -- in the sense of knowing how to structure and present your story. Crafting good scenes, building out a plot, knowing what needs to happen on the page and what doesn't. Twists, turns, interesting emotional stakes.
• Getting good words down. What I tend to call 'nuts and bolts' writing. Word choice, clarity and grammar, filigree and ornamentation, imagery, and the like. The business of words and sentences, above all.

So, you need to be able to do all of that at least functionally to get anywhere. (Although -- perhaps not even that if you're just working to brief. That can shortcut at least some chunks of it.) But you don't need to do all of it equally well. For me, I think the third type, the craft of words, was the thing I was best at early. Which is deceptive, because it made me think I could write far better than I actually could in practice, in the sense of writing that encompasses all of these groups. But turning a good phrase can only get you so far. I haven't actually gone back and re-read any of my many draft stories from a decade ago, but this is the problem I remember being plagued with and lacking the tools to fix.

I've seen plenty of work that is very pedestrian in its nuts and bolts writing, but sings in the ideas and construction -- it's never felt like a deficiency. And the inverse -- I've read work that's beautiful but at the structural level unremarkable or 'badly functional'. Which isn't always a death kneel either, though I'll admit that it's less often to my tastes.

'Nuts and bolts' writing can seem to matter disproportionately, because it's often one of the easier things to evaluate -- you can get to grips with it quickly in someone else's work. Though, that said, I think it's often a reasonable proxy for the overall quality when evaluating someone's work, if it just doesn't land right for me at that level.

I consider nuts and bolts writing the easiest thing to get better at, but that may just be because I had a historically stronger grasp of it myself. (Though there's certainly some concrete elements to that, too -- you can learn digestible rules and styles, and you can iterate quicker than the other categories.)

I think people from outside the discipline overindex on the first and the last groups when thinking about what 'writing' is. There's a tendency to think of writing as 'just' the last bit. There's also this myth that it's just about coming up with loose, exciting ideas. This plays into weird-and-amusing-but-also-not-amusing anecdotes about people coming to writers with their awesome idea, and they'll magnanimously allow the writer to use their idea and split the proceeds. Ideas aren't actually worthless, and truly good ideas are rare enough to be worth treasuring, but they sure as heck ain't the bulk of the craft, either.

(Actually, I'll posit that the skillful part of 'ideas' part of the writing craft is more centred around forcing the generation of decent ideas. Having really good ideas come to you out of the blue is great, though the number of times I've found that powerfully useful in practice is small. Better still is the ability to come up with the ideas you need right now and make them work for you.)

In any case, given this mental division of the craft that's long existed in my head, my nascent taxonomy of narrative units probably isn't surprising.

A closing aside: this inclination over the past few posts to respond to my own previous post in some way has given me a notion. One thing I'll try in a forthcoming week is to write the same blog post over five days. More specifically: drafting something loose and exploratory, then aiming to cover the same ground in the post the next day. And so on for the rest of the week. It'Ss not about revising the previous post as much as rewriting it (and stealing chunks from it if needed) to try to sharpen it and see what falls out of my head when doing this. Sketching and resketching./

Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units

Today, I'm trying to do some resketching of yesterday's shard.

Terms

Form. Refers to the broad shape of a piece of work. This can be at the macro level of 'video game', 'stage play', 'novel', etc., or some of the subdivisions within those e.g. 'first-person shooter', 'TV episode', or 'one-woman show'. There are obviously distinctions between those, but the slight squishiness of the term is in itself useful.

Medium. Perversely, I'm going to use this to refer to the means by which written material is present. NOT in the sense of narrative units -- that comes later. But in the sense of 'an intervening substance' the word implies at its root. Prose is a medium to me. As is dialogue (spoken) and dialogue (displayed), or images and set dressing in the story-world. A video game can use prose, and so can a novel. So, medium and form are distinct.

Narrative Unit. Generally, 'the bits you can break the narrative into'. This is the bit that stands well for me from yesterday. Narrative units are things you can generally poke at when writing to interrogate specific information/content/function and effect in terms of how you want it to reach the audience. Specifically:

Dramatic Units: Scenes, acts, plot beats, and the like. Anything that can be used to carve up a story irrespective of its form or medium.

Form-specific units: Commonly used chunking in the specific form you're working. Comic pages, novel chapters, audiologs, in-game texts, storylets, etc.

Atomic medium units: For prose, words, sentences, paragraphs. For dialogue, mostly lines. Probably gets a lot squishier as you branch into other mediums.

The taxonomy here is still hideous and horrible, but it's still one million degrees in here, so that's a 'fix it later' problem.

So, the issue I was talking about with prose yesterday is that I have a good handle (I hope...) on the atomic medium units of prose as well as the dramatic units, but less on the form-specific units.

I think (in yet another terrible name-collision) that 'beats' is really what I'm looking for here. Not so much in the 'plot beat' sense, though also yes -- but in the mode of a... I guess unit of timing. This happens. Then this happens. And this happens. If you described the prose in highly simplified but exhaustive bullet points, they're all the things you couldn't leave out.

And yes, these really occur everywhere, they're kinda an atomic medium unit in some ways, EXCEPT I don't think they're strictly tied to medium or form. Nor, strictly, do they sit in 'dramatic units' since they're a writing tool to me rather than a breaking tool.

Sigh. I think I just described something not actually captured in my taxonomy. Well, this is still a work in progress, I guess.

Thinking out loud about narrative units

Yesterday, I touched on narrative units in writing, and how I found games a lot easier on that front than prose. I'm going to try to poke at that idea a little more here. To reiterate the nature of this blog: this is intended to be a messy thought sketch where I'm thinking on the page and trying to move closer to a thought, rather than something declarative and pre-baked.

I'm reasonably certain I got the term 'narrative units' from Hannah Nicklin's Writing for Games, which is singularly fantastic. Without checking back, I can't be sure, and I might have come across it somewhere previous to that, but credit where it's almost definitely due as it's super helpful in exploring this concept.

So narrative units are a slightly squishy concept, but I'd define them as the divisible pieces of writing or narrative that constitute 'a work'. What constitutes a 'unit' to me varies depending on the precise depth in which you're looking and your current frame of reference. There are a few larger categories which occur to me offhand:

Dramatic units like scenes, acts, even broader plot beats.

Form-specific units like storylets, comic pages and panels, audiologs, barks, in-game lore texts, chapters.

Atomic units like lines of dialogue, words, sentences, paragraphs.

Dramatic units I think are broadly applicable everywhere. They're fairly high-level, and refer to more generalised narrative concepts that will apply most of the time regardless of the form in which you're working.

'Form' is another word I've been using heavily since reading Nicklin's book. I think it's usefully more specific than 'medium', though, looking back to refresh my memory, it's more malleable:

‘Form’ might feel a little woolly as a definitional term at this point. Sometimes I’ve used it to describe what I’ve also called’ structure’ (the form a story takes), and also the formal expectations of the medium and of genre. That’s okay though, because ‘form’ is a word that simply means the ‘shape’ of something - the shape we design or a set of expectations about how things are usually shaped.

The meaning of 'form’ is modified by context – structural form, media form, genre form. I’ve touched on ‘form-driven design/storytelling’ as a kind of approach too – using the shape of structure, genre, or medium to underline or contrast with the content. Elements of form in games are ways the storytelling is shaped by the writer, the design, the gameplay, and by the player. These elements include:

So, to clarify, I'm currently using the word 'form' to distinguish between, say, video games, interactive fiction, TV, novels, etc. -- what are often called 'mediums'. I'm already coming to regret this terminology, but that's for me to fix in a future post.

I'm now finding the need to distinguish slightly between form and... it's hard to put a term on it. There's a difference between a dialogue-based format vs prose-based one. Dialogue-based formats fit within a bunch of different forms -- (parts of) video games where words are written for VO, text-only dialogue (that's still not prose per se), theatrical scripts, film scripts, audio drama, etc. Those are different forms with a common format. Prose is also not a form per se. The forms could be personal essay, novel, short-story, video games that use in-game prose in some way, and so on -- each with their own affordances -- but there is still a commonality of prose behind them. Maybe this is where 'medium' is useful, in the physical sense of 'an intervening substance'. Yes, that feels right.

The form-specific units are usually key, because they bridge the gap between the more generalised dramatic units and the specific shape of the form you're working in. You could break a story entirely in dramatic units before even thinking about the form-specific ones. You might have an entire story worked out before even settling on a form through which to tell it! But there's then an additional breaking step to map the general dramatic units onto the form-specific ones.

The atomic units are more, for me, about the execution of very specific things. Pacing and flow within a scene. Just the right-feeling word choice. Rhythm and prosody. They're still connected to everything else, but they're a more granular part of the writing process.

All of the different units have stuff in common. The key things are that they generally seek to convey specific information (you could call this 'purpose' more broadly or 'content') and achieve specific effects for the audience. Whenever I'm struggling or need to force myself to be more specific, those are the two elements I fall back on for a given unit ('What is the actual purpose of this scene and how do I want it to make them feel.' 'What does this specific sentence need to convey to set up the next bit. What tone do I want it to set?'). That's the same when breaking the story in a dramatic context or when doing it for the form-specific units. But also at the atomic level -- when it's not working intuitively, interrogating the content and the effect work well for me.

(I would love to give some specific examples here, but it's 28 degrees in my office and I've been steaming like a ham all day.)

To the point from yesterday that inspired this post: I think with prose specifically, I have a fairly loose grasp on what the form-specific units are. Pages feel less meaningful in this context; chapters certainly are meaningful but are also too macro to stand alone for my purposes. Scenes could just stand as a form-specific unit rather than a dramatic one, but again that feels like muddying the distinctions a bit.

With games, the form-specific units are often very visible and legible (storylets! audiologs! barks!) -- often to the player directly, and certainly to the developer. With prose, I think they're less so.

Something for me to interrogate further, then, is the idea of something like 'sequences' or 'blocks' which represent a form-specific unit in prose as a thinking tool when writing and revising, to enable clarity of purpose and effect.

Write fast

A small correction from yesterday's post. I said 'not everything has to be optimised'. Olivia rightly yelled 'GEORGE ARE YOU OKAY'. I apologise for the error. What I meant to say was 'things should be optimised to their optimal point of optimisation and no further'

One thing I have to hold myself to when writing is: forward momentum. When I'm at the writing stage, no matter my reservations, it's better to keep trying to turn out a first draft and fix the problems later than tinker with the materials to try to 'get it right' first time. Usually, it's better for me to keep on truckin' and get through a rough version of everything so I can see how it all fits together and finesse the wrong bits. This works best when there's sufficient iteration time for big rewrites as well as just revision. (But also: one of the ways to make more time for rewriting is to write the first bit as fast and scrappily as you need.)

I find, though, that I have a tendency to 'figure out what's wrong' with the fundamentals while drafting, leading me to want to go back and work those out those kinks midway through. That's generally a false economy. Those things can almost always be fixed between drafts. In fact, they're often more easily fixed between drafts than in-flight. Sometimes, they might not turn out to be an issue at all -- or else my understanding of the issue will shift. So: better to press on, you can't polish a blank page, etc. etc.

Except, that's not always the case. Sometimes, there is something major wrong in the fundamentals that needs fixing to enable you to write better and more fluidly, and the correct thing is to pause and backstep through the process.

Which is immensely frustrating, because that means my brain is constantly trying to trick me into believing that this is one of those times when that's necessary (when it almost always isn't). And I can't shut that off by saying 'that's never the right thing to do', because... sometimes it is. It's the variable reinforcement problem.

Still, this almost always holds true for me, and there doesn't need to be a perfect answer. It's gratifying to recognise a problem before turning out a bunch of words that bakes in whatever assumptions might be shaky, but that sort of draft is rarely entirely wasted effort, either.

I'm better at writing first fast and scrappy in games stuff, I think because the narrative units tend to be more tightly defined at the point of drafting. Writing for (or in) a little box in a CMS makes it much easier for me to define function and effect, and just do that bad, then better, then decent. Prose shares some general narrative units (paragraphs, scenes, sentences, etc.), but for me the connective tissue of those tends to be much less crisp when drafting. That's partly a positive affordance of the form, one of the things that makes prose prose and lets you do all those lovely prosey things, and partly something that I find makes it harder for me to be as clear and intentional early on. Perhaps that's something to poke at more in future.

(There's a further distinction between 'prose as artistic form' and 'prose as medium'. 'Prose' can be a tool deployed in other context, like games, or the end in and of itself. Maybe this is where my thinking about narrative units needs to happen. The fundamental atomic units of prose (words, sentences, paragraphs) plus the general narrative units that apply to basically every form (like scenes) are not actually the narrative units of a prose-first form like a short story or novel. Pages don't quite apply there in the same way as a more formalist medium like comics, so... what is the shape of those prosey units?)

Being Creative Uphill

Some days, you've just got to make stuff even when you don't want to. I think this is the big difference that separates amateur and professional creative work.

Crucially, I'm adopting a distinction between 'professional' and 'amateur' which is not intended as a value judgement, but one that represents focus and key considerations. 'Professional', to me, means someone deriving a notable part of their income from the relevant work, who therefore have to bring some commercial considerations to how they go about it. That might be in terms of the actual output, e.g. 'this game needs to make money', or it can be about their direct relationship with the work, e.g. 'this is how I make my living; I need to produce work in a manner that supports that', or anything else along those lines.

(For me, it's both. I get paid for my work, and that matters to me, because that enables me to keep doing it. That was different as a freelancer than salaried in-house, but similar in each case. Many of the things I work on have their own commercial sensibilities which impact process and approach. There are things I work on that don't really conform to either of these; it's a range.)

A key difference to, say, writing for a living is that sometimes you just don't wanna. Or: your find your brain and/or body in a place that's not maximally conduicive to solving narrative problems or actually sitting down and getting down a bunch of words. This can be the case in any job. It's one of the reasons that I value structure and process so much (both narrative-specific, but also in how I work more generally): because they help me break things down into manageable chunks and push myself forward when I have to work 'uphill'.

(This is true in a different way of non-professional or not-for-hire work of course. I'm not suggesting that creative work is anything other than well, work, often hard. Doing it for yourself can sometimes be harder in that the lack of extrinsic pressure can make self-motivation more difficult. But the relationship between work and circumstances is, necessarily, different.)

When I find myself in this position, I'm grateful for being so structured -- that I think Narrative is process and process narrative, to refer back to a previous post. Or to have ways that remind me How to Write When You Can't.

Forcing Out Ideas

I read this Twitter thread and also this piece called 'The Creativity Faucet' on the same thing. (Both via Jack.) I have opinions.

• Short version for those not clicking through: it's an analogy for creative idea generation as a 'backed up' pipe. You have to pump through the 'wastewater' to get to the good stuff, and that's just about getting lots of things pumped out in volume. You can't selectively only pump out the good stuff.
• It rhymes with the old 10,000 hours chestnut, that you need to log 10,000 hours of a discipline to become anything approaching an expert in it.
• I think there is a version of this that is true, and the thread/post actually do describe this, but then conflate it with a bunch of other stuff.
• True bit first: It is a mistake to try to put yourself in a place where you're only churning out good ideas. I don't feel like this is actually that insightful a point, given how many creative workflows and apparatus are engineered specifically around this.
• A prominent example is writers' rooms -- they're not meant to be about sharing 'good ideas', just sharing 'ideas' and then using the room as a development space to make them better. The quality of the original idea is somewhat less important that the ways in which it gets hammered out. (And a writers' room that is closing off 'bad' ideas and not getting people externalising stuff quickly probably isn't fit for purpose.)
• Likewise, a technique I use a lot is as described in the thread -- if I need a small number of good ideas, the best method for me is forcing myself to churn out of a LOT of quality-neutral ideas.
• Say I needed 10 interesting item descriptions that a blacksmith might sell you. I'd give myself... say 15 minutes? maybe? to write down 100 ideas. That forces me to just write down whatever the hell I can think of, because I only have 10s per idea. Most will be utter shite. Some will be great. More will be 'almost there' and I can adapt them or stick two ideas together.
• (The time factor here is important -- having too little time to do the thing forces you to abandon any sense of quality control for the first draft. It's a volume game.)
• So -- so far, so true. The issue I take with the way it's framed is that it presents idea generation as the greatest differentiator of creativity. Which is just not true!!

  One of the most valuable writing skills is the ability to generate novel ideas.

• Sure, in some contexts. But as is said often and loudly, ideas by themselves are only worth so much (which isn't much). Execution is key. Doing it at all, for one; doing it well, for another.
• I think that's the factor it misses about, say, Neil Gaiman's career. Sure! The man has good ideas! But that feels like a very small piece of the overall puzzle.

  [Neil Gaiman and Ed Sheeran are] among, say, 25 people in the world who repeatedly generate blockbusters.

• I think this also ignores the fact that at a certain point, fame and audience make this self-sustaining. I find it a bit tenuous to make assertions about the quality of the creative craft of people like Sheeran and Gaiman based on their sales figures. Which isn't intended in itself as a comment on either's craft either -- my point is that, at a certain threshold, you're going to sell massively whether your ideas and execution are dogshit or not, so it doesn't really tell us anything.
• Bringing it back to 10,000 hours as well: I think what both miss also is the idea of deliberate practice. The 'forcing through' of volume is a useful tool in the toolbox, but it needs to be supported by other craft work. If what you take away from it is that you just to write lots without caring about the quality of the output... well, that's about half a useful lesson.
• The useful half is that if you're not investing your sense of validity in quality of your output, you will be happier and healthier as a creative, which is something worth cultivating.
• Plus, if you do something a lot over time, you will get better at it even if you don't think too hard.
• But I think where you are actually committed to getting better at something, deliberate practice is so important. And that means: evaluating your work and process, reflecting on those things, and developing focus areas within the craft and finding means for working on them.
• Which can and should include doing the thing lots.
• But doing it without the elements of deliberate practice will get you somewhere, but not as far and far more slowly.

Anyway, I'm probably being needless ornery on this whole thing. There is something actually actionably useful in there, I just dislike a framing that focuses on the ideas as the important bit. 'Where do you get your ideas' is a long-standing cliché of a boring, unproductive question for artists for a reason.

(Ironically, this blog slightly undermines my own point by its own existence. But only slightly.)

How to Write When You Can't

Today was a hard writing day -- one where everything felt hard to turn out, and the substance of it wasn't quite working. This happens, and I still actually got a lot written in spite of that, which counts as a win.

A few observations on the days like these:

• You can, and will, fix it later.
• The output of the bad days and of the good days is much harder to tell apart later than it seems at the time. It's often more psychological/physiological than anything intrinsic. (It's not coincidental that writing was hard on a day where it's 29C, the pollen is kicking my face off, and I'm tired and grouchy from the impact both those things had on my sleep.)
• There are tools that help. For me, format-shifting is always good. Getting things down on pen and paper feels a little freer and less formal, and it looks much scrappier. It give itself permission to be bad, and you know you're only going to improve it from there as you shift what you've got to another format.
• Seek clarity about what you're trying to do. Take a step back. What's the story, beyond whatever narrative techniques you're using to tell it? Do you understand it well enough and have it loaded into your brain? How does that flow into whatever narrative units you're using? What does the unit you're working on right now need to actually accomplish? If something's still not working, why isn't it? Are the motivations clear? The characters', the player's, yours?
• Write what you can, omit what you can't. Stitch it all together later.
• Take the rest when it comes.