Live To Write Another Day (13 page)

•
Don’t be afraid to go back to the white board or the index cards to execute your rewrite.

•
Be prepared to let go of every scene.

•
Use a double-yellow-pad approach, writing down the current structure on one pad, and the new one on another.

•
Be patient. Don’t start composing the new scenes until you’re absolutely confident with the new structure.

•
Once you have your new structure, make a battle plan, describing within the body of your script how you are going to modify each scene.

•
Consider giving your note giver the battle plan for more notes before executing the rewrite.

Questions to Ask Yourself:

•
What is the scope of your rewrite? Is it a major or a minor one?

•
How long do you think your rewrite is going to take? Make an estimate and see how accurate you are.

•
Are there components (individual scenes or sequences) of your old structure you can use as templates for parts of your new structure?

•
Is each modification you’re making consistent with your core message?

10. Writing Partners

Things to Remember:

•
Being in a writing partnership is like being in a marriage. It’s an intimate relationship that needs to be based on trust, mutual respect, and commitment.

•
The partner process takes time to evolve. You have to work at it.

•
It’s usually best to be in the same room with one another through the brainstorming, concept, and structuring phases.

•
Once you begin outlining, it’s easier to be in separate spaces, passing documents back and forth.

•
Remain passionate about your ideas, but always be willing to compromise with your partner.

Questions to Ask Yourself:

•
Are you willing to give up creative ownership of the work and be a 50-50 partner in it?

•
Are you prepared to negotiate every creative decision with your partner if necessary?

•
Are you willing to sacrifice your own voice as a writer for the sake of the voice that emerges as a product of the partnership?

•
What creative ground rules have you set for your process? Under what circumstances is it okay to rewrite your partner and vice versa?

•
Are you dividing the workload equally? Try not to cross the 50-yard line too often.

11. Pitching Stories

Things to Remember:

•
Pitching is a necessary evil. You must be able to express your ideas verbally as well as on paper in order to give potential employers confidence that you can do the job.

•
The most important thing you’re selling when pitching a story is yourself. So pitch your personality.

•
A pitch is a performance in which you are both the actor and the main character.

•
Memorize your pitch, then perform it as though you’re saying the words for the first time, just like a good actor.

•
Hone your pitch so you use as few words as possible. Try to make it no longer than 10 to 15 minutes.

•
When pitching with a partner, figure out ahead of time exactly who is going to say what and when.

•
Be open and flexible. Anything can happen once you get in the room.

Questions to Ask Yourself:

•
What’s your natural storytelling style? Are you big and gregarious? Quiet and soft-spoken?

•
How do you tell stories to your friends or family members in everyday life? Develop an approach that is similar.

•
Is there a hook to your pitch you can use to start it off right? A personal anecdote, for example, or a metaphor that frames the theme of your story and sets the tone for the rest of the pitch?

•
Which parts of your story can be edited out in your verbal presentation? Look hard at each beat as you rehearse and only include what’s absolutely necessary.

•
Who are you pitching to? Have you pitched to them before? Tailor your pitch to receive the most favorable response possible.

12. Writing for Hire

Things to Remember:

•
You need great writing samples in order to get work for hire, which means writing on spec is essential.

•
When you work as a writer for hire there is no draft for you. It’s a
we
thing, not a
me
thing, from the very beginning.

•
Your process is more important than ever when writing for hire. It’s the one thing you can always fall back on to get you through the rocky moments.

•
When you work as a writer for hire, the note giver is always right.

•
As a writer, there will always be some degree of tension involved in the relationship between you and your employer. It’s okay. Just accept it.

•
If you’re taking a writing class, approach the work as if it’s a job. Don’t be a writing student, be a writer for hire.

•
Always have a passion project going on in the back of the shop. It will feed your soul.

Questions to Ask Yourself:

•
What can you do to make the working relationship with your employer as productive as possible?

•
Which are the most important battles to fight with respect to the work? Choose wisely. You can’t win them all.

•
How can you use your creative talent to solve any issue that arises between you and your employer, writing-related or otherwise?

•
Which is better for the project (and for your career)—to be effective or to be right?

•
If you’re a writing student, what are the ways in which you can effectively turn your class into a work for hire? What do you want to get from your teacher? From your peers? Write down some goals.

•
How can you shape the notes you get in class into something that is consistent with your vision?

13. Art vs. Commerce

Things to Remember:

•
Financial success and writing success are not joined at the hip.

•
You can learn the business of being a writer. But you also have to be lucky to be financially successful.

•
The best way to get lucky is to be ready when luck comes your way—which means having a great script in your pocket.

•
Writing success = writer gene + process. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

•
Only you know when you have achieved writing success.

Questions to Ask Yourself:

•
What is the definition of financial success for you as a writer? Write it down.

•
Have you looked at your overall writing process and identified places where you need to improve?

•
What can you do differently on your next project, process-wise, that might help you overcome some of the deficiencies in your last one?

•
Have you rewritten the story you’re currently working on as much as you possibly can? Do you know in your heart that it is as good as you can make it?

14. The Write Community

Things to Remember:

•
To whatever extent possible, make every effort to surround yourself with a community of other writers throughout every stage of your career.

•
Writers need other writers not just for moral support, but also for the exchange of energy and ideas.

•
Your community of writers is your umbilical cord to numerous resources, potential collaborators, and representatives.

•
Being part of a community of writers helps you express who you are as an artist.

•
One of the best ways to cultivate a community of writers is to start or join a writing group.

Questions to Ask Yourself:

•
Do you know any writers who are as serious about writing as you are? Who are they? Make a list.

•
Have you ever sat down and had an in-depth conversation about process with these writers? How are your processes different?

•
Is there anything these other writers do that you might experiment with? Anything useful that you think you might be able to incorporate into your process?

•
What aspects of your process can you share with them?

•
Do you know five to ten other writers who might make a good writing group? Do you know of any existing writing groups that you might be able to join?

15. Live to Write Another Day

Things to Remember:

•
As creative storytellers, we are the cultural record keepers of our generation.

•
Be the hero of your own story. Never give up!

•
Don’t be afraid to fail. No great story was ever written by a writer playing it safe.

•
Your voice is worthy of being heard, and the fight to make it heard is never in vain.

Interactive Media and the Future of Storytelling

Without a doubt, the most unique aspect of my entertainment career is that in addition to working in the traditional mediums, I’ve also worked in so many different quarters of the interactive media business and in so many different capacities. I’ve been a writer on numerous projects, as well as an interactive designer, a voice director, a producer, and a creative director. My many adventures have taken me from developing PC games (back in the days of CD-ROMs), to online games, to console video games (Xbox, PlayStation etc.), to interactive theme park attractions.

The common thread that’s allowed me to navigate these many worlds has been my ability to tell a story, my writer gene, coupled with the growing need these emerging art forms have for good storytellers. I want to be careful, however, not to mislead you into thinking that interactive media is a land of milk and honey for writers. The fact is, this is an industry that’s very much in its infancy, one in which technology is still ahead of creativity and, at the moment, employs writers in a variety of different ways, from copywriters to pure dialogue writers to writer/designers to narrative directors. There’s also no real industry-wide standard in terms of the format in which writers work. Unlike screenplays or teleplays, which pretty much all look the same, if you were to study five different interactive scripts, they would probably vary quite dramatically in how they look, how they’re structured, and how they balance creative content with technical design.

For these and many other reasons, the subject of interactive writing really merits a much lengthier, in-depth discussion in its own right; however my intention here is to give you a relatively high-level treatment that focuses more on the impact interactive technology has had (and will continue to have) on us as writers, as well as on the entertainment world as a whole.

For as long as I can remember the most hotly debated topic in the gaming world has revolved around the question of whether or not you can experience genuine emotion while playing a video game. Naturally, like everyone else I have a theory about this, though mine is a very nuanced one.

Yes, I think you can experience genuine emotion while playing a video game, but it’s not the same kind of emotion that you experience while consuming a traditional narrative.

Remember in Chapter 2 when I said writing involves both
passively
listening while at the same time
actively
composing? I believe a similar thing happens when you’re button mashing some hideous mythological monster to death. You’re passively receiving the cues that the game is constantly giving you and at the same time actively trying to beat the stuffing out of that thing. When you write, you don’t typically get
emotional
about what you’re doing (though I’m sure every writer has their moments). You’re focused on accomplishing something. The same thing is true when you’re playing a game. Even if there are some deeper emotional elements to the experience, you’re only partially engaged with them because you’re driven by a different kind of emotion, something I describe as an intense
need to achieve.

On the other hand, when you watch a movie or a TV show or read a novel, you can easily become deeply emotional. That’s because the experience is
entirely passive
. You’re focused on receiving information, with no need to achieve anything. The dominant feeling is one of empathy for the characters you see on the screen or for whom you’re reading about. This reaction is utterly visceral because storytelling is an archetypal ritual, one our ancestors have engaged in for thousands of years, predisposing us to respond in this way.

So, if the two experiences do indeed affect us in fundamentally different physiological ways, then how could we possibly expect them to elicit similar feelings or emotions? And should they? Do video games really need to be more like movies, and do all stories need to be deeply emotional in order to be good? I don’t think so. You don’t have to look any further than the perennial success of high-tech spy novels, like those popularized by Tom Clancy, and procedural TV crime dramas, like
CSI
and
Law & Order,
to answer that question.

Now, could I be convinced otherwise that playing a video game can be a deeply empathic and emotional experience? Given the rapid advancement of technology, and the possibilities that will undoubtedly emerge in the future, absolutely. I believe
anything
is possible.

When it comes to narrative storytelling, there’s no question a prominent seat at the table exists not just for video games, but for many other types of interactive experiences as well. The challenge is that virtually all of our previous narrative formats have evolved out of the oral tradition. While a narrative
wants
to be linear and set in stone, interactive design is pretty much the opposite. It wants to be non-linear and allow the user some degree of autonomy as to how they consume the experience.

What you have in many video games is a lot of narrative delivered through backstory. In other words, you’re free to explore the world the game designers have created, solve puzzles, and/or perform missions that can be completed in multiple ways. As a result, you uncover the story of events that happened in the past. I really like games that do this effectively, where the more you play, the more you learn and understand about how this particular world came to be.

Most video games also deliver narrative through the use of what are commonly called
cutscenes
or
cinematics
, which are essentially a sequence of movie scenes shoe-horned between the missions. When the game is completed, these scenes collectively tell the entire story. Personally, I have never found this method to be very satisfying because it usually takes control away from the player (i.e., stops the game) so that (A) the scenes can play at a higher resolution, and/or (B) the player is less likely to miss critical parts of the narrative. If cinematics are part of the design, I prefer them to run
in game
, which means the narrative is delivered on the fly
during
play. You may have to sacrifice a bit of the visual aesthetic, and you do risk having some story beats go unseen, but some of that can be made up for with clever design. At least this way the story feels more organic, since the active part of the experience isn’t interrupted for the sake of delivering the passive part, which can be frustrating at times.

Another approach to creating interactive narrative that I have always been a big fan of involves the use of “branching” story architecture. This means multiple versions of a single over-arching story can be experienced by presenting the player with a number of different story pathways, each of which is determined, at least in part, by the choices the player makes along the way. In some cases, all paths lead to the same conclusion. In other cases, the structure provides for more than one possible outcome, which then allows players to replay the game and have a different experience.

On a practical level, creating something of this breadth is clearly an enormous amount of work. It’s also an incredible writing and interactive design challenge, because not only do you have to structure and execute a single linear story (which is tough enough to do well), you also have to create a tremendous number of alternative scenes as well as somehow find a way to bring each story path to its logical and inevitable conclusion.

One area of narrative game design that presents a wealth of potential opportunities is the area of character. As we discussed earlier, characters and their motivations are the fundamental drivers of stories. Yet in most narrative-based games, the wants and desires of characters are often incidental to the actions that the player is required to make in order to progress through the experience. So the question that I’ve been asking for years is:

Why can’t character motivation be more of an integral part of gameplay?

Here’s an example. I’m a big World War II buff, so the early
Call of Duty
games were among my favorites,
Call of Duty 2: Big Red One
in particular. This type of game is generally called a “first-person shooter” because you see everything from the point of view of the character you’re playing as you run around shooting things. In this case, you’re a soldier in the thick of the European theater of battle, and there’s a platoon of other GIs who accompany you throughout the entire experience. As with most games in this genre, the missions are very repetitive puzzle-solving activities in which you have to navigate a maze-like battlefield, fight your way through a horde of relentless Nazis, and ultimately complete a climactic task (like blow up a trio of anti-aircraft guns, capture a farmhouse, get to the top of a hill, etc.).

One of the many things I liked about
Big Red One
was that the NPCs (non-playing characters) in the platoon stay with you from mission to mission, shouting random commentary for the duration of the game. You also get to know a little about each one of them from brief cutscenes that take place before and after each mission, though all of this is just filler and has no impact on the actual gameplay itself.

Then, at a certain point in the middle of the game, an interesting thing happens: One of the NPC characters suddenly dies, and before you even realize what’s going on, this very somber moment occurs in which a couple of the other NPCs grieve the loss of their fallen comrade. The game then quickly transitions to the next mission without skipping a beat, and there is no mention of the event again.

I’ll never forget the feeling I had at that moment. Up until then I had been mindlessly blowing away all those Nazis for the pure pleasure of it, but now suddenly my writer gene had awoken and my thoughts were racing. What if we really got to know these guys in this platoon? What if instead of running around mission after mission doing variations of the same thing, the missions were about accomplishing objectives that
mattered
to your platoon mates? What if they also involved interacting with the enemy soldiers? What if you actually got to know who
those
guys were and
all
these interactions mattered?
And what if there were consequences that would determine the course of the story depending on what you did and when you did it?

You see where I’m going with this? Granted, this is a shooter game, and its designers never intended for it to be about all these character-based motivations, but if you’re going to introduce characters and try to tell a story, why not make that story a sincere part of the entire experience? Why not try to fuse the interactive design as much as you possibly can with the narrative?

Even if the creators of
Big Red One
only went a step or two in the direction that I’m suggesting, I’m sure they could have constructed a very interesting interactive story, making what was already a very well-designed game even better.

Achieving this kind of seamless marriage of gameplay and narrative requires two things. First, there needs to be a willingness on the part of game development companies to allow the stories of their narrative-based games to be created concurrently with gameplay and level design. Typically, this isn’t the case. Story details are often added much later on in the process. Second, it requires that these companies have writers working on their projects that are also skilled interactive designers. What I’m talking about now are people who not only have the writer gene, but who have the
interactive gene
as well.

You don’t have to be a software engineer to be a designer/writer of interactive games, but you do have to have a fundamental understanding of how games are programmed. Obviously this is a topic that is far too complex for me to go into in great detail, but I will give you a basic introduction.

The underlying principle of all interactive design is what is commonly known as the
if/then scenario.
In other words, if
Action A
occurs, then
Result A
happens. But if
Action B
occurs, then
Result B
happens. And from there a myriad of mind-twisting possibilities ensues.

Let’s say we’re making my version of that character-driven WWII game. One tiny slice of what would potentially be a very extensive interactive design document for that game might go something like this:

INT. BARN – DAY OR NIGHT

IF
the player enters the barn,
THEN
they encounter STAFF SERGEANT JOHNANNES SCHMIDT.

IF
the player shoots at Schmidt,
THEN
Schmidt yells a battle cry and engages the player in a firefight.

IF
the player kills Schmidt,
THEN
they will find a codebook on him. But it is written in German and they must find a way to crack the code.

IF
the player gets close enough to Schmidt during the encounter and hits him with the butt of their rifle,
THEN
Schmidt falls to the floor unconscious and they have captured him.