I swear, I can’t make it through a RPG PHD video without freaking NEEDING to write a whole ass essay about something he said. I just can’t make it through.
This one is particularly egregious on my part, I’ve only made it to the six minute mark >_<.
The thing is, everything I hear him talk about relates to story writing almost as much as it relates to gaming.
The attention to layout he is talking about is WHY (you know I loves me some yummy WHY stuff) we do a LOT of the things we do as story tellers. From what we do with our opening lines and beginning chapters, to how we size our paragraphs and sentences.
One piece of advice I absolutely loathe but is still quite good advice is to read your work more or less as it will appear to your reader. That’s something you have to guess and fudge intensely these days. It’s got a lot more limits than it used to but it’s still a useful way to gauge the effect your text, as a physical object, will psychologically effect the reader.
While I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I should because I hate it and I feel more aware of its limits than its strengths I will still, however rarely, set some of my text to print on two columns on a horizontally oriented page, printed both sides, so I’m reading the text like a pamphlet or a zine to mimic how it might look in a book. This lets me see if a paragraph is too big and daunting or a sentence goes on profoundly too long.
On the computer I can just scroll and tweak the fonts and margins for my comfort. On paper, I can’t do that. It is typeset. I can’t cheat-fiddle it into “nice.” I have to deal with it as a real canvas that is being dealt with as a real person.
If it makes my heart stutter, the poor reader is going to look up, questioning if it is worth it, which is the last thing I want.
The goal, however monumentally hard it is to achieve, is to keep the reader’s nose glued to that book so they can’t look away and can’t pause, and even when they know they have to quit, they flip forward to see if there’s a break soon so they can keep going just a little longer. I want to have it LOOK like I’m giving that promise and then yank it away so they’ll read just a little longer.
There is an architecture to story. Something vaguely like Feng Shui. Lots of little principles about what works because of some aspect of the way the world works, which accumulates into something that Blake Snyder called “the same but different.” The principles for WHY we do what we do are the same, but HOW we fulfill those principles can be as individual as we are.
I would argue that the best stuff does exactly that: Meets the needs of WHY we do a thing as story tellers but does it in a way that no story teller but you would express it that particular way. Less formula than fish tank. A fish tank is a fish tank. It needs certain things to function as a fish tank. But your fish tank, made to best please you and the people you show it off to, is probably going to be noticeably different from mine. If we do a really good job of personalization, we could put them side by side and our friends could tell which belonged to each of us without us telling them, just by how the choices that went into them reflect our personalities.
And I will shut up now and go back to watching the video. Because I’m NOT quitting at only six minutes. That’s ridiculous.
But also… how the heck is The Hidden and the Maiden at the Los Angeles public library?? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Someone must have requested it, no idea how they heard about it but I’ll take it. Thank you to who-ever out there in the universe who got me into a major metropolitan library. That was very cool of you.
And, I guess this is one of those optimum random moments to mention that I wrote a book.
