Author: terribleminds (page 176 of 454)

This one is pretty simple:

Write an opening sentence.

Post it in the comments below.

Any genre will do, really, though versatility has value.

The sentence should be on the shorter side. Let’s say, mmm, no more than 25 words. Some things to avoid, since sometimes folks fall into these traps: avoid blood, death, dead people, kids being hurt, and so forth. Think original. Conceive of a sentence that, when crafted right, is a strong hook. The kind that makes people want to read further. It makes them want to know more. Compelling and maddening in equal measure.

By next Friday, I will pick between five and ten I really like, and I’ll pop them into next week’s challenge, and you guys can choose one of those I pick to serve as the opening sentence to a new piece of flash fiction.

Today, no story necessary, though.

Just an opening line.

Due by next Friday, 2/26, noon EST.

Andrea is a friend and a talent and initially when she sent me a guest post that said throw everything at the wall I assume that meant she was offering advice for how to deal with the frustrating realities of being a writer (“JUST BREAK EVERYTHING AND YOU’LL FEEL SO MUCH BETTER”), but her advice is far broader and, well, more useful than all that. Anyway, here Andrea talks about the willful messiness of a writing career: 

* * *

Sometimes, when I talk about all the different kinds of work that I do, I think I come off like a lying liar.

See, I’m here today to promote my brand-spanking-new project, The Daring Mermaid Expedition, which is a choose-your-own-adventure-style game except convenient app form. An interactive novel, if you will. It’s about mermaids and academia and pirates and loyalty. It’s funny and fluffy and… pretty weird, I guess? Also fun. And you can play the first couple of chapters for free!

Buuuuuut I’m not actually going to talk about my game. PSYCH! Ha ha promoting your work is hard.

The most perceptive of you throngs of Wendigites will recall that the last thing I was here trying to con you into buying was something completely different: Revision, a snarky sci-fi thriller about a wiki where your edits come true.

And my record only gets weirder from there. I’ve done nonfiction, and spent a while as a leading world expert in transmedia storytelling. I’ve written children’s books! Entertainment marketing campaigns! I’ve written smut under a pseudonym! Blog posts, alternate reality games, poetry, fitness games, old-fashioned paper newspaper articles, catalog copy. I’ve even written ye olde search engine optimization. (Never again, my friends. Never again.)

That’s not even getting into my day job shenanigans: library secretary, IT product manager, copy/production editor, game designer.

And yet here I am, just one single person with no apparent sense or focus to how I go from one thing to the next. I might as well be choosing each new project with a wine-spattered Ouija board.

But there is a method to my madness. To wit, I go where the money is. I walk through the doors that are open to me, instead of banging my head on the ones that sound like they’re locking me out of the most funnest parties. Sometimes those open doors aren’t in a straight line, or very close together. And that’s OK!

It’s easy to be seduced by the idea that there’s one true career path. It makes a nice story, with a clear progression and a sense of narrative justice. You write some short stories and get them published in semipro magazines, then you hit the pros, then you write a novel and sell it. Or you start in the quality assurance department of a big game studio, you work hard and prove yourself, and then one day you get a crack at writing yourself. You start as an assistant reading slush, and then you become an assistant producer, and then one day—

But the truth is, real careers are messy, and a lot of writers do a lot of different things before and even after their big hits. You may know George R.R. Martin from Game of Thrones, but I first knew him as the guy behind those Wild Card anthologies about mutated superheroes. And he wrote for the TV show Beauty and the Beast in the 80s! (Remember that? It was huuuuuuuge.)

Lewis Carroll famously received a request from Queen Victoria to dedicate his next book to her after the charming Alice in Wonderland, and was bemused when it was a dense mathematical treatise. John Scalzi has a well-known career in science fiction, but he’s also written film and music criticism and nonfiction about subjects from astronomy to financial advice.

Our own host Chuck Wendig has written original fiction, Star Wars tie-in novels, film scripts, writing advice, and an obscure line of threatening notes for fortune cookies. So it goes.

The point I’m making, in my roundabout way, is a two-for-one. First: Opportunity can come in many shapes and sizes, and only a sucker turns it down. Second: Diversification is awesome.

You might well have one thing you’re burning to write and that’s the only thing that will ever make you happy. Which, great! Fine! I’m very glad for you. But if you have your heart set on writing only wangsty love-triangle science fiction about a sentient lawnmower and a pair of animatronic garden gnomes, then your career options are going to be, ah, somewhat limited. If you only have one move and nobody’s picking up what you’re putting down, well, so much for that. Them’s the breaks.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to try a whole bunch of things, throw all that mess at the wall and see what sticks? That’s how you build a career.

It’s purely a matter of numbers. Because no matter how hard you work as a writer, your success will always be subject to an unpredictable climate of luck, timing, zeitgeist. There are authors who strike it big with their first thing out of the gate – and I’m looking at you, JK Rowling and Stephen King — but there are authors who not only never strike it big at all, they never strike it small, either.

So it’s a smart move to keep your options open and your eyes on the horizon. Maximize your chances. Maybe the garden gnome/lawnmower thing won’t work out, but somebody likes your style and wants you to move on to garden gnome noir crime fiction. Or maybe you’ll get an itch to step away from it and try your hand at middle grades occult primers.

“Oh, but Andrea,” you wail, “what about my personal brand? Won’t I confuse my audience?” Pssssssh no, I wouldn’t waste my time worrying about that. There’s a grain of a point there, inasmuch as the people who loved your lawnmower romances might not care for your garden gnome noir. But if you like both things, how can you be sure your audience wouldn’t? We all contain multitudes.

And many an author has lamented being locked into a series from the start of their career, and had trouble branching out to the other kinds of work that interest them later. Again, JK Rowling and her crime fiction.

That doesn’t inevitably lead to “pick one kind of thing and do it forever.” It means do a lot of different kinds of things that you like your whole career. Added side bonus: it keeps your creative wheels spinning faster, too. Variety is like crop rotation for the writer brain, letting some parts lay fallow and grow new ideas while you harvest the field next door. So switching things up doesn’t just increase your odds of making sweet sweet moolah, it can actively make you a better writer.

Try it, you might like it!

And, uh, buy my game? Available on iOS, Android, and Steam! Free to try! It’s fun, I pinky swear. And if it’s not to your taste, hey, I got a dozen other things you can try.

Andrea Phillips: Website | Twitter

The Daring Mermaid Expedition: iOS | Android | Steam

*twitch*

*twitch*

*twitch*

Ahem. So.

Stephen Hull, editor of Huffington Post UK, said:

“… I’m proud to say that what we do is that we have 13,000 contributors in the UK, bloggers… we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.”

(Click the link above and listen to the audio. You’ll hear a lot about quality and brands and viral content. Reach and markets and other joy-sucking face-wrinkling terms.)

Hull is, to repeat, proud that they do not pay writers. HuffPo is owned by AOL who is actually Verizon. Not small companies. The audio link notes from Hull that they are a profitable business.

And yet, they do not pay the writers.

And yet, they are proud not to pay the writers.

PROUD.

Because it isn’t “authentic.” To pay writers.

You toxic tickledicks.

You venomous content-garglers.

You thieves, you brigands, you media lampreys.

Let us expose this hot nonsense for what it is: a lie meant to exploit writers and to puff up that old persistent myth about the value of exposure or the joy of the starving artist or the mounting power of unpaid citizen journalism.

The lie is this: writing is not work, it is not fundamental, it is a freedom in which you would partake anyway, and here some chucklefuck would say, haw haw haw, you blog at your blog and nobody pays you, you post updates on Twitter and nobody pays you, you speak words into the mighty air and you do it for free, free, free. And Huffington Post floats overhead in their bloated dirigible and they yell down at you, WE BROADCAST TO MILLIONS and DON’T YOU WANT TO REACH MILLIONS WITH YOUR MEAGER VOICE and THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU.

But it is an opportunity for them, not for you.

When I blog for myself, it’s for myself. It is for my aims. I am free to say what I wish to say and not worry about getting paid (or not getting paid as it were) because I am, in fact, gladly broadcasting into the void. I am not part of AOL. I am not owned by Verizon. I do not have nearly a thousand employees (all of whom would of course be paid). My blog is not a charity, no, but I also don’t ask anybody to work for free. Yes, indeed, I have guest posters, as I did today — but I don’t ask them, I don’t invite them, and they are passively or sometimes actively trying to sell you something. (Plus, this site actually costs me quite a bit of money to host every month.)

Which, by the way, is another component of the lie.

HuffPo would have you believe that not paying means that somehow, the integrity of the information remains intact. What it misunderstands is that, if HuffPo isn’t paying, then who is? Someone is always paying. Or, at the very least, someone is always selling something.

If I work for XYZ Media Conglomerate, I get paid by XYZ to report the news. I am beholden to no one except my own employer — perhaps that employer has an agenda, perhaps it does not.

But if I am an Unpaid Blogger Citizen Journalist Content Rebarfer, I am beholden to — well, who the fuck knows? No money means no checks, no balances. If HuffPo isn’t paying me, you can bet I want somebody to pay me. Coca-Cola or the Koch Brothers Political Engine or Shitmittens, Incorporated. Or maybe I’m just trying to shill my book, my protein powder, my dangle-widgets, my wang-dongles, whatever. Money in journalism will come from somewhere. Better that it comes from one’s own employer than from all angles. We can pretend that money is somehow a corrosive influence, that it corrupts the journalistic process — oh, wait, but Huffington Post is valued at tens of millions of dollars? Hull even says that they’re profitable. Well, of course they are. It’s easy to be profitable when you don’t pay the people.

The only thing money corrodes is my mortgage balance. Money I make from writing slowly and diligently erodes my debts and my bills, thus allowing me to NOT DIE EVERY MONTH.

I want you to understand something:

When you go to Huffington Post, it is primarily made of one thing:

Words. Lots and lots and lots of words.

Hundreds or thousands on a page. Millions at the site overall.

And nobody paid anything to anyone to write them.

Imagine walking into a building and realizing nobody paid anybody to lay the bricks that built the walls. Imagine sipping a drink and realizing that nobody got paid to build the machine that makes the can or what is inside it — nobody got paid to formulate the beverage or drive cases to stores or put the cans on shelves. Imagine that those who made the most fundamental component of the drink — the drink itself — never get paid. They were told that work was a privilege. They were told that to get paid to do those things would somehow make the process crass. It would make it impure. Better to drink a drink made out of love, they would say. Love is an ingredient! They would bellow that as they use a literal rake to rake in profits while those beneath them starve.

The only thing HuffPo has is words, and it chooses not to pay for them.

That is not exposure. That is exploitation.

Writing is work. Most things begin with writing. Though I find writing a pleasure, it is also a thing that requires great mental effort. It is not mere content — that word said almost dismissively, as if it is a synonym for styrofoam peanuts. (And by the way: you actually have to buy styrofoam peanuts. They aren’t free unless you rob them from boxes shipped to you.) Content is not slurry. It’s not protein goo. It’s not mud or air or some readily available resource —

At least, it’s not as long as we don’t let it be.

As I am wont to say, there’s nothing wrong with exposure for writers. It can be useful, provided it is on your terms. But also realize that hikers die from exposure, and writers can die from it, too.

Do not be exposed.

Expose yourself.

NO, NOT LIKE THAT, PULL UP YOUR PANTS.

I mean, be in control of how and when you write for free.

And my advice? Don’t write for Huffington Post. Don’t even share links to there. They’re so profitable by not paying writers? Fine. Demand they pay their writers and until they do, don’t click their links, don’t share their links, don’t speak their name while wearing anything other than a Mister Yuck face. Starve them of content and they will see how precious it is to them.

Pay the goddamn writers.

(See also: an earlier response from Wil Wheaton for HuffPo to reprint his work. For free.)

Rob Hart is a cool dude and he wanted to write a post about outlining and that seems all nice and good and sure, fine. But then he went ahead and named it HOW TO PUT THE TOILET IN THE RIGHT PLACE and I was in love. Now Rob won’t respond to my texts (sorry, “dick pics”), and he changed his locks but ha ha ha he doesn’t know that I found a way in through the vents and now live in his basement.

* * *

I went into my first novel without an outline.

I regret this!

It took five years to write the book. Characters appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. Entire threads were repurposed, rethought, trashed, and untrashed.

It was like if you’re building a house, but the blueprints are constantly getting changed, and the builders aren’t communicating, and suddenly there’s a toilet next to the fridge. And you have to figure out how to move it, but once you do, it screws with the plumbing lines…

So you hammer away and hope it comes together in the end.

And it did, mostly. I am immensely proud of New Yorked, but looking back, I see the gutted piping that didn’t get relocated. Publishers Weekly, in their review of New Yorked, said:

“The book’s relentless pacing and strong sense of place (happy face) compensate for the incoherent plot line (sad face), which prevents it from being truly effective (very sad face).”

It sucks to hear, but it’s not an unfair point.

One of the lessons I learned from New Yorked is: I’m the kind of writer who needs an outline. I knew the beginning and I knew the ending, but the middle—that’s where the plans got mixed up and the basement stairs suddenly led to the roof.

So for my second book, City of Rose, I knew I wanted a strong set of blueprints. The question was: How? There’s no one right way to outline. So I took a couple of tries, sketching things out, jotting down ideas.

Then I came across something that really worked for me.

I got myself a notebook, and I wrote up a list of characters. Then I went chapter by chapter, and wrote a couple of sentences for each one—the setting, what happened, how it would lead into the next chapter.

Once I was done, I trashed it. Ripped it right out of the notebook and threw it into the garbage can on the Staten Island Ferry.

A few days later, I did another outline. Characters, chapter-by-chapter breakdown. All from memory, all without referring to anything else.

I threw that away, too.

A few days later, I did it one more time.

That outline, the third one, I kept.

So, what’s with throwing away all this paper, you ask? Is it because of my deep-seated hatred for trees?

Yes.

No, wait. It’s because the second time I did the outline, I’d had some time to think. The plot threads marinated, the characters broke apart and reformed into stronger versions of themselves. I remembered all the things I was excited about, forgot all the stuff that didn’t really matter, and even came up with some new ideas along the way.

The third time was the charm. The final book isn’t exactly what I sketched out, but it’s pretty damn close. I wrote and delivered City of Rose within a space of six months. A far cry from the five years of New Yorked. And the best part of that is: I think it’s a better book.

Publishers Weekly seems to agree. In their review of City of Rose, they said “readers will enjoy [Hart’s] playful, jaded hero and twisty plot (happy face).”

It worked. Not to say any of this is going to work for you. Not every bit of advice is right for every single writer. But in the grand scheme of writing advice, I like to this this is a little more concrete than the often-conflicting stuff I’ve seen out there (write every day, write when you want, write drunk, write sober, write when the moon is in the seventh house…)

But if you’re the kind of person who feels like you need an outline, and the outline doesn’t always come together on the first pass—try not using the first pass. Junk it. Give it some time to gestate, then use the second, or third, or fourth, or hundred millionth.

Bonus round: I also found it helpful, after I finished the first draft of the book, to summarize each chapter on an index card, then sit with the cards and angrily stare at them while I drank a big glass of Jim Beam.

It was useful for seeing the breadth of the story, figuring out the pacing, finding where things happened too quick or too slow, etc.

Anyway. That’s me. That’s how I took a problem with the first book and fixed it the second time around. I’ve been doing this for all my new writing projects, and it’s really helped me feel like I’m proceeding on stable footing.

That is to say, the toilet ends up where it belongs.

What about you? Do you outline? Or do you write by the seat of your pants and hope you find the story in the process?

Do you have a process, different from this, that works for you?

* * *

Rob Hart is the author of New Yorked and City of Rose. His short stories have been published in places like Thuglit, Needle, Joyland, and Helix Literary Magazine. Nonfiction has appeared at Slate, the Daily Beast, Nailed, and the Powell’s bookstore blog. You can find him on the web at www.robwhart.com and on Twitter at @robwhart.

City of Rose: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

The first five minutes of Firewatch are sweet until they are harrowing. At their end, you are left gutted of your stuffing — and then, only then, does the game begin.

This is an important moment, narratively. You as the player have been hollowed out much as your on-screen avatar, Henry, is hollowed out. You are an empty person waiting to be filled up. It’s almost like being a house so empty it invites a haunting — and boy howdy, this game is haunting. It’s not only that, of course. The game is funny, exciting, tense. It’s also frequently beautiful in ways both visually and emotionally.

But it is haunting.

Those first five minutes are harrowing not in a genre sense — it’s not like, OH, DANG, MY GIRLFRIEND WAS TAKEN AND KILLED BY NINJAS, NOOOOO, I WILL AVENGE YOU, BETTY-SUE. It’s not even quite in the vein of UP, where you watch a man’s life and marriage zip by in fast-forward to an unfortunate, if inevitable, conclusion. I won’t spoil how this game opens, but I will say that the emotional collapse that awaits the character of Henry is one that is painfully adult in nature. Mature not in the sense of, OMG IT’S PEE PORN, but mature in the way that adult life sometimes throws challenges at you you would’ve never before imagined. Challenges that are purely emotional, that are difficult because adulthood is frequently about setting up expectations for yourself and yet sometimes, sometimes, those expectations are dashed against the rocks of reality until dead. This leads us to our first lesson, actually —

The Earliest Moments Matter

Here it’s the first five minutes, same as it might be with a film or a TV pilot. Maybe in your book it’s the first five pages. In a comic the first five panels — whatever.

Point is — you gotta get in early and make those first moments count.

Those opening moments are an opportunity to chum the waters with narrative blood — then the audience comes swimming closer, looking for bait, and that’s when you draw in the net or use a gaff hook or something-something some-other-fishing-metaphor.

What’s interesting with Firewatch is that we assume those initial story moments must be PLOT-focused, right? As in, SET UP THE PLOT PROBLEM WITH AN INCITING INCIDENT BECAUSE OH NO ROBOTS ARE GOING TO LASERBOMB THE SUPERBOWL. Firewatch on the other hand uses this opportunity not to set out a plot problem but rather, a character problem. It does not establish physical stakes, but rather, emotional stakes for one character. It lays waste to the character’s emotional interior and then that personal apocalypse launches into not the mechanics of the plot but instead, the character’s connection to and the necessity for the plot.

To translate that, when we see the character take the lonely role of “firewatch” (meaning, he lives at a firewatch station and monitors the park for forest fires), he does not do so because he has some love of parks or fire or because some Sinister Villain has driven him to this. No, the guy is just alone and fucked up and wants to be more alone and so he goes to be isolated. The decision to be where he is (and for the game to be what the game is) is not because of hammering home some plot point but because that’s where Henry wants to or needs to go.

He has a problem [emotional devastation] and his solution to that problem is to go hide from the world in the wilds of Wyoming, taking a job that requires very little of him except isolation.

(If you want further thoughts on characters and plot and how the story lies between a character’s problem and a character’s solution — my Zero Fuckery Guide to kick-ass characters.)

(See also some earlier thoughts on simplicity and elegance in plot and character.)

The trick here is that it’s not enough to simply present that emotional devastation like a cat offering a dead rat (I MADE DIS SORTA). It also does it artfully — those initial moments are a seduction. Storytelling is often an act of seduction, albeit a really twisted one where you are seduced into trusting the story just so it can throw you in a bag and drive you off a cliff. The opening moments of the game are that way. Firewatch brings you into feeling emotionally compelled as you (all done through text) form a relationship with a new person, and then it slowly sticks a knife between your ribs, gently twisting and twisting as the consequences of this relationship are revealed.

It’s not enough to just plop it on the ground.

You’ve gotta get tricky with it.

It is the act of stage magic: the art of showing you a thing, then misdirecting you, and then transubstantiating that story matter into something else entirely.

Storytelling as stage magic: revelation, misdirection, and betrayal.

Revelation — Look, my assistant is getting in this box.

Misdirection — Now I shall spin the box around and do all sorts of frippery and ritual.

Betrayal — Ha ha ha fuck you I’m cutting my assistant in half, sucker. It is both everything you expected and not what you expected and now you’re wondering how I did it or how I’ll top it.

(Or, if you like The Prestige — the pledge, the turn, the prestige.)

In storytelling, it goes like:

YOU THINK THING IS ABC123

I DO A LOT OF NARRATIVE CONTORTIONS TO MESS WITH YOUR HEAD

HA HA HA YOU FOOL IT’S REALLY 321XYZ.

Or, with my own work in particular:

LOOK AT THIS APPLE

*hides apple under a sheet*

HA HA HA IT’S REALLY A RABID FERRET BITING YOUR FACE.

To get back to Firewatch, the game makes a lot of hay with those initial moments — and it’s not your classic videogame opening where you’re under attack by an alien ship or breaking out of your cryo-cradle or whatever. This is all about building up a sand castle, then sending in a big-ass wave to wash it all way. And that leaves you with the vital question of: holy shit, what now?

“Holy Shit, What Now?”

That question is a good one, I think, in terms of driving the audience to stay with the tale at hand. There’s no great overarching lesson here other than, when in doubt and when feeling stuck, there is some value in looking at what you’ve got on the pages before you and asking how you engineer the audience asking that question:

Holy shit, what now?

You get them to ask that question by surprising them, upsetting them, or delighting them. You’ve got to betray, or reveal, or surprise. (A good example of a story that does this: Orphan Black.)

On the other hand, you can do this too much. (And occasionally, Orphan Black does that, too.) You can present a ceaseless barrage of twists and turns — having your story act like a frenetic child (LOOK AT THIS. NOW THIS. LOOK AT THIS OTHER THING. WATCH ME DANCE. WATCH ME WIGGLE. I HAVE TO POOP) gives us no time to breathe. That question of holy shit, what now is an important one — but it’s also just as important that we have time to ask it and think about it.

The Glory Of Mundane Moments

Firewatch works like this:

Henry, the aforementioned firewatch, talks to his boss Delilah on the radio.

He performs seemingly mundane tasks in service to the job.

He uses his map and compass to find and perform these tasks, which takes him through amazing visual setpieces — while he wanders, Delilah occasionally chimes in or you are given a chance to talk about a thing you see (like, say, a meadow) with Delilah.

This normalcy of the job and these interactions is broken up by a set of increasingly strange events — not X-Files strange, but strange enough where you start to feel extra alone and threatened by people or systems you can’t quite see. The core of it is: imagine you’re supposed to be alone in somewhere and you slowly realize that you’re really not.

The thing is, the game parcels these tentpole plot moments out. We aren’t pummeled with a barrage of one-after-the-other events. Instead, an event occurs to deepen and complicate the mystery, and then it’s back to the job. This is vital to build tension. The game stabs with a knife, then twists — but doesn’t keep on stabbing. It lets us bleed. It lets us heal a little, or scar over.

To flip the subject a little bit, let’s talk about another game.

This game is the game where I hide somewhere in our house and I jump-scare our four-year-old. And then he does it to me in return because he thinks it’s hilarious fun (and I suspect he’ll one day be a fan of horror movies because of this).

I understand the game.

He does not understand the game.

That okay. He’s four. Four-year-olds understand a lot more than we think, but just the same, they’re kinda all over the fucking map in terms of grokking shit. I mean, trying to zip a zipper on his sweater gives him fits, so. But here’s how he plays the game:

B-Dub hides. Sometimes effectively, sometimes not. He jumps out, BOO. I am either actually startled or I fake being startled — “Oh, ha ha, I peed a little, good job.” And then he immediately does it again. And with literally zero finesse. He will step behind the nearest corner. I will watch him step behind the nearest corner. And then five seconds later he’s jumping out again: BOO. And it’s like, dude, kid, lad, that crap won’t work a second time. You have to up the ante. You have to change the game. He either needs to fool me — trick me into thinking he’s really just stepping behind the corner while really he’s climbing into the vents like John McClane where he’s going to drop down out of the ceiling (and if my son ever comes out of the ceiling I will most certainly brown my trousers). Or — or —

He needs to give it some time.

This is the part of the game I get that he does not. I’ll scare him, and then I’ll stop. I’ll ease off. I’ll go do some other nonsense and he’ll be there waiting with a suspicious smile thinking, is it about to happen again, is he going to scare me, are we still playing the game or what. Then I’ll misdirect him — “Hey, what’s that over there?” — or I’ll simply let enough time go where he’s gotten comfortable.

Then I scare him again.

BOO.

I don’t just sit there and yell at him. BOO. BOO. BOO AGAIN. BOO SOME MORE.

He needs time to giddily worry. He needs time to think about what’s coming — to anticipate it, to ponder from where I may jump out. And then he needs that time to grow comfortable, mostly certain that the game is over and I in fact will not jump out at all and scare him. At which point, I drop down out of the ceiling covered in spiders.

Firewatch knows that we need time. We need time to be tense, but also that we need time for that tension to unspool a little. The rope can’t always be tight. Sometimes it needs slack. (Want more fishing metaphor? You might catch more fish with a slack line than a tight one.) The ratchet, recoil and slack of the narrative allows us time to ponder questions, amplify our fears, play with characters, and ultimately grow comfortable in the narrative (often just in time for it to deepen our discomfort). It is an artful balancing act.

Mystery Makes Tension

This is a very simple thing, but important to understand:

As I have said before, question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they drag us into the narrative. But Firewatch further proves that unanswered questions create tension. At the most fundamental level this is reflected by our very human fear of the dark. The dark is the unknown. The dark is the theoretically infinite. The dark is the ultimate unanswered question. The unknown is fearful. The unknown makes us anxious.

And it doesn’t have to be anything huge, either. You go home and find your door unlocked. Or a knick-knack obviously out of place. It’s not actively sinister, and could probably be explained away by something fairly mundane — but without really knowing, your mind conjures an unholy host of options. Firewatch does this so well. Bits of trash left around. Someone watching you. Someone in your firewatch tower. The questions mount, and in classic storytelling fashion, answering one question with a half-ass-answer only offers up three more questions — the mysteries multiply like wet Gremlins.

The Power Of Skipping Ahead

Another thing I love about Firewatch — it isn’t afraid to pole-vault over its own narrative. You start off in standard day-by-day fashion, DAY ONE, DAY TWO, DAY THREE. Then next thing you know? DAY 9. DAY 15. DAY 33. DAY 64. And it’s like, whoa, what the fuck.

Skipping ahead has three big advantages, I think.

First, it cuts ahead of boring stuff. In games particularly, we expect to play out every moment. And novels sometimes dwell overlong on boring parts. Solution? Skip ahead!

Second, it creates a mystery in and of itself. A jump in time leaves us wondering now not just about what is going to happen but what has already happened.

Third, it lends us a sense of movement through time. It’s odd how that movement deepens my investment — it’s an illusion, but a functional one. While The Force Awakens is one of my most favorite cinematic experiences of recent memory, I was struck by how rushed it felt. Like the events of the story took two hours of my time in the theater and two hours of the characters’ time. Letting Rey and Finn have the Falcon in space for a full day or a week would feel more complete than having them immediately launch into space where HEY NOW THERE’S HAN and then HEY NOW THERE’S GANGS and HEY MAZ KANATA.

Firewatch doesn’t play out the missing time — but it lets us know it happened.

The One Firewatch Failure

You could say a lot of things about the narrative and about the game (and even about how the narrative is the game), but the one place where the game falls down for me is in the conclusion of its story. And here, by the way, we are venturing deep upriver to SPOILER TOWN.

ALERT

AWOOGA

LLAMA BLEAT

WILD GESTICULATIONS

WELCOME TO SPOILERS

The game does a very good job at presenting us with deepening, simple mysteries that when viewed together seem to point to a larger… something. A conspiracy. A murder. A dangerous delusion. You’ve got missing teen girls. You’ve got a missing firewatch man and his son. There’s a mysterious research station behind a fence — and god, how elegant is that fence? It’s so simple! HERE IS A FENCE IN THE WAY WHERE YOU DO NOT EXPECT A FENCE TO BE. You get so mad at that fence! Fuck that fence! What’s beyond it? NNNGH I WANNA KNOW. Someone is listening to you. There’s an unexplored cave. And then there’s the characters’ backstories — Henry and Delilah are so perfectly realized and wonderfully acted, and you realize both are incomplete people whose lives are not mysterious but are filled with mistakes. Henry in particular has a wife who is at an early age falling prey to dementia and that’s really important because it is key to his character and key to how the character deals with these mysteries.

Because he asks himself: am I the one falling prey to dementia? None of this stuff adds up. And as the characters become more paranoid about their situation, you as the player are forced to reckon with an unholy host of possibilities. Maybe there IS a conspiracy. Maybe there ISN’T and your shared paranoia with Delilah is driving you to commit terrible acts in service to an imagined attack. What about the missing kid? The teens?

But ultimately what happens is that the details all add up to a fairly soft revelation — the missing boy and his father are still in play. The boy is dead and the father never left the park and he’s kinda gone south mentally, and he’s just been fucking with you.

Which is fine. That works. But it works too easily. And you mostly figure that out by the time you get to the final act, and then you still have to get through the final act where you expect some further mystery or revelation — but mostly, everything is fine. The one twist is that we learn that Delilah lied on the radio and said that there never was any boy up there at all, which means his death is at least a little bit on her shoulders. The problem here is the order of that revelation. Learning that before you find the dead boy dampens the impact. If we instead learned it after, it would be a revelation rather than a soft unveiling.

What this leads to is a bit of a glitch in the magic trick.

Firewatch shows us the woman getting into the box.

Then it spins the box around and around and it gets out the saw.

The sawblades gleam. The woman cries out.

Then Firewatch puts the saw away and the woman gets out of the box.

Safe and unharmed, she toddles off the stage.

TA-DA, it cries. Except there isn’t much ta-da.

It’s maybe part of the point that the isolation and loneliness is not ideal for your mental state, and maybe running away from your problems just makes you invent new problems in their stead. Thematically it works, but narratively, it feels less than satisfying. It does not fulfill the promise of its premise. Okay, I guess? Neh? Meh?

That said, the game is still one of the most amazing I’ve played. It is a — well, whatever the equivalent of a “page-turner” would be in the video game sense. It’s a great mystery and has some of the sharpest writing I have ever encountered in a video game format. I adored these characters. It was worth the time and worth the money, and just wandering around the beautiful Olly Moss-inspired wilderness is its own reward. I just wish that in terms of the story, the ending had more to give us — that it allowed us some final twist, some wink, some last ta-da. There is a betrayal, but it is gentle and sad and disappointing in its dullness.

Do not let that be a counter, though, to you buying it.

Buy it.

Study it.

Study it some more.

Figure out what it does right and what it doesn’t do as well.

Then make that work for your own stories, regardless of their form.

I went off a bit the other day on Twitter regarding overcomplexity in fiction — I’ve seen it too many times now, especially across SFF and across thrillers or even horror novels, where convoluted characters motivations and plots get in the way of a damn good story.

A chief example of this in film right now is the James Bond franchise. The re-do of Casino Royale is a nearly perfect package — its packaging of the character and the plot are compressed so tightly, it turns an otherwise coal-black franchise into a shining fucking diamond. It’s a lesson they forget in the follow-ups, where the work just gets more bloated and convoluted and everyone seems to act in thrall to a blither-blather knot-tangle plot rather than acting in service to the elegance of the first Daniel Craig installment. Actually, Tarantino’s films have gone this way, too — Reservoir Dogs is about as tightly woven as they come. Then, with each successive release, his films get bigger and more tangled and seem more in service to his style and his lack of narrative control rather than to telling the aforementioned damn good story.

There’s a pretty good test for this, by the way — if you can take a character or a plotline and summarize it cleanly and concisely (bonus points for compellingly), you’re probably okay. If the summary ends up feeling convoluted and over-oxygenated in its unpacking, you might — not necessarily, but might — have a problem. This isn’t to say you can’t do a story that is big and sprawly and complex. But know that doing so takes special finesse — and even then, you’re better off building that sprawling story with simple bricks.

Even the most complex architecture is built with simple materials.

Here then is the Storify of the tweets in question (or click here if it fails to embed).