Eddy Rivas is one of the writers behind Red Vs. Blue, and it seems only appropriate that he’s here to talk about writing habits both good and bad he got from video games.

Bad: Tutorial Levels

You’ve just started a new game. You’re a zombie monkey slaying space marine with biceps that border on cancerous. It’s time to start teaching those undead monkeys who’s boss in this galaxy, but first, you’re going to have to listen to a technician teach you how to look up. And then down. And then maybe around in a circle for good measure (sometimes those biceps mess with your muscle memory).

The technician explains a bunch of Shit You Already Know about the world you’re about to lay to waste with amazing futuristic weaponry fine-tuned for ultimate zombie monkey destruction. You humor the kid because the game just started and you’re still not sure which button you should press to sprint headlong into adrenaline-fueled heroism.

This learning and teaching phase is somewhat necessary to orient a player with the mechanics of a game world, but makes your writing more hopelessly stuck than a beached whale who just ate its own weight in donuts. One of the things I have to ask myself when laying down info in the first chapter of a new project: does the reader absolutely need to know this information for the story to make sense at this moment?

Often, because I try to be clever, the biggest offender of this is dialogue between two characters that no sane person would actually utter in day-to-day conversation, like:

“Joe. You’re my brother-in-law and my partner in zombie monkey slaying. We went through training together at monkey slaying academy.”

I’m pretty sure Joe would look at you as if you were having a stroke, before wondering if maybe you’ve got the zombie monkey sickness. If it feels like it belongs in a videogame tutorial, it’s probably best to tuck away for future use.

We all skip those levels anyway.

Bad: Vanilla Character Builds

Because I’m a coward whose favorite type of ice cream is vanilla, I tend to play it safe when it comes time to build my characters in RPGs. This is most troublesome when assigning attribution points. Afraid to miss out on any particular stat (what if I need my intelligence high later on for the testicle-burning spell that I’ll probably never use because it requires too many skill points), I create a character more boring than AAA video games’ brown-haired white guy.

Unfortunately, this middle-of-the-road attribute character creeps into my writing as well. There have been times when I’m reading over my first drafts and have to ask the painful question: “why else should I root for this guy, besides the fact that he’s who we meet on page one?” I don’t always have an answer.

A good friend of mine just started Fallout 4 with a character who has max luck and max intelligence, and basically zero of every other stat. I’d be too terrified to play through the game that way, but it certainly is an interesting approach to creating a memorable character. What if we thought about our own characters in that way, maximizing particular traits to the derailment of every other part of their lives? We might end up with more Miriam Blacks, a true force of nature who tornados her way through each of her books from start to finish.

This is also one of the things I love about Red vs. Blue, the longest running show on the Internet (you’ll have to forgive my fanboy-ing, I literally wrote the book on it). The show’s characters basically have one trait maxed to 111, with all other traits somewhere in the negative threshold. It makes each character memorable and easily identifiable (the brightly colored armor helps, too), and is no doubt a huge contributing factor to why the show has outlasted so many others of its kind, and why it’s attracted an audience that rivals some of cable’s biggest shows.

Bad: Follow the Waypoint

“Master Zombie Monkey Killer, we need you to run over to Bullshit Canyon to take care of a generic problem because of Reasons. Clear out as many of those zombie monkeys as you can, and may God have mercy on your soul when you find out the secret twist that this is all leading to.”

In videogames, it’s usually pretty critical to have a destination marker of some kind (unless you’re in a Call of Duty, which is basically a long hallway disguised as a videogame, filled with explosions and bad guys). Much of the design of every space is meant to subtly (or not-so-subtly) push you forward, telling you where to be and when to trigger the next event.

I tend to treat my characters the same way.

While I’m a huge fan of outlines, one of the trappings of mapping everything out beforehand is that you start treating story beats like videogame waypoints. “Go here,” you tell the main character. “Learn this startling revelation.” “Join in on this rising action, fool.” “Get all up on that denouement.” But stories need to be more organic than that.

Trust me, I get it – we want to be sure we know where the story is heading at all times, so we can make it easier on ourselves. But what I usually find is the sections that are working the least are the ones that I plopped into the middle of the story from a very early stage, completely unwilling to budge on its inclusion. I created a waypoint, and I told the main character to get there because of Reasons.

Good: Co-Op Makes Everything Better

My regular Destiny fireteam bros hates me, because I refuse to do any mission by myself. I’m the needy guardian, constantly pestering people to join me to run through the new daily, even if it’s something that I’m totally capable of doing on my own.

What can I say, I love a good co-op experience.

In the same way that certain games become exponentially more fun the more humans you add to your play session (Borderlands comes to mind), our stories become instantaneously infused with tension and fire when we pair our heroes up with someone else – and the more conflicting their ideologies or goals, the better.

It might make sense to travel alone through a wasteland in a videogame, but our characters need other humans to butt heads with. They need someone else standing on the other side of the central conflict, or someone who sees the central conflict in a different way than they do, to really throw some lighter fluid into every scene. I can’t tell you how many of my early drafts put my main character traveling from point A to point B by herself, mulling over what happened in the previous chapter or wondering what’s going to happen in the chapter that follows. I’m usually left wondering who I can put in her path that might really piss her off her ruin her day even further.

So really it’s not that much different from playing co-op games at all.

Good: The Steady Build

The best videogames, like the best stories, meticulously build on themselves until the final chapters. What a good game does in the background is teach you how to play and defeat its next challenge, drip-feeding you new mechanics and variations to the ones you thought you’d previously mastered.

Nowhere is this displayed better than in the Portal games, which are basically tutorials for how to play the Portal games. By the end of each game, there is a zen like moment in the final chapters where you are using every jumping, portal-ing, twisting, momentum-gaining trick in the book to make you feel like the ultimate badass. It’s a steady, methodical build that gets you there, but one that pays off because the game is delivering on what it promised from the very start.

The best writing does this as well. It’s more than foreshadowing, and more than simply paying off a plot twist that was so subtly hinted back on page 2. The best stories build on themselves, creating a feedback loop of character motivation, central conflict and overarching theme that’ll eventually blow the speakers and send you careening through the air like Marty McFly. There’s a similar Portal-like zen moment that happens when you’re in the middle of a book that has also pulled this off, and there’s honestly nothing else quite so satisfying.

So the next time you boot up Zombie Monkey Killer, pay attention to how you’re being guided to the next zombie monkey to annihilate, what you’re learning to do and what comes next. Now turn that same attentive eye to your story.

You might just learn a thing or two about your own writing – for better or worse.

* * *

Eddy Rivas is a writer from Houston, Texas and the author of Red vs. Blue: The Ultimate Fan Guide, after being a fan of the show for more than a decade. A copywriter by trade, he moonlights as a writer for a number of web productions. His contributions to online video include Rooster Teeth’s Red vs. Blue, X-Ray & Vav and Day 5, as well as Web Zeroes, Revision 3’s first scripted sitcom, which he also starred in. When he’s not at work, playing video games or training in Krav Maga, Eddy writes for The Know, a popular gaming news show on YouTube.

Red Versus Blue: The Ultimate Fan Guide: Indiebound | Amazon

Yesterday, I wrote ten tips to get you tightening up the middle of your story, and the way to do that is to focus on the midpoint of the narrative. Right? Right.

I HAVE MORE THOUGHTS. SIT COMFORTABLY. STRAP IN. PLEASE HOLD STILL AS ROBOTS ADMINISTER MY THOUGHTS TO YOUR BRAIN WITH AN IDEA-INJECTOR.

The midpoint, as I noted, is not a long flat line — it’s not a stretch of horse-killing swamp or a sad pair of rain-soaked underwear hanging on a clothes line. It’s a knife in the table. It’s a sword cutting a rope. It’s a portcullis slamming down or a heart ripped out of a ruptured chest. It is a breach. It is drama and conflict. It is a state change, a pivot, a curtain pulled back to reveal the real show that’s been playing all along.

But it’s something else, too.

The midpoint creates tension between the first half and the second half of the story.

Let’s say you built two structures — towers, maybe — that will stand poorly on their own. We have a tree like this in our yard — two massive forking trunks that will inevitably fracture. The way we keep that from happening, and the way you would keep those two towers from falling, is by cabling them together. You let the weight of each pull against one another. They’re always just about to fall but never do, because of the tension held in that cable. Your story is like this.

The first half of your book is the beginning of the tale — the inciting incident, the introduction of the characters, the revelation of the problem. And then it’s what builds up from that. The second half of the story is a difficult, dangerous move to resolution. Maybe it’s a further climb or an uncontrolled descent, but the point is, you’ve got the end and climax coming, and you’re working toward that. The characters have taken agency. The stakes are bigger, or maybe they’re different than anyone thought they were. The midpoint provides tension between the build up of the first half and the unspooling of the second half. It is the cable forcing tension between the beginning and the end, and letting the weight of each provide that tension.

Practically speaking, that means that the midpoint is momentous. Something has to happen here. It isn’t just talk. It isn’t hemming and hawing. But it isn’t just some random event, either. A hard choice arises and must be made. A revelation arrives, or better yet, is forced. A character’s weakness is exploited. The character takes agency for herself, or sacrifices something. The character reaches a nadir and must climb out of it — or climbs to what he believes is the pinnacle and then is knocked from a great height. The midpoint must be a state change for the narrative — things go from solid to liquid, from order to chaos (or the reverse, sometimes). Something big has to change. Sometimes, everything changes at the midpoint. Character in particular is key to the midpoint. The big change isn’t just something that happens to the universe. It’s something that urges the characters or is urged by them. It’s linked to them, their goals, their problems. It exposes them, or demands they take action, or destroys their expectations. It may change their goal or even change who the characters believe themselves to be.

In the Star Wars original trilogy, that midpoint represents Luke shifting from believing Darth Vader is some faceless enemy to realizing that he is his father. It is the moment when he starts to shift his goal from defeating Darth Vader to believing he must redeem him. It is both so much better and so much worse than he ever knew. A straightforward physical goal becomes a complex, emotional one. Plus, the stakes are raised across the board. And our heroes, not the Rebellion, suffer a great loss at Cloud City. Han is gone — his debts have caught up with him. Leia is left reeling. Lando betrays them and then doubles back to betray the Empire. C-3P0 is in pieces. Vader, too, hits this midpoint. He has had a similar revelation from a different angle — he knows that he has a son, and he chooses not to kill him but instead to try to recruit him to the Dark Side. And he fails at it! It’s like Lucas kicked the story right off a cliff. That moment is huge! It ties the two ends of the whole story together. (The entire middle film of Empire Strikes Back does this really well, actually. It proves quite capably that the middle of a story needn’t just be filler.)

Here, then, is an exercise for you —

Pick a story. Movie, comic, book, whatever.

Or something you’re currently writing.

Identify in the comments —

What’s the midpoint?

What happens? Why is it momentous? What is the shift?

GO.

We tend to think of our stories as:

YEAH MAN WOOO BOOM INCITING INCIDENT AS THE TALE BEGINS.

And then:

YEEHAW FUCK YEAH IT’S THE END IT’S AN EVEN BIGGER BOOM AND ALSO A KABLAMMO AND THEN KSSHAOW AND FRRRBZZZT AND AHHH, NGGGGH SWEET CLIMAX.

We have these two moments — dramatic beginning and epic ending — and in the middle is…

What?

Often, we treat it like it’s a sagging clothesline. Dipping down in the middle with the weight of all that hangs upon it — supposedly clean clothes dragging in the dirt.

No. Fuck that shit, George. You must revise how you think of your story’s middle. It needn’t be some untended swamp, fetid and formless, in which your story will become mired.

Instead, think of it as:

The midpoint.

The middle of your story is not a straight line going up, down, or on a level plane. The middle of your story is a thing with shape. It has peaks and valleys all its own. It is not a two-dimensional line, but rather, it swoops and turns and loops like a roller coaster. (Bonus read: an older post talking about narrative architecture and the shape of story.) The midpoint has topography, man. It is not an invitation to let the story go lazy and loose but rather to keep it moving, up and down, left and right, through conflict and drama.

Here, then, are some quick tips to keep the middle of your book zipping and clipping along:

1. Do what Delilah says. (I had a similar point here, but it was wordier and more profane. Go read hers, which is as taut as the rubber band you wear on your braces. In fact, most times you can probably just go listen to her say stuff instead of whatever dumbness of mine.)

2. You know that thing in your book where you’re about to dwell over-long in one of the valleys? You’ve got all this plot-flavored stuff to explain and all these transitions to go through and the journey from Point A to Point Z feels long, so long? Skip it. Consider this a narrative exercise — leap the valley and jump right to the next peak. Meaning, get to the next cool part, and summarize — swiftly, now! — how the story got there.

3. Don’t shy away from the slow parts where you breathe some oxygen into the story, though. You need a little oxygen, if only because it’s flammable and you might need it to blow up the room later. A slow spot is okay — but even the slow spots need to be relevant and revelatory. Or at the bare minimum: interesting. Always. Be. Interesting.

4. Drama is conflict that is character-driven. Seize it. Characters lie, cheat and steal. They swindle and betray. They love when they shouldn’t and let hate take them over. They have affairs. They have lapses in judgment — some tiny, some huge, all consequential to the tale. They want, they need, they desire. They have problems. Exploit all of this. (Note that exploiting it too much leads to melodrama, not drama — though in certain story modes, melodrama can work, too.) The middle of your story is fertile for this kind of character shenanigans.

5. Rhythm is created when you alternate things. This is true in writing even a single paragraph — you write a long sentence here, a short one, a short one, a medium-sized one, etc. Then a short paragraph or series of dialogue bits with another big paragraph. This is true too in the shape of the story — a big chapter next to a small one, a slow moment followed by a fast one, a bit of character introspection that leads into an action scene. The middle sometimes falls prey to a gross uniformity, which leads to a loss of rhythm. Do not let the middle be monotone. Look at the shape of music. Then listen to it — listen to how music handles its center. Ape that.

6. The midpoint is a knife stuck suddenly in the center of a dinner table — thwack! It is a dramatic breach — there, at each end of the table are the beginning and the climax. Two guests dining. Between which is a fucking knife stabbed into the hard wood. Why is it there? Examine the knife. Exploit it. Find the knife in your narrative. What is the blade stuck in the middle? What does it say? What conflict emblemizes it? Seize that edge.

7. The thing you think is the actual end of your book? Bring it to the midpoint. Sounds extreme, but try it — drag it forward and plant it smack in the middle. Now the latter half of the book is unclaimed and unknown territory. It is unimagined by both you and the reader. Who knows what lurks there? HERE THERE BE ENDER DRAGONS.

8. The midpoint is not just a knife — it’s a catapult. What I mean is this: an event will take the characters and launch them into the next half of the story. The event must propel them — it must give them dramatic urgency, it must fling them forward. The stakes are upped or changed. The plan is ruined. All seems lost, or a victory that was won is now false. The word “change” is key, here. A change of state is significant — something has shifted, and now the playing field is different. Maybe the whole goddamn game is different.

9. Behold and correct passivity. I make a lot of noise where characters have to be active over passive, but there is a middle-ground here where a character is reactive. Meaning, the story presents them with a problem external to them and they are forced to react accordingly. Still, though, at a certain point the character has become active over reactive — not necessarily “gaining the upper-hand,” but gaining agency. The midpoint is an excellent time for exactly this. It represents just the sort of turning point readers seek in the middle of the story.

10. Throw out the rules. Not necessarily the internal story rules (which may be unseen but should remain consistent) — but your overall plan for them. Got an outline? Now’s a good time to scrap it. Writing is often an act of constantly checking your gut. I can feel when I think the story is starting to go boggy — I trust my instinct and I act on that. When that happens, I search for a way to break things I did not expect to break. I jump out of the plane with no parachute acquired. I find a character to kill, a thing to blow up, a relationship to begin or detonate — I reach out blindly for the toys in my sandbox to see what I can do to smash them together, change their story and modify the action. Fuck my plan. Screw my outline. The only thing that matters is whether or not the story is working right there on the page. Midpoint is a great check-in time for this. When in doubt? Improvise, escalate, and ‘asplode stuff. *hits big red comical button*

Ta-da! Ten tips. Use ’em or lose ’em.

Now go write more stuff.

Reminder:

30 DAYS IN THE WORD MINES is a 30-day writing regimen. $2.99 at Amazon, or 33% off directly if you use coupon code NANOWRIMO.

The NaNoWriMo Storybundle is live — 13 books with another 12 if you meet the $25 threshold. You will note that the bonus tier contains one of my books so go grabby-grabby.

Finally, if you want a lot of my tips and tricks and DUBIOUS WORDTHINK agglomerated, look no further than The Kick-Ass Writer, out now from Writer’s Digest: Indiebound or Amazon.

Imagine that Person A has a sandwich.

He says to me, “Damn, this sandwich is delicious. Best sandwich I have ever eaten.” He describes its ingredients in detail: a bounty of meats and cheese and rare mustards, mm-mm-mm.  Then he says, “We should all share this sandwich.” And you think, dang, that’s very nice of him.

So, you take a quarter of the sandwich for yourself and then you pass the rest along. Maybe you’re hungry, so you take a bite. Or maybe you decide to wait for later and let someone else eat it.

If only you have peeled back the bread and looked inside because it’s just — I mean, it’s just full of scat. Turtle turdlets and otter dung and the sloppy mess from an irritable gopher.

Don’t worry, nobody really fed you a shit-filled sammy.

But also, definitely worry, because the truth is much worse.

Truth is, the internet’s informational sharing mechanism is pretty much that. It’s a lot of people passing shit sandwiches around, ignorant of or pretending they’re not actually shit sandwiches.

Given the horror show present in places around the globe recently — Beirut, Paris, and so forth — the informational sharing mechanism has been like ordure fertilizing a garden of only ordure. During times of crisis and concern, the misinformation shared often seems to spike sharply for reasons both sinister and foolish. Some folks want to actively share propaganda, and other people who spread the propaganda around because it sounds awfully good and awfully true and so surely it’s not propaganda at all (spoiler warning: it is). The most sinister of propaganda is the stuff that doesn’t read like propaganda at all. It sounds sensible. It comes from smart-sounding folks. Maybe it even comes from a primary major media source. Or! Maybe it comes from a friend. And we trust friends. Above all others. The circle of trust amongst people can be tighter and stronger than any other bond, and we like to think it keeps out bad ideas but sometimes it does the opposite — it traps the bad stuff within where we all huff it like glue.

This is easily solved, at least on the Internet.

It’s called “just fucking Google it.”

You know the paranoid phrase IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING?

Add a new one to your panoply of phrases:

BEFORE YOU FUCKING SHARE IT, JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

Because usually, the order of operations goes like this:

a) see a thing

b) maybe read it all the way through or maybe just enjoy the insightful headline

c) SHARE IT LIKE SYPHILIS

Here, I would add a mere extra step:

a) see a thing

b) maybe read it all the way through or maybe just enjoy the insightful headline

c) FUCKING GOOGLE IT

d) determine whether or not you should share this thing or not

The impetus behind me asking for a slight shift in your Internet information-sharing habits is this: on Facebook, that most fertile breeding ground of dum-dummery, someone I was “friends” (air quotes are key) with shared a post from some ministry that was also so “patriotic” I’m pretty sure the writer ejaculates every time he sees an American flag. This post was all about how HEY GUESS WHAT JAPAN NEVER HAD ANY MUSLIM TERROR ATTACKS BECAUSE JAPAN KEEPS THEM MUSLIMS OUT, and then it goes on — sounding very factual and intellectual and actually not at all like my frothy caps-lock tone suggests! — to lay out its case with facts and details. Japan doesn’t allow Muslims into the country, Japan doesn’t allow the study of Islam, and only a “few hundred” Muslims even live in the country. I mean wow. Who knew?

So very simple and straightforward, right? Japan is safe because Japan closed its doors to Islam.

Full stop. End of story. Huzzah and hooray.

Now, let’s for a moment try to see past the sheer irony of someone like this using Japan as an example — I say ironic because I’m guessing that this dipshit would normally froth at the mouth if he even heard the words “Pearl” and “Harbor” in the same sentence. Further, let’s also look past the fact that even if it were all true, that doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t make it simple…

It’s all bullshit.

Which is easily discovered through the strategy of —

Wait for it.

Waaaaaaait for it.

JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

All you gotta do is take like, less than two minutes of your life and Google it. Hell, Google already had this one locked and loaded in the chamber, as it auto-filled the search term for me. It’s not only bullshit, it’s old bullshit — years-old from one of those chain letter e-mails you probably got from your racist grandpa. And it takes a shallow dive to see the author of the piece is a one of two authors who co-wrote this lunatic e-book about immigration (spoiler warning: its cover offers a big red clumsy font and an image of the burning World Trade towers) and whose entire presence on the Internet is a racist sham. (I’m not linking to any of this because, really, ugh.) And of course statistically, the 1.6 billion Muslims globally could not possibly be related to the fractional number of terrorists in the world, so tying one to the other is super-dubious and…

Point is, it took me no time at all in my day to suss this out. It took as much effort as it takes to clean a filthy window so that you can see through it more clearly.

It’s not your fault. Our brains are poorly wired. You know how like, Dell computers come pre-loaded with lots of junk-ware? Our brains come loaded with a lot of the same crummy software. Fallacies and fritzing logic centers and synaptic tangles that let us trust anecdotal information over statistical reality. Surely once upon a time this bloatware probably helped us defend ourselves from baboon attacks or something, but those days are gone, and now as we sit plump and happy anxious in our office chairs, we have to defeat our fucky reptilian brains and cleave to some kind of logic. Particularly when sharing information — because information creates for us a story, and story is important. Narrative matters. That’s why propaganda exists.

Here someone will probably say, WELL IT HAPPENS ON BOTH SIDES, and sure, yeah, yes, it does. And I’ve done the thing too where you share something and then learn fairly quickly that it’s old, outdated, or just plain wrong-o. Thing is, the power of JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT is that it will limit the bullshit on all sides of a thing. It’s not perfect, no. It will not grant you 20/20 vision — certainly you have to possess reason and common sense, and further, Google is capable of floating bullshit to the top of the pond, too. And sometimes it’s not as easy as taking just a minute or two of your time. Sometimes it takes some actual reading! (gasp.) Just the same, in my experience it’s still a very good start. God knows, you might even learn something in the process.

So, repeat after me:

BEFORE YOU FUCKING SHARE IT, JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

Truth will out. And, hopefully, Google will out, too.

(Small call to action, here: if you are capable of donating to charity, please consider doing so. Charity Navigator will rate charities for you and show you vital statistics of each charity, and so you might want to look at Doctors Without Borders, or the American Refugee Committee.)

We are just over the midpoint hump in NaNoWriMo — so it’s time to check in, see how you’re doing. I’ll have a post later about dealing with the midpoint of your book, but in the meantime, how has it been for you? How is the book? How and what is your process? If this is your first time doing NaNoWriMo, how do you find it?

I’m unofficially participating, as I do with many months — I’m presently just over 41,000 words, though that’ll slow down because I travel this week and because next week is the TURKEY PARADE that is Thanksgiving. I am dubious that my 41,000 words are worth a single good goddamn, but that’s the burden most writers bear regarding their own work. Show me an author who is uniformly pleased with everything she writes all the time and I will show you an ANDROID WHO MUST BE UNMASKED BEFORE IT MURDERS ALL OF HUMANITY.

So, status updates — let’s hear them.

Man, I didn’t do a flash fiction challenge last week, did I?

I AM DOPEY MCGEE.

Anyway, this week, let’s make it easy. Go to your favorite music playing app or device, spin up a random song either of your own or from a service like Pandora.

The title of the song is now also the title of your story.

And you should listen to the song and take from it inspiration to tell the tale.

You’ve got 1000 words.

Post at your online space.

Link back here in the comments so we can all read it.

Due by next week — Friday the 20th, noon EST.