Ask A.K. #3
What’s my writing process? How do I start? How do I stay focused?
I love all your comments about writing and since you seem to like answering questions about writing: I was wondering if you could elaborate on your writing process? How do you start writing? Where do you start? How do you keep focused? How do you decide what to include and what to exclude when you have several ideas for the same story? Or ignore these questions and fill them in yourself with whatever you'd like to share or not! I would love to hear your thoughts, thanks!!
Hey! I’m glad you find these posts about writing useful. The blessing and the curse of writing is that there’s no one right way to do it. Even when you think you’ve found a method that works for you, every new project throws you new and obscure problems to deal with. The only life preserver we have to grab onto is to talk to other people about it. So I may not have a million dollars or a book deal or anything, but I’m always happy to chat if you think it’ll help.
How do you start writing?
For my personal work, I always start with a character. Usually it’s the protagonist, but it could also be a team member or a love interest. Before I even have a story, I have to figure out who they are - what their dialogue sounds like, what they look like, what they wear. I’m not going to get anywhere with a plot until I’ve befriended this fake person and become invested in their journey. I’d say it comes from being active in fandom and playing RPGs with character creators, except that I did it for years before either one of those things was on my radar screen. Eventually, I’ll get to “I want to write a story about [X themes],” but the jumping off point is, “I have this character. What would their story be about?”
You may have heard the terms “plotter” and “pantser” when it comes to planning stories. I’m a plotter to a fault. I’m not comfortable climbing on the story horse and taking off until I have a solid idea of where it’s headed and at least some kind of outline. This is for two reasons. One, I know I’ll be working on the project for a while, so I have to build strong defenses against forgetting anything. There’s no guarantee that I’ll remember some cool plot development or line of dialogue eight months from now. In fact, odds are I won’t. The second reason is that I need to know whether the story’s concept has enough meat on it that the project idea is viable in the first place. We’ve all had an awesome setting with nothing for the characters to do, or a fun beginning with no conflict, or a series of scenes that lead nowhere. It hurts. It’s disappointing, and it can feed into an insidious mindset that you aren’t capable of completing anything. At the risk of sounding mercenary, I can’t afford to get 20,000 words into something and realize I’ve wasted my time.
When it comes to game writing for a studio, the pipeline is different. Usually, when I show up to work on a game’s story, the rest of the team has already started, so there’s material waiting for me. This could be a setting, or character concepts, or a rough idea of what they want to cover in the plot. In that case, my starting point becomes a lot more situational - whether it’s dialogue scripts, barks, or a plot outline, it’s my job to start in whichever corner they need me most.
Where do you start?
Once I had my characters - Marcus and Livia - as the seeds to begin Dangerous Crowns, the shoots came from a mental image of the two of them up late at night. I had a few visual details. I knew the room was a deep, dark blue. I could see Marcus sitting on the edge of a bed with drapes. I knew he would tell Livia that some ambiguous war was taking a toll on him, and I felt the rhythm of the conversation, if not the exact words. I wrote parts of the scene down as random bits of dialogue just to get it out of my system. I didn’t expect it to go anywhere.
And then, as the characters grew on me, I got other flashbulb images. I saw the two of them having a breakfast in a peristyle garden. I saw Livia riding through a forest with dappled light through the leaves. Then I saw the two of them making a pact to overthrow a king. Which king? Why? The scenes didn’t fit together, but they were adding up. Eventually I had an image of a fight in a throne room, and an argument in a treasury room, so those went in the pot, too. It’s not uncommon for end scenes to hit me early, before I have any idea what to do with them.
This is a peristyle, by the way. Photo by Sailko via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
And that’s how it happens. Moments pop up like nonlinear storyboards, and then I have to jot them down and figure out where they fit. It’s a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t start at the top corner and go left-to-right, I notch sections together based on whatever piece I find next.
I think having a blank page scares a lot of people off, so my goal is to get rid of the emptiness as soon as possible. When I start a story doc, I paste in my outline template and start filling it with junk. Just anything. Setting ideas, scene details, character notes. If I have a particularly compelling flashbulb that came with dialogue, I’ll paste in a chapter header and scribble the dialogue down. At this stage, I’m not even worried about proper formatting. Half the time, it has character tags and brackets like a 2007 AIM roleplay. It may not look like much - because it isn’t - but at least it’s not blank anymore.
How do you keep focused?
Well, if I’m writing for a check, it’s easy. I have deadlines. Deadlines can either terrify you or sober you, but you can’t run from them. I’m lucky and work all right under pressure instead of freezing up, and I’ve had a few years of practice, so I can take my marching orders and go. Whether it’s easy or enjoyable to focus on the work that’s due is irrelevant. It needs to be done on time, even if I have to pull a train with my teeth to do it.
So when I have a deadline to contend with, it falls on me to do two things: be realistic, and plan in advance. Because of that practice I mentioned earlier, I have experiential knowledge of how much I can write in one day before I burn out. I can push it once in a while if I really need to, but for the most part, that upper limit is non-negotiable. That means, if something is more than about 11- or 1200 words long, I can’t put it off until the day before it’s due. I’ll have to spread the word count evenly over every day leading up to the deadline, then front-load the first few days to minimize stress later.
On the other hand, with personal work, the deadlines aren’t there. I have the merciful luxury of taking as long as I want. To that end, I’ve just kind of accepted that doing a personal writing project is a slow, gentle ride. So far, I have not proven myself to be one of those writers who can strap in and bang out a novel in, say, three weeks. I admire both the pantsers and passionate binge-drafters of the writing world because I sense I don’t have those things in me. It’s always something - a paid assignment will come up that saps my energy, or I’ll get distracted with research, or spend too long trying to make one passage perfect.
There’s a paraphrased quote that nails the mindset i have about long-form work: “You have to get comfortable with the idea that you’re going to live with this project for the next year or two.” After a novel and about 800,000 words of game scripts, I will admit that this comfort comes a lot more easily. The more work I complete, the more faith I have that I can let my focus meander on a project and still get it done sometime.
How do you decide what to include and what to exclude when you have several ideas for the same story?
See, when it comes to this question, you’re the lucky one. On the spectrum of writing problems, that’s one I wish I had more often. One of the inherent flaws of the “flashbulb storyboard” method of scene-building is that it can be hard to envision those scenes any other way. I can struggle to bridge big plot beats together - yes, I’m one of those writers who’s bad with middles - and when I get feedback that something doesn’t work, it tends to stop me in my tracks. It’s tough when I have to re-rout a scene, or, god forbid, a major facet of the story’s premise because it’s factually implausible. I mean, if Scout X isn’t allowed in that building because it breaks military regs, what else could she do? She has to go there to advance the plot! And down the Jenga tower goes. (Thankfully, this isn’t an issue when I’m writing on a team. It’s always easier when you can bounce an idea off of someone else.)
On the rare instance that I do have more than one idea for a scene - or, more commonly, separate scenes that contradict each other - it boils down to survival of the fittest. I’ll leave those scenes on the back burner while I work on other stuff, and eventually, one will take the lead and edge the other out. For example, if I have two different ideas for a character’s backstory, I may find later that one is more symbolically meaningful. If I’m stuck between giving a character two different jobs, I’ll choose the one where they can use their professional skills to affect the plot. Long writing projects are already hard enough. If there’s a tie to be broken, I’m going with the one that makes my job smoother.
The writing process that works for you will be unique to you. It’ll play to your strengths and be a supportive brace for your weaknesses. It’s also not set in stone. I wrote the original answer to this in June 2019, when I only had a couple of game titles under my belt. I’ve gotten to work on several projects since then that have changed my perspective on how I write in general. That shift enabled me to make some additions to this article that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Keep your options open!
- A.K.