Silly writing post (Patreon)

Hello, I decided to take a full-fledged break the past two weeks because I'm in a slump. I'm slightly sick and had just cut down significantly on sugar, since I used to drink several Mountain Dews a day. I did draw some concept art for one of the next enemies I'm going to make, but it was looking a little too cartoony for my liking, and I need to find a way for it to make sense. Or maybe I don't and I'm just overthinking it. I also fixed some issues with Grugga on the side, such as netcode bugs, its behavior with multiple players, and improving the "following shot" type. I've also commissioned someone to make a certain 3D model for the ending of Lethal Company, and that is coming along very well.

My main project the past two weeks has been starting a new book. In 2018, my book called Between Music and Silence just kind of happened spontaneously. (I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that I had just read every single thing written by C.S. Lewis.) The first draft was finished by the end of that year, and the manic excitement I had working on that was crazier than any game I've worked on.

Writing stories is not like making games

What I discovered is that writing a book is very exciting because eventually you will find that you are telling yourself the story. Even if you outline a plot beforehand, you will find your characters constantly outgrowing your outline and doing things you didn't expect, causing you to course-correct. That's because no matter how character-focused you make your outline, it is still the eagle's-eye view of their journey. For characters to feel alive, they have to be the ones driving the plot of their story. And it seems to me like the only way to know for sure where your characters will drive your plot is to write them going through it. You just can't treat writing fiction like you do with games; making games is like building weird, eccentric machines, but writing stories is like putting on a live performance.

So what I had was a very good, solid plot with characters that were not in control of it, in a world that was practically empty. The book was terrible.

But there are two chapters in it which I'm still really proud of, and I've always believed something went right here. They are the backstory chapters of Thrin, the side character. So after I made a massive text document analyzing all the large-scale problems with this story, I decided to take her story and make a new one based on her. This is something I've always considered but never acted on.

I am trying to learn from my previous mistakes, which are 1. to let the characters fully drive the plot, and 2. to not take any shortcuts when it comes to world-building. What's funny about the old book is that its world was consistent but took crazy leaps to explain why it was completely empty and boring. No more of that.

World-building is one of the things I feel most inept at. I'm very slow at coming up with details that feel like they fit in, and for some reason I'm more critical of this aspect than I am of plots and characters. And while some people are quite good at filling in the blanks of their world as they write, I am not. So I'm not going to rush this part. I actually feel like I am actively stretching my imagination. I can feel my brain growing. swelling uiuuuueauuueeauuuuueoauoooou

Writing is probably not something I'll ever be really good at. I think I found my natural talent in making games. But that makes writing fun, because it's an enormous challenge and little wins are really big. I'm also getting back into reading. I finally picked up the Lord Of The Rings, and after that I'm finally going to continue The Stormlight Archive, which has been on my mind since I paused it in 2020. Yikes

In the next post, I'm almost sure I will have made massive progress on Lethal Company. There is a lot of fun to be had over the next couple weeks.