Radiating Gnome
Adventurer
Rune asked me to elaborate on this idea in a discussion on the Iron DM list, and I moved it here just to stop hijacking that board with my mumbling
We had been discussing the idea of Creative Writing programs, and a “formal” education in creative writing, and how it prepares a writer to work in Genre and game writing.
I should preface this by saying that my experience shouldn’t be taken as universal, even if I do think I can get pretty close to the heart of the situation for most students in writing programs.
My boring story of “becoming” a writer: I drifted into the creative writing program as an undergrad. I started out, like a lot of geeks like me who end up in those sorts of classes, writing genre stuff – detective stories, fantasy, etc. My writing professor at that point shut me down quick – called it “pulp” and advised me to write that stuff with my left hand – and not to show it to him. He wanted to see something that was literary.
So I settled in to the literary writing thing, learning to write the way they wanted me to write. And I’m okay at it. Mine isn’t going to be a name you’ll see on the NYT bestseller list any time soon. I always promised myself, as an undergrad and later as a grad student, that I would go back some day and apply the things that I learned as a student of writing in the existing system to the genre stuff I grew up with – science fiction and fantasy.
So I finished my MFA a little while ago, and when I finished I started to go back to science fiction and fantasy – stuff I hadn’t read much for years – this time to read as a writer, and relearn the genre conventions so I could give it a try myself.
And it’s a tough transition – tougher than I expected. Most of the things I learned to strive for as a literary fiction writer don’t do very well in a fantasy or sci-fi setting. The rules are different.
Am I boring you yet?
So, to get to the meat: The easiest way to try to illustrate the difference between literary writing and genre writing is to think about the difference between an action/adventure movie like Lord of the Rings and an art film like Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, which has strong action movie tendencies.
LOTR is a movie that was driven by plot. There are characters, and they’re interesting to a point, but for the most party they’re fairly simple characters. Sam is the embodiment of loyalty. He doesn’t have a lot of depth of character beyond that. None of the characters really surprise us in the movie – not just because we’ve been reading those books for the past 60 years, but because the characters are fairly static and predictable. The conflict takes place outside the characters, between good and evil, and we don’t think about things like camera angle, framing, or many of the other artistic parts of the process as we enjoy the film. For the most part.
Ghost Dog is a very different sort of action movie. There’s a lot of ambiguity, for one thing. Although the movie follows the Forest Whitaker character, we understand that he’s isn’t a good guy or a bad guy, he’s just trying to make his way in the world the same as the rest of us. His struggle is a very human, real-world struggle, despite the trappings of an action movie and his taste for samurai philosophy. And, at the same time, our attention is drawn to the artistic elements of the film. A boat built on the top of a building in the middle of New York City. Creative casting, even, and the presence of images and elements in the film that are there to draw attention to the film itself, as a piece of art, and not just serving to further the story.
Mind you, I loved both movies, and think LOTR is a great film as well as a great movie, but Jackson’s movie is more invested in storytelling than in art, and Jarmush’s film is more interested in the art than in the story.
In a writing program there is very little discussion of plot in a piece. The conventional wisdom says that plot is just an expression of character, and that the originality and complexity of the character is what really matters. The plot is secondary at best – it’s just a chance for the character to behave. Genre writing tends to be the opposite—the characters are pretty standard, simple characters – with perhaps a flaw here or there, something to make them a little different, but not the kind of ambiguity and complexity of a character in a more Literary piece.
So I learned about story structure, the problems and traps of exposition, the various tools of the trade, but when I turned my attention to genre writing, there were things that were left out.
And when you turn that a step further to writing for a game, a game in which the central characters need to be not just static and predictable, but a hole left for the players to fill, that’s something else entirely.
My own approach to writing original adventures for my campaign centers around character – the characters of the major NPCs in the adventure. I try not to plan the plot out too much ahead of time – the major bad guys are as developed as they can be, and then I ad lib their actions and reactions as the story unfolds. That takes me very far away from my roots as a writing student, but the exercise of trying to figure out what a given character would do in a situation is fun. I have gone so far, when I was underprepared for a session, to arrive with a handful of characters that I created using a combination of Jamis Buck’s NPC generator and
Of course, when I sit down to try to write something that I might submit elsewhere, for other DMs to run, I need to write out a lot more, lay out a lot more plot than I usually do for my own games.
So, are there other creative writers out there? Anyone have a similar or different experience? What sort of advice would be give to a young writer who wants to write genre stuff and is thinking about entering a program?
I’ll shut the hll up now.
-rg
We had been discussing the idea of Creative Writing programs, and a “formal” education in creative writing, and how it prepares a writer to work in Genre and game writing.
I should preface this by saying that my experience shouldn’t be taken as universal, even if I do think I can get pretty close to the heart of the situation for most students in writing programs.
My boring story of “becoming” a writer: I drifted into the creative writing program as an undergrad. I started out, like a lot of geeks like me who end up in those sorts of classes, writing genre stuff – detective stories, fantasy, etc. My writing professor at that point shut me down quick – called it “pulp” and advised me to write that stuff with my left hand – and not to show it to him. He wanted to see something that was literary.
So I settled in to the literary writing thing, learning to write the way they wanted me to write. And I’m okay at it. Mine isn’t going to be a name you’ll see on the NYT bestseller list any time soon. I always promised myself, as an undergrad and later as a grad student, that I would go back some day and apply the things that I learned as a student of writing in the existing system to the genre stuff I grew up with – science fiction and fantasy.
So I finished my MFA a little while ago, and when I finished I started to go back to science fiction and fantasy – stuff I hadn’t read much for years – this time to read as a writer, and relearn the genre conventions so I could give it a try myself.
And it’s a tough transition – tougher than I expected. Most of the things I learned to strive for as a literary fiction writer don’t do very well in a fantasy or sci-fi setting. The rules are different.
Am I boring you yet?
So, to get to the meat: The easiest way to try to illustrate the difference between literary writing and genre writing is to think about the difference between an action/adventure movie like Lord of the Rings and an art film like Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, which has strong action movie tendencies.
LOTR is a movie that was driven by plot. There are characters, and they’re interesting to a point, but for the most party they’re fairly simple characters. Sam is the embodiment of loyalty. He doesn’t have a lot of depth of character beyond that. None of the characters really surprise us in the movie – not just because we’ve been reading those books for the past 60 years, but because the characters are fairly static and predictable. The conflict takes place outside the characters, between good and evil, and we don’t think about things like camera angle, framing, or many of the other artistic parts of the process as we enjoy the film. For the most part.
Ghost Dog is a very different sort of action movie. There’s a lot of ambiguity, for one thing. Although the movie follows the Forest Whitaker character, we understand that he’s isn’t a good guy or a bad guy, he’s just trying to make his way in the world the same as the rest of us. His struggle is a very human, real-world struggle, despite the trappings of an action movie and his taste for samurai philosophy. And, at the same time, our attention is drawn to the artistic elements of the film. A boat built on the top of a building in the middle of New York City. Creative casting, even, and the presence of images and elements in the film that are there to draw attention to the film itself, as a piece of art, and not just serving to further the story.
Mind you, I loved both movies, and think LOTR is a great film as well as a great movie, but Jackson’s movie is more invested in storytelling than in art, and Jarmush’s film is more interested in the art than in the story.
In a writing program there is very little discussion of plot in a piece. The conventional wisdom says that plot is just an expression of character, and that the originality and complexity of the character is what really matters. The plot is secondary at best – it’s just a chance for the character to behave. Genre writing tends to be the opposite—the characters are pretty standard, simple characters – with perhaps a flaw here or there, something to make them a little different, but not the kind of ambiguity and complexity of a character in a more Literary piece.
So I learned about story structure, the problems and traps of exposition, the various tools of the trade, but when I turned my attention to genre writing, there were things that were left out.
And when you turn that a step further to writing for a game, a game in which the central characters need to be not just static and predictable, but a hole left for the players to fill, that’s something else entirely.
My own approach to writing original adventures for my campaign centers around character – the characters of the major NPCs in the adventure. I try not to plan the plot out too much ahead of time – the major bad guys are as developed as they can be, and then I ad lib their actions and reactions as the story unfolds. That takes me very far away from my roots as a writing student, but the exercise of trying to figure out what a given character would do in a situation is fun. I have gone so far, when I was underprepared for a session, to arrive with a handful of characters that I created using a combination of Jamis Buck’s NPC generator and
Of course, when I sit down to try to write something that I might submit elsewhere, for other DMs to run, I need to write out a lot more, lay out a lot more plot than I usually do for my own games.
So, are there other creative writers out there? Anyone have a similar or different experience? What sort of advice would be give to a young writer who wants to write genre stuff and is thinking about entering a program?
I’ll shut the hll up now.
-rg