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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sialia" data-source="post: 2634349" data-attributes="member: 1025">I find that the Ceramic model is surprisingly good at lending direction.Piratecat once explained to me the secret of writing good 4 hour con modules: pick just three or four good scenes, and then let the party have free reign to ramble from one to the next, not necessarily in a specific order.This is exactly what the Ceramic competition does for my writing: it gives me four or five themes/moments I have to work towards. Structure, with a lot of freedom--time for exploration, imperative to motion.Always before, I would make good characters, and then they would sit there, doing nothing. The first time I ever cranked out a really long story that went somewhere all by itself was for Ceramic GM. (I don't count the storyhour writing because I wasn't controlling the defining events/themes--Piratecat was. I was just working out the path between them, and exploring what it felt like to walk on it.)The story got long last time because I stole something from Mythago, too. That was: if you're going to use something in a crucially defining moment, you have to introduce it before you get there. It has to already be in the world before you really need it to be there. It gets the reader off guard, and it makes things plausible. So with four or five things I had to work in for three rounds, and a desire to get them all in place before I got to the important moment, the story started looking like twenty four or thirty places I needed to explore, and it started turning into a novel quite on it's own.Last tip I learned from years and years of gaming: know what is in your characters' pockets before they ever walk out the door.  No two people carry exactly the same kind of junk around--if you can't tell your characters apart just from thier inventories, they aren't ready to walk out the door. When they get stuck, or you feel tapped out, go digging around in that list -- there is always something you can use, and it comes from a deep sense of who they are.</blockquote>

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