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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zad" data-source="post: 3383058" data-attributes="member: 90">About stories and writingAnd now, a bit of story-hour writing discussion. I think some of you lurking out there (and not lurking) are story hour writers too. While this campaign and the prior one have never had the legendary status of, say, Piratecat's, the hit count over time always has it showing up as a very well-read story, and I've fielded questions publicly and privately from authors and soon-to-be authors. This entry was a little different so I figured I'd babble about it for a bit. If that sort of thing is no interest to you, you probably want to skip this. Let's start with the ground rules. First, we've established a perspective in this story - first person from a borderline-involved party. (I think it's generally known who the narrator is at this point but I'm too lazy to look to see if we've come out and said it. Spoiler: [spoiler]The narrator is Elizabeth's psicrystal. This made it different from the prior story hour where the perspective was not of a PC but was of an entity with a view, so not third person.[/spoiler]We also have general guidelines - these are good story-hour writing practice that have grown over the years.  First, it's a good idea to give each character some camera time. Fighters and mages have a tendency for the spectacular and that can marginalize other characters. Second, combat is boring. Since this is a full-on babble, let's explore that a little.Combat is, generally speaking, dull for the reader. Especially if you fall into the natural tendency in D&D and describe it round-by-round, the way it happened. It makes for lousy story and bad tension and drama. Consider an action movie with multiple good guys/bad guys. They don't show GG1 punching, then cut to GG2 punching, then BG 3, then GG3, then BG2. It'd jar the viewer senseless. You spend some time showing a bit of action in one area, then the other, then the next. The viewer understands they're happening in parallel.Even when you reorder the temporal moves this way, it can be dull. A fight with a big dragon or boss deserves some attention, but the mundane business of hacking through the orcs in Room #27 can get dull. So the lesson here is that combat has to be written carefully or it will get dull and drag your story down. Generally speaking, character interactions make good drama and good story, while combat does not. Now let's pretend you're me. We played on Saturday night. We spent a little time in the traveling. We were attacked by a group of baboons which we drove off pretty easily. Then we found a caravan that had been attacked. Everyone was not just dead - they were missing, horses and all. The caravan had been attacked by something bestial but it wasn't robbed, however the strongbox had been opened and money removed. Then we found the bodies, skinned, salted, and staked to the cliff face above in a predator-like way. But this was a small part of the night. We spent most of the night doing a massive combat outside the inn. The whitespawn hunter and waves of 20 hordelings were quite a handful and it took all night to get through it. So it's Monday morning and you're going to write about this. You know combat is dull but that's almost all that happened. If you go light on the combat, you don't have much of a story. It deserves some attention but if you stretch it to fill the story (there's no set amount really) it'll drag. As I was getting ready for work, I had a thought. "Bet they'll be telling stories about it in that inn for a while."Inspiration followed. What if I change perspective just for this entry. The concept fell together quickly. A traveller shows up at the inn, overhears regulars, gets the whole story. Piece of cake. It can have a more dramatic flair, and it will read so much better as we establish the new characters/perspective and go through the drama of the attack from that viewpoint.Now as I was writing it, I added details to make it play out as you can see. But it became clear that I had another problem. Remember the rule about camera time for each character? I've got a couple guys, probably half asleep, half drunk looking through windows at a battle. What can they see? They see the girls in plate armor - they understand it. Swords, blood, etc. They see Glyph because he has glowy things. Can they tell he used an insignia spell to get a Bless spell on everyone? No, not really. Can they see Kris' support spells or healing? Did they notice when Ramir went to 0 hp at the end? No. Do they even notice Bellsin at all? Nope. Yes, I could have had them see it, but it would have been a stretch.So what do you do? My answer was to break the rule. It's a good rule, but it's not carved in stone. The objective here is a good story, and the story was better this way. I spoke to Bellsin/Aethramyr last night. He said:"If some half-drunk guy sees what I'm up to, then I suck."And he's right of course. Story is irrevocably linked to perspective. It's important when writing a story hour to have someone who has a good perspective with a broad view. (Assuming you're not doing third-person.) But that doesn't mean you can't make occasional departures and experiment in your writing. The results may surprise you.For what it's worth, the whole "I lub you Elishabeth!" thing just kind of happened as I was writing. It could easily have been Astrid.</blockquote>

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