“I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work. Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life.”
~Bill Clinton
My first writing was journaling. After getting divorced, I found myself living in a tiny little Army Bachelor’s Officer’s Quarters apartment on base at Ft. Knox, KY. This was the first time I’d ever lived completely by myself, and the experience was in some ways unnerving. Added to that was the reality that I was then sleeping by myself for the first time in several years, and as a result, I developed insomnia. I kept looking around, waiting for someone to walk into my little apartment and start talking, and the fact that no one ever did was really hard for me to adjust to. Especially at nights. So I started journaling. Since I couldn’t come home and talk to my wife about my day anymore, I’d get out my little notebook and write about it. There’s a kind of peace that you can find in journaling that’s hard to describe if you’ve never experienced it. But eventually, I got kind of bored with just keeping a simple journal, and so I started trying to fictionalize some of the more outrageous experiences from my actual life. Professional wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin has described the process of creating his on-stage persona as essentially taking his real-life personality, dialing it up to eleven, and then letting it run wild. This was the same approach I took with my early fiction. My first stuff was basically about a lonely, heart-broken guy, except that instead of being a lowly soldier, the guy was a super-spy, and he was pining after a super-sexy enemy secret agent. It was very much the fantasy of a lonely man. In my favorite scene, our hero is seduced at gun-point, chained to a bed, and thereby allowed to wallow in his true feelings for his arch-enemy. He couldn’t get away. He was therefore free to love instead.
But although my early fiction had its moments, it was always missing something. It wasn’t focused. There was no story, and quite honestly, I didn’t know how to even begin addressing the problem. My first stuff was basically just a rambling series of random events. Sometimes it was entertaining. More often, it was a mess.
It didn’t have any structure.
So. Writing as a Game Master is different than writing as a novelist, but some things are similar. As a Game Master, you don’t control the characters. But you do control the situation. And to the extent that your story is going to have any structure—to the extent that it’s going to make sense as a story—it’s up to you to impose that structure. That doesn’t have to be a problem, but it can become one if we don’t have a framework from which to work when we’re planning our games.
I personally use an “ABCDE” structure that I learned, oddly enough, from Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri back before her now celebrated novel Namesake was released. I was taking a writing class at the time, and she was teaching. She wasn’t famous yet, she was just trying to make ends meet, and… well, I’m still not famous.
Anyway, her simple formula worked like this:
· A – Open on Action
· B – Backstory
· C – Conflict
· D – Development
· E – Ending
Now, maybe that’s self-explanatory, but even so, let’s take a little time and talk about it. In fact, let’s take the next few weeks.
Opening on Action is a straightforward concept. If you’ve ever seen a James Bond movie, you’ll know immediately what I’m talking about. We’re dropped straight into the middle of some life-or-death situation with little warning and absolutely no explanation. The music comes up, and suddenly James is getting it on with a bunch of bad guys who’re out to kill him. We rarely know why. We NEVER need to. However, while opening with a bang is easy in concept, it’s devilishly tricky to implement with either Fantasy or Science Fiction. Both genres require the writer to step outside the bounds of reality and imagine not only a different land, but oftentimes a completely different set of physics and mathematics and biology to go along with it. As a storyteller, then, it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to explain how that world works up-front so that folks will have a clue about what’s going on when they read all of the exciting action that we have planned for later on. Right? I mean, that makes logical sense.
The problem is that fiction isn’t reality. As a writer, we succeed when we draw our audience into the story. Unfortunately, spending our first ten pages on a physics or alternate-history lesson is not the best way to accomplish this goal. Indeed, the opposite is often true: we’d be much better off to make the reader guess. When you’re reader is interested but wondering what’s really going on you’re working from a good starting point.
“So alright,” you say, “I can see that I want to open with a bang. But look, it’s a GAME, not a novel. Don’t my players need to know the rules first?” But see, you’re already playing a game with rules. And your players know those rules. The fact that the bad-ass goblin chief is trying to kill them is an element of story, not an element for the rules lawyers to argue.
Opening on Action has virtue of getting the players involved in actual play right off the bat. Even if the “action” isn’t a fight of some kind, it should still be some kind of struggle. Because, bottom line, you want your players to bond with their characters right off the bat. That’s gonna happen when they—as their characters—overcome some kind of difficult challenge. The bigger the challenge, the bigger the triumph. And then, once that’s out of the way, you can start to introduce the other story elements like backstory and setting.
As a parting shot this week, let me just note that with the exception of Opening on Action, you don’t have to address the issues of background, conflict, development, and ending in any particular order. Once you’ve gotten your players successfully involved, it’s perfectly acceptable to tease out the realities of the situation for weeks—or even months! In fact, a lot of players LIKE a little bit of mystery. Again, when they’re wondering “what in the Hell is going on?” you’re probably doing something right.
And that’s all I’ve got for the old Playbook this week. Next week, we’ll talk Background and Conflict and maybe get into a bit of timing. Until then, have great week!
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