Category Archives: Guest Posts

The Monster Looms

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monsterA guest post by Mary Villalba

The monster looms. The “to-do” list is long and the day short. Armed with coffee and good intentions I begin to tick off tasks. The pile before me like the Sorcerer’s brooms inexplicably grows. By noon, I have managed to lob off more than just those items listed, but I have also laid down another twenty to fill the space between noon and eleven pm, when I will fall exhausted, but satisfied, into bed looking back on the day with pride in my productive behavior!

The problem? The have-to list crowds out the want-to list. I want to do a final edit on my first novel and fine tune the synopsis. I want to sell millions of copies of my book. I want to post “author” legitimately on my FaceBook profile. Why can’t I?

Another writer and lecturer whom I greatly admire, Barbara Sher, came up with the term “resistance”, which pretty much sums it up. What is it that creates resistance to doing the things you want to do? As an overachieving, type-A personality I have gone through my own life determinedly setting goals up on fence posts and shooting them off. At twelve I determined that I would live in the most exclusive neighborhood in Denver; at twenty-nine I moved in to the house I built there. When it became clear to me that there was a great need for services for the hearing impaired in third world countries a doctor and I created the World Hearing Network, which is today the most successful outreach program for the hearing impaired in the world. I decided the Rocky Mountain District of Kiwanis should have a female governor at the helm, and became the first female elected to the position in eighty-five years. The ridiculously long list of accomplishments goes on and on. It should be easy for me to apply the same ambition to my writing, but it isn’t. So, as much as I hate to be introspective, it must be time for me to look at why I am holding myself back.

Yes, I am the reason I have not overcome the monster inertia. We, I, reach plateaus where the level of risk and reward become just about even. I don’t anticipate a greater reward for my writing than there is risk in exposing my inner-self and my writing to others; so I stop. I suppose that if there was a champion cheering me on with a contract for a million books I might be more motivated to take a chance on myself. Risk versus reward. Ah ha! In the rest of my life I create my own rewards, but when it comes to writing I can’t envision a real world reward coming my way.

Crawling back into my head and rummaging around I see the box labeled “get a job”. When I open it up it contains letters from parents who grew up pre-depression era. They want me to set concrete goals and they want me to be realistic about what I can and cannot do. The letters indicate they don’t think I can live in the neighborhood I picked, they don’t think I can build my dream empire, but, wait………I did! They were not my champions, I was my own champion.

In my mind, I set that box on fire and sweep the ashes out of my head.

Hmmmm; now what? See the problem, solve the problem, move on! Eureka! I can approach writing the same way I have approached every other goal in my life. So, today, right now, at the top of my to-do list I have written “finish synopsis.” It will get done today, because I will give myself a reward for getting the task done and because the risk of negative feedback burned up in the mental box I’d been carrying around for the last sixty-five years!

Take a look in your own attic and see what you can clean out! Then get to work!! You have a lot to accomplish and I, for one, will be your champion! I believe in you and know you can do it!! And, BTW, I’m posting “author” on my FaceBook profile right now!

Guest Writer Bio:Mary Villalba
“It’s about time” is a good description for taking up novel writing at her age!  Mary started writing stories and poetry when she was about six years old, and over fifty years of her professional life as a real estate broker and owner of her own strategic marketing company she has used language as a communication tool, even holding press credentials, but writing a novel was beyond her wildest dreams.  It was a group of inspired writers half her age who threw her off the cliff and into the waters of authorship.  She is very grateful they didn’t stop to ask her if she knew how to swim!

Inspiration by Imitation

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A guest post by Brenda Sawatzky.

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you,
whose presence calls forth your best.
—Epictetus

I’m relatively new to the world of writing, still a fledgling searching for my deep, commanding, authoress voice, beckoning readers to visit the world as viewed through my eyes. I long to be regarded among the Ann-Marie MacDonalds of fiction, the Erma Bombecks of humour writing. How do they do it? Is it a latent talent bestowed on a few lucky stiffs? A creative gene passed on from the early Neanderthal cave sketchers or Sumerian hieroglyphic scribes?

While I work out the troubling answer to that, I pen my thoughts, just in case while jotting down my grocery list one day I find myself crafting an exceptionally creative work of genius and say, “Eureka! I think I’ve got it.”

I’m really too new to the craft to be plateauing just yet. From my position somewhere near the base of the steep, craggy hillside, the plateau isn’t even visible. I’m still longing for the plateau. But I do understand what it’s like to desire to do better, to keep my eyes focused on the prize, to search for the genius within. I’ve joined writers workshops, registered with an online writing course, looked to mentors, and created a blog to feel the thrill of finding forty-odd people in cyberspace who want to read my stories.

41WNVSW4JWL._SY300_I’ve read books on writing, editing, and grammar. One of my favourites is titled On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. Zinsser says, “Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I’d say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.” And so, I turn to the great sages of the written word, authors who captivate me page after page with descriptive metaphor and sublime prose. Authors who know the craft of taking a simple grouping of alphabets and weaving them into a picture in my head that leaves me breathless and wanting more.

I look to classic novelists like John Steinbeck, carefully analyzing his ability to spend the first four pages of The Grapes of Wrath telling me that there was a drought and the crops were poor, and holding me mesmerized throughout. And I turn to Erma for a whimsical look at the everyday, who teaches me to find the ludicrous in the fundamental truths of life. And on to Ann-Marie for a sensory adventure, first allowing myself to be drawn deeply in, then re-reading, underlining and objectively dissecting under a microscope.

These authors, and others, uplift me; their words call forth my best. In a writing slump, I always turn to a good read, revelling in how their writing speaks to me and how I might imitate what they do.

But at times, even then, when the blank page of the computer monitor stares back at me, when I struggle for the bait to place on the hook of my opening line, when I’ve blown a circuit in my creative juicer, sometimes I just need to walk away. As writers we may not have an “on” button but we do have a “kill” switch, and sometimes it’s best to turn off the computer and get our negative selves out of the way of the creative processes. Invention often occurs when we’re not “in the lab.” Answers often come when we’re not looking.

Author Bertrand Russell described it succinctly: “If I have to write upon some difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with great intensity—the greatest intensity of which I am capable—for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak (to my subconscious mind), that the work is to proceed underground. After [some time] I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done.”

I do this by finding a physical outlet where I can quiet my mind from distraction—walking or cooking. Some of my best ideas come to me when lying in bed just moments before my brain shuts off for the night. The key is to have a pen and notepad beside the bed.

Other key creativity boosters are self-imposed exercises, such as focusing on an item in its simplest form and describing it in as many delicious, sentient words as possible.

Recently I discovered the Bulwer-Lytton contest, challenging writers to pen the worst possible opening line to a fiction novel. Entries come in from around the world and it’s truly amazing just how crafty and creative bad opening lines can be. I’ve submitted a few and it’s an enormously fun challenge. This, also, is great distraction that keeps my writing muscles flexed and oiled for the real task at hand—serious writing.

Most important of all is to release the steam from my self-imposed pressure cooker, to take my time, and to remember Zinsser’s words: “You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.”

Brenda PicGuest Writer Bio:
Brenda Sawatzky is a relatively new, unpublished writer hailing from the wide-open prairie spaces of southeast Manitoba. She and her husband of thirty-one years are self-employed and parents to five kids (two ushered in by marriage). She is presently working toward fiction and non-fiction writing for magazines and manages a personal blog.

From Zork to Halo and Back Again, Part Two

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2389904-master_chief_in_halo_4_wide[1] A guest post by Aaron Scott Hildebrandt

If you haven’t done so yet, make sure you read From Zork to Halo and Back Again, Part One.

Computers, as a storytelling medium, are separated by the mediums that preceded them by a simple but important difference–computers are technology, and technology is constantly shifting. At first, personal computers were glorified word processors, and naturally some of the first stories told on computers were the same stories we had been telling in books, but with some added eyestrain.

It wasn’t long, however, before the medium evolved. With computers, stories could be manipulated in ways that were never possible with just a printed page. Out of this one of the earliest computer game genres was born: interactive fiction. Essentially, these were books that cast the reader as the main character, telling stories in second-person while giving the reader control over where they went and what they did. It’s a setup we’d already seen in previous mediums; the Adventures of You books, followed later by the Choose Your Own Adventure series, played with this very effectively, though the interaction you could have with the book was confined to choosing one of several predefined paths through the narrative.

Role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons (the direct inspiration for the first piece of interactive fiction ever written, Will Crother’s Colossal Cave Adventure), used a mixture of written and oral storytelling to achieve this. But computers could do this on a much more impressive level–stories could have more variation, more interactivity, and could achieve this without the reader/player having to rely on another person to tell the story, or dice rolls to determine random outcomes. It was awesome. It still is.

It wasn’t just interactivity that set computers apart as a medium. In 1992, William Gibson’s poem “Agrippa” took advantage of the fact that, on a computer, words were mutable; as you read the work, it deleted itself from the device it was stored on, driving home the poem’s feeling of loss. When all computers could do was store and manipulate text, it created a fertile ground for experimentation. We can thank this era for some of the most impressive examples of the medium, such as Steve Meretzky’s philosophical masterpiece A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling’s definitive game Zork (and its numerous sequels).

But as I said, technology shifts. After a while, computers started pumping out more than just text. Soon, there was sound, and then graphics. Now, only a handful of years later, we have high-definition ray-traced stereoscopic visuals, 5.1 surround sound, and fifty-inch plasma displays (not to mention motion controls, virtual reality helmets, and the Rez Trance controller). Things have changed.

This constantly shifting technology has a peculiar effect on storytelling. At first, computers could be used to emulate the storytelling we used in books. Then the medium evolved, and people used it to tell original stories that could only have been told in this medium. But with the advent of computer graphics, we found we could emulate stuff other than books. We could draw on new inspirations and translate other mediums, like movies. Imagine movies where you are the main character! In a way, it was the holy grail of entertainment–something that involved multiple senses and placed you in the middle of the story.

This is where the history of computers as a storytelling medium breaks from a lot of the mediums that came before it. The idea that computers could be used to tell the same sort of stories we saw in movies–with bonus interactivity–launched us into a technological arms race. With the static mediums that came before it, we had a lot of time to sit and think about how we could use the medium to tell stories in new and exciting ways. With computers, however, we became obsessed with telling the same stories with newer technology, over and over, each time embracing the new technology but almost never pushing the medium. By and large, we treat computer and video games like we treat movies; we use the same visual language, the same story structure, the same narrative tricks. Instead of evolving the medium to tell new stories, we put innovation on the backburner. What separates games released one year from the games released the next isn’t a daring new approach to computer-aided storytelling–it’s iteration.

In a way, I wish a giant pause button could be pushed on the computer industry, forcing everyone to get creative with the toys we already have. But as much as the technological arms race has stunted the growth of computers as a storytelling medium, it’s also gotten us to an incredible position for innovation. The computers we have now are cheaper and more accessible than they’ve ever been before, and it’s allowing an incredible amount of people to get into computerised storytelling–people who are less obsessed with chasing the technology curve, and more obsessed with pushing the medium.

Offhand, I can think of numerous games that tell stories that could never have been told–or at least couldn’t have been told nearly as effectively–in other mediums. Façade, by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, casts you as the friend of a quarrelling couple, using a simple interface to tell you an intimate, emotional, and deeply mutable story. The recently released Papers, Please, by Lucas Pope, has you playing an immigration inspector, the story dictated only by the simple action of accepting or rejecting passports. Zoe Quinn’s phenomenal Depression Quest puts you in the shoes of someone dealing with chronic depression, using an extremely clever interactive device to stress how powerless those fighting depression can feel about their situation.

It’s no coincidence that all these games use very simple graphics and are usually the product of extremely small teams–often just one or two people. None of these stories use bleeding-edge technology. Instead, they use existing tools to tell new stories, leveraging the aspects of computers that help them construct their narrative and discarding the ones that don’t. People with no background whatsoever in programming or computer sciences can now make interactive stories in their spare time, and many do.

Of course, there’s more to computers than keyboard, mice, and screens, and this is one of the preconceptions we need to shed. Alternate Reality Games (or ARGs), popularised by Elan Lee and Jane McGonigal, use computers to pull off incredible feats of storytelling that break free of the constraints of the screen, telling single stories across websites, emails, videos, and phone calls. Epic, multimedia stories like The Beast and I Love Bees couldn’t have been told without the use of computers. Players of the hilarious, fantastic, and impeccably named game Johann Sebastian Joust (made by Copenhagen-based Die Gute Fabrik) might forget that there’s a computer involved at all–though the game is played with video game controllers, the screen can be ignored completely by the people playing it.

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that the same medium has spawned Colossal Cave Adventure, Call of Duty, Façade, and The Beast. Computers might be the most versatile and powerful storytelling medium that’s ever been found, and its potential has been largely untapped. We’ve gotten a little stuck. But that doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way–science fiction has already dreamt up countless ways we can use technology to tell stories, from the magic of Star Trek’s holodeck to the fever dream of William Gibson’s virtual reality to the educational potential of Neal Stephenson’s A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. We’re ready for the next stage in computerised storytelling, whatever that is.

As a storytelling medium, computers have still only flirted with greatness. But we also need to remember that using computers to tell stories is still a brand new thing–we can forgive this little hiccup. We’ve been telling oral stories for so long that we have no idea when we started. We’ve been writing down stories down for at least four and a half thousand years. Novels have been refined over four hundred years, and we’ve been making films for a hundred and thirty. It’s only been fifty years since the first computer game, and less than forty years since we started using computers to tell narrative stories. This is where things get interesting. Right here, right now. The medium has become accessible, prevalent, and open to experimentation. It’s time to start throwing shit at the wall–some of it might even stick.

Guest Writer Bio: Aaron Scott Hildebrandt
Aaron Scott Hildebrandt is a narrative designer and animator living in Vancouver, Canada. His work can be found in a number of games, including Halo: Anniversary, Halo 4, and Remember Me, as well as the web series H+. He’s also the author of the upcoming web serial Hanna Buys the Farm.

From Zork to Halo and Back Again, Part One

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zork_1[1] A guest post by Aaron Scott Hildebrandt

When you start a conversation about storytelling in video games, it’s hard to not immediately jump to discussions about the writing in Halo, Call of Duty, Uncharted, God of War, and the other games that have graced living rooms across the globe. There’s a lot that can be said about the stories in these games–both how they’re written and how they’re presented. Some of these games tell expertly penned and deeply engaging stories, and there are some seriously talented people behind them. People like Ragnar Tornquist, Amy Hennig, and Chris Avellone have left their prints on the entire industry.

But at the same time, the industry as a whole seems like it’s stuck in a rut. There’s something oddly familiar about a lot of the stories being told. Since games like Dragon’s Lair first appeared in 1983, it’s been hard to avoid phrases like “it’s like playing a movie.” And that’s a pretty good summary of where we’re at with computer-based storytelling–we’ve been transplanting the movie experience and casting the viewer in the leading role, rather than leaving them as a disembodied spectator.

Of course, things haven’t always been this way. A lot of us remember the early days of computer gaming, and to compare those experiences to Hollywood blockbusters–or even low-budget indie films–would be kind of hilarious. In fact, those early games seemed like they were on a different medium entirely. So, how did we get using computers to tell stories about battling dysentery in Oregon Trail or exploring mysterious white houses in Zork to defending the universe in Halo? More importantly, where did the dysentery and white houses go? To find out, we’re going to have to rewind a bit. And by “a bit,” I mean “through most of human history.” It’s kind of a long story.

Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “the medium is the message” has gotten a nauseating amount of attention since it first appeared in 1964. There’s a good reason for that–the stories we tell are directly affected by the way we choose to present them. Some stories work across all mediums, while others are so deeply tied to their medium that it would be almost impossible to attempt it in any other. That might not seem like much of a revelation, but we’re living in an odd era that’s become obsessed with translating stories between mediums while pretending that the core of each story will remain intact.

For a while, almost every major movie release saw a companion “novelisation” released in bookstores. Some of the biggest movies (and TV shows) of the last ten years have been adaptations of popular books, comics, and graphic novels. And sometimes, this all works out. There are a handful of examples of beautiful synergy existing between the two mediums, especially when stories are translated from one graphic medium to another. Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez demonstrated this extremely well with Sin City, a movie that literally recreated the graphic novel panel for panel, shot for shot. But for each time it works, you have a hundred other attempts that are met with a shrug, followed by the damning phrase “the book was better.”

There’s always been an interplay between the different mediums we use to tell stories, and it’s pretty obvious as to why this happens. At one point, every medium is new. Early oral storytelling established a lot of the techniques we still use to string narrative together. Speaking words aloud could transport people to other times and places. Dialogue could be spoken on behalf of people who only existed in the imagination of the storyteller. But you can’t tell every sort of story with your voice alone.

When the first stories were written, it shouldn’t be surprising that what people wrote were, essentially, the same sorts of stories they were already telling orally, and the stories were told in much the same way. They transcribed. As time passed, though, we started to find new and interesting ways to tell stories. We discovered the novel, Don Quixote setting the stage for an entirely new way of telling stories that just wouldn’t have been feasible had Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra attempted to speak it aloud instead of commit it to paper.

Once we broke free from the previous mediums and embraced what made writing different, we were able to tell stories in totally new ways. Writing, as a medium, is still continuing to surprise us. Jonathan Safran Foer took a physical knife (okay, well, a laser cutter) to the pages of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, creating an entirely new book from its fragments (Tree of Codes). Both David Foster Wallace and Mark Z. Danielewski have written books that parody the medium itself, hiding the most interesting parts of the book in footnotes and sidebars. Even though they found their root in the same storytelling devices that preceded them, written stories evolved.

Every medium goes through this evolution. At first, we attempt to use new mediums to clone old stories, and while there’s certainly a sense of wonder and discovery as this happens, it’s the evolution that keeps us excited–the adventure of bending and twisting that medium to create something new. Every new medium opens up the possibility of telling original stories that excite and surprise us in ways we’ve never experienced before. Movies took ideas from theatre and radio and turned them into something new. Summer blockbusters would, by and large, make dreadful books, but movies can tell stories that are loud and bright and impossible to experience firsthand. They can actually show us things instead of simply describing them. They can hide details and use focus pulls to draw our attention around a scene in an extremely nuanced way. Movies like Timecode and shows like 24 played at telling stories in real-time, something that would be nearly impossible to experience if we were reading them instead of watching.

(A quick aside: I have no idea if anyone has ever attempted to write a real-time book. Essentially, every three hundred words you write would have to cover about a minute of action. If anyone knows of someone who has attempted this, please let me know, because I owe that person a beer.)

There is one medium, however, that ended up on a different evolutionary path than the mediums that came before it. When we started telling stories with computers, what used to be a cycle quickly became a rut.

Jump to From Zork to Halo and Back Again, Part Two

Guest Writer Bio: Aaron Scott Hildebrandt
Aaron Scott Hildebrandt is a narrative designer and animator living in Vancouver, Canada. His work can be found in a number of games, including Halo: Anniversary, Halo 4, and Remember Me, as well as the web series H+. He’s also the author of the upcoming web serial Hanna Buys the Farm.