Category Archives: Mary Pletsch

I Want It This Bad

Mary Pletsch The Writing Life 1 Comment

There’s a scrap of paper taped over my computer with five words on it in blue ink:  I Want It This Bad.  This is the reminder that took me and my writing from amateur to professional.

Five years ago I was a hobby writer.  I liked to write and did so for my own amusement.  I wrote fan fiction.  Text-based role-plays.  Half-finished stories and concept outlines.  Occasionally I’d dash off a newspaper article or submission to a contest, but for the most part, I wrote what I felt like, when I felt like it.

Other times I felt like playing Halo marathons.  Not a lot got written those weeks.

I got a lot of positive feedback on this hobby writing.  Comments like “you should be a real writer.”  Which led me to ask…why wasn’t I?

I wasn’t actively looking for markets.  I wasn’t actively creating original works that I could sell.  I wasn’t doing much to learn about publishing as an industry, or network with those already in it.  In short, I was a writer, but I wasn’t a professional.

I know people who love to write, and have written incredibly entertaining stories, who have no interest in being professional writers.  One of them has accepted that his heart lies in his chosen career, and writing will always come second.  Some of them write because they love a franchise, and they want to continue the stories of those characters.  One of them said, “Writing is fun for me.  I don’t want it to feel like a job.”

These are all valid reasons.  None of them were my reasons.  I would have been happy to pitch my day job to write, and, in fact, I wanted to.  So why wasn’t I doing anything that would get me to that point?  I had taken Step One – write – and I had stopped there.

That moment was my realization.  If I ever wanted the opportunity for writing to be my real job, I had to make writing a real job – at the very least, a part time job – right away.

What did I want to do with my day off – play Halo 2 for the 24th time, or lay down some words on a novel?  What did I want to do with my vacation – lie on a beach, or attend a writer’s conference?  What was a better way for me to spend that spare hour – gawking at Facebook, or looking for short story markets?

I’ll be honest.  There were times I would rather have picked Option A.  And that’s when those words play through my mind:  How bad do you want it?

I want it this bad.

Bad enough to put down the video game controller, lay down the money for the conference registration, knuckle down and do the research.  Bad enough to weigh whether I’d gotten my day’s writing done before I accepted the invitation, turned on the TV or spent an afternoon reading comic books.  Bad enough to turn (full disclosure: 99%) of my plot ideas into sellable fiction rather than fan fiction.

In the interests of work-life balance, I do still play video games when I’m too sick to write a coherent sentence.  I do take days off to lay on the beach with my family.  I do noodle around the internet from time to time.  However devoted I am to my writing, I swore I would not let that devotion leave me divorced, socially isolated, and sick from neglecting my loved ones or my health.  And yes, I made time for that fanfic 1% so I could get it out of my head and have a decent night’s sleep already.

Still, that’s left me with a significant amount of time to write professional-quality, marketable stuff.  I’ve had three paid publications so far, and I’m gunning for more to come.

Sometimes I do miss those Halo marathons.  When I do, though, I think about my story sales and ask myself, “How bad do I want it?”And then I park my butt in front of the word processor, because I Want It This Bad.

The Mass Effect Trilogy: Story-Driven Gaming

Character Mary Pletsch No Comments

It’s my firm belief that the Mass Effect trilogy is the future of video game storytelling.

For those who are not familiar with the games, a basic primer.  Playing Mass Effect is like an action movie where you control the main character.  That means you choose dialogue options, affecting how your character interacts with other characters; mission options, picking what your character will do and in what order; upgrades-as you advance in the game, you have points to spend at your discretion, allowing your character to become somewhat skilled in many fields or very skilled in a few-and combat.

Commander Shepard can be female or male, of any race.  S/he can have romances with a variety of different characters, including alien and same-gender romances, or s/he can be utterly indifferent to romance.  S/he can develop platonic friendships – or anger shipmates.  S/he can make Paragon (virtuous) choices, Renegade (“badass”) choices, or a mixture of the two.  Most importantly, saves from the first game can be carried over into the second; and then into the third.  That means the possibilities for the future change, depending on the player’s decisions in the past-ie, what you did in the second game will change your options in the third.  The end result is a storyline directly affected by the player’s input.

The series is not without its flaws.  One common complaint is that a few plot points always lead to the same end, regardless of player input.  For example, at the end of the first game, Commander Shepard can either encourage space cop Garrus to respect the institution of law enforcement and rejoin Citadel Security, or to reject the regulations as hurdles impeding justice.  No matter which option is chosen, though, Garrus ends up in the same place at the start of the second game:  hunting down criminals on a lawless space station.

Looking outside the story itself, my guess is that there was a question of practicality.  Theoretically, if Garrus had stayed with the police (the Paragon version of Shepard’s advice), the developers would have had to create a whole new mission to encounter him in the second game.  The time and cost of developing two wholly different missions to achieve the same end (getting Garrus to join your crew) was probably prohibitive.   In-story, though, the second game focused on Garrus’ frustration with lawlessness, to justify his decision no matter what advice he received.  I think that as technology improves and games become more powerful, it will be easier for developers to provide more complex options for players, and a wider variety of consequences for each decision made.  Given the variety that already exists in Mass Effect, I’m pleased with the past, and anticipating the future.

Throughout the game, Commander Shepard is called upon to make moral judgments; to solve disagreements between characters; to make tough ethical decisions;  to decide when to use force and when to try to talk out a problem.  These choices shaped my concept of the character.  My first Commander Shepard usually did the noble thing, but she made Renegade choices when she got angry.  My second Commander Shepard was mostly renegade, but there were some lines even he wouldn’t cross.  I developed an emotional attachment both to Commander Shepard and the characters with whom s/he interacted.  And in every game, there are choices that can lead to those characters’ deaths.  It’s not possible to complete the first game without at least one crew death, and it’s gut-wrenching every time, no matter who I lose.

This, I think, is the reason I keep playing Mass Effect over and over:  the wedding of characterization and storytelling.  The secondary characters are fleshed-out people who I want to spend time with.  I could skip the dialogue and go right to the shooting, but I don’t want to.  I have a lot of games where I can shoot things.  I don’t have a lot of games where I can be whatever kind of hero I can imagine, interacting with characters I’ve come to care about, making decisions that have real consequences.   I hope in the future, I’ll be playing a lot more games like this.

Storytelling Across Platforms

Craft & Skills Mary Pletsch No Comments

The first stories were told orally, in the light of flickering fires.  Over the centuries, storytelling has continued to evolve into a wide variety of formats.  One of these formats–movies–has been our topic this past month.  Another format will be our focus in August.

Storytellers-both ancient and modern-often act out parts of their stories.  Dramatization evolved into theatrical arts, such as stand-up comedy and plays.  The widespread use of home radio created radio dramas.  The invention of film evolved plays into movies.  The creation of television evolved plays into TV shows.   Or, consider cave paintings.  Sometimes, when viewed in sequence, they depict events, such as hunts.  When images are married to the written word, comic books, manga, and graphic novels are their descendants.

Yet TV didn’t kill plays, and comic books didn’t eliminate novels.  Radio dramas might be rarer today, but audiobooks continue to sell.  All these different forms of storytelling have survived and thrived side by side.  The reason for their proliferation is that different forms of storytelling appeal to different people.

We all have different learning styles:  visual, auditory, tactile, or some mixture of methods.  I have a friend, vision impaired and legally blind, who finds it much easier to enjoy television-listening to the story and watching the screen through a special magnifier-than to read a printed book with his devices.   I have another  friend-a published novelist-who doesn’t read novels for entertainment.  She learned her storytelling skills from movies and television and applied them to the written word.  Personally, I have prosopagnosia-the inability to distinguish between faces-which makes TV and movies challenging for me, since I often struggle to tell the characters apart.  As a result, my novel and comic book library vastly outstrips my DVD library.

Or, sometimes we want a specific experience with our story.  There’s the summer popcorn spectacle of going to see a movie with a group of friends.  There’s the dinner and the theatre date that marks a special occasion.  There’s curling up under the covers with a good book on a stormy winter day.  There’s the sick day spent in a video game marathon.   None of these experiences are the same, but all of them are centered around a story.

The keys to good storytelling are common across all these different forms.  These keys include:  suspense, strong characterization, eliciting emotion from the audience, interesting plots, conflict and resolution, theme, mood, and more.  Techniques vary – for example, in a novel, the author can write out the character’s thoughts, whereas in a movie, the director must choose between using camera work and the actor’s gestures to convey those thoughts, or using a voice-over narration to relate the thoughts to the audience-but story elements remain.  That’s why the lessons we learn from other forms of media can be applied to novel and short story writing.  That’s also why people are hired to write scripts that become movies, TV shows and video games; because you can’t just turn a group of actors and a camera crew loose and expect a coherent story to create itself.

This past month we’ve talked about storytelling lessons we’ve learned from movies.  Next month, we’ll be taking a look at storytelling in one of its newest forms:  games, both video and otherwise.  We’re fortunate to live in an era where we have so many different options for enjoying, and creating, our stories.

The Outsider’s Perspective

Character Mary Pletsch World-building 2 Comments

When I’m waiting at the bus stop, I see all kinds of people.  People with skin colours from cocoa to olive, from toffee to porcelain.  People in turbans, in hijabs, in saffron robes.  People wearing crosses, pentacles, Stars of David.  People of all ages, of all income levels, speaking a variety of languages.

When I’m writing, I want to reflect that kind of diversity in my stories.  Unless there’s a specific story-based reason for everyone to look the same, believe the same, and exhibit the same behaviours, I like my fiction to encompass the wide variety of human experience.

Growing up, I read a lot of stories based on Greek and Roman myth, Biblical personages, fairy tales, Norse legends, King Arthur.  The prevalence of these tales made sense in a historical context; these mythologies form the bedrock of modern Western culture.  I also found a few precious collections of different mythologies, containing very different personages:  Nanebozho, the Ojibwe trickster.  Rama, the hero from India.  Fox spirits from China.  I loved these stories.  I’d memorized Cinderella and Snow White.  These anthologies provided me with something new, something different.  As I grew older, I found that readers, and publishers, are increasingly open to stories featuring a wider diversity of characters, based on legends and mythologies from all over the globe.

Full disclosure time.  I’m white, female, of predominantly German ancestry, in a relationship with a man.  But I write about all kinds of people.  People whose life experiences I cannot base on my own; people whose cultures I was not raised in.

I have to be very careful when I write about these people.

Cultural appropriation is the act of taking something from another culture and using it to suit your needs.  To an extent, all cultures in contact mix and borrow from each other.  Suburban youth listen to rap songs about life in the hood; Canadian teenagers read Japanese manga; people all over the world go to movies based on American comic book characters.  There is, however, a tension in these relationships, particularly when a group with power plunders groups with less power, taking their symbols and distorting them, commodifying them, stripping them of their cultural context and selling them.  There is also a tension when people “try to be something they’re not,” particularly when this means they act out of fantasy and idealization rather than a true understanding, or forget their own heritage in the attempt to ape someone else’s.  Appropriation can perpetuate stereotypes (think of how Vodun, aka “voodoo,” struggles to be recognized as a religion), water down symbols (it’s hard to take a powerful symbol seriously when you can buy it as a T-shirt or fridge magnet), and confuse with partial understandings and half-truths.  Borrowing mythology from cultures not my own is tricky.

And yet, to write only about white, heterosexual people of European ancestry is both dishonest (in that it doesn’t reflect the totality of human experience) and dangerous (in that it insinuates these are the only people worth writing about).

The beauty of fiction is that it demands that I, as a writer, develop the ability to see through my characters’ eyes.  I need to know what motivates them, what their dreams are, what their fears are, what their goals are.  Their point of view makes sense to them and I need to understand it in order to figure out what they will do next.  I need to see them both in the context of their cultures, and as individuals, whose behaviours and beliefs may vary a little-or a lot-from their cultures’ norms.

And so I imagine what it would be like to be a man.  Or a lesbian.  Or a Hindu.  Or an Asian woman.  Or someone who lives in the 18th century.  I learn about issues these groups face that I do not, in the hopes that my portrayals are based on reality and not on stereotypes.  I do my best to portray the myths of other cultures with respect for the context in which those myths were created, and with the reverence I would give to the figures of my own childhood.  And I aim to honour, rather than use; to share in, rather than take.

It’s a balancing act, and I can’t please everyone, but when the alternative is to write about a world where everyone is White and European and middle-class and straight, I’ll take some risks, and do some research, to build a world that’s an honest portrayal of the human experience.