I’ve always loved the name White Wolf gave to their role-playing system: the Storytelling System. The manuals remind both game-masters and players that the goal of the game is not to defeat a monster or accumulate treasure, but rather, to tell a great story.

I began roleplaying when I was in university. One of my biggest frustrations in growing up was the increasing difficulty in finding someone to play with. As I got older, the games I played with my toys became increasingly more complex. Unfortunately, my playmates kept getting younger, as kids my age gave up play entirely and I had to turn to my younger neighbours, who complained when the stories I came up with were too complicated for them to understand.

Then I went away to university, in the dawning age of the internet.

I wasn’t fortunate enough to find a role-playing group at my university, but I did find a number of online, text-based roleplaying games. These are not the “RPGs” of Nintendo or Playstation fame; these are groups of fans who used words alone to describe environments, objects, and characters. Fans from all over the world met up online, took on personas, and acted out events. Simple code introduced elements of random chance into the game, and described the level of damage if two characters got into a fight.

Some players occasionally acted as game masters to lead characters through organized events: an alien visitor, the investigation of a mysterious disappearance, a quest for a treasure, a battle between two factions. Other times, players just got together on their own and explored the relationships between their characters, talking about the characters’ histories or dreams.

I didn’t find a My Little Pony roleplaying game, but I did find a few based on everyone’s favourite Robots in Disguise: the Transformers.

Excited by the logs I read-the interesting, well-developed characters and complex plots-I created a character and signed up. Finally, at long last, I was able to play Transformers with people who could keep up with me, who could challenge me and surprise me, and together, we acted out our own epics. I had daily practice writing my character’s dialogue, describing her surroundings and tools, and scripting action in a manner that was clear, detailed, and fast-moving. Soon, I began writing some fan fiction stories about my character, providing glimpses into her past and possible future.

I’d written stories before, mostly for school projects, a few simply to entertain myself. These stories, though, were intended to be shared. I posted them on the internet and published a few in a paper fan-zine.

Looking back, I’m surprised how long it took for me to realize that this was something I wanted to do: not only create worlds, but share those worlds with others. I did undergo a learning period, a time when my writing was focused on fandom (roleplaying, fan fiction, etc.) and I also underwent a growth period when I struggled to balance the time I spent on fan activities with the time I needed to create my own original, marketable fiction. I eventually left my Transformers role-plays, though I do still role-play occasionally.

Roleplaying gave me a chance to share my stories with others, to use words alone to describe settings and action, to refine my skills at dialogue with the help of my fellow players, and most of all, to keep me inspired and writing during the long years of learning my craft.

My Last, Best Hope for Mastering Structure

May 27, 2013

Evan Braun

Earlier this month, I wrote about how Star Trek ignited my passion for writing and gave me the push I needed to start committing words to paper at a young age. Not all my early work, however, was Star Trek fan fiction; I also produced a couple of short original pieces, as well as a 100,000-word novel in ninth grade called The Investigators. What all these works have in common is that they were very terrible, though each one improved on the one that came before.

There are a number of failings in these first works, but the main problem is that I didn’t have a handle on structure. My understanding of plotting could be reduced to this: the plot is the sequence of events that occur over the course of the novel. I mean, you can’t get any vaguer than that. If you read my first novels (I don’t recommend it), this is evidenced by the overall sense that I was making the story up as I went along. There were so thematic underpinnings, the twists and turns came out of nowhere and served no purpose beyond surprise, and the characters did not progress through meaningful arcs. Lots of stuff happened, but none of it told a story. The plot points were random; I may as well have written some plot ideas on playing cards, shuffled them together, then wrote the novel based on the order of the cards with no thought towards what would make sense or provoke an emotional response in the reader. The plot was just what happened-and it could be anything.

In 1998, however, at the age of fifteen, I was washing dishes at the restaurant where I worked when a coworker, Carole, asked me if I’d ever seen Babylon 5. The two of us shared a passion for Star Trek, which is what we talked about most often, but I had barely heard of Babylon 5, even though the show had just about completed its five-year run by that time. Carole had the first couple of seasons recorded on VHS, so one day she came to work with a bag full of tapes for me.

I took those tapes home and began to devour them.

Much has been written about the unevenness of Babylon 5. Especially in the first season, the acting was rough, the effects were cheaply produced, and the writing was… bumpy. Awkward, even. And yet I immediately fell in love with the show, because it was the first time I encountered a television series that was unabashedly serialized. It was a show that was intended to be viewed in order. Though individual episodes had beginnings, middles, and ends, Babylon 5 told a larger story that could only be fully appreciated and understood in the context of many seasons.

Since that time, Babylon 5 has been followed by dozens of serialized shows, so many in fact that heavy serialization has become the norm. However, in terms of structure and planning, no show, in my opinion, has ever surpassed the high standard established by Babylon 5. The show’s creator and main writer, J. Michael Straczynski, personally scripted 91 of the 110 episodes, and wrote the last three seasons entirely by himself, with the exception of one installment. This resulted in unbridled consistency. From the beginning, he knew where the story was going. He had a full series outline. Many shows’ writers have claimed to have known the end from the beginning (I’m looking at you, Lost and Battlestar Galactica), but Babylon 5 is the only show I’m aware of that proves its structural integrity by directly foreshadowing its later twists and turns right from the very start. Rewatching the show, with full knowledge of how the show progresses and ultimately concludes, allows its genius to be fully appreciated.

Structurally, Babylon 5 taught me to think ahead. It taught me to think about consequences. It taught me to think about the significance of the events of my story, even the very small events. In fact, the very small events in my stories often end up triggering very large events down the road, something which Babylon 5 excelled at.

It could be said that Straczynski planned his show almost too well, with the effect of producing uneven episodes which aren’t always much fun when viewed in isolation. The plot momentum of that show, however, is pretty overwhelming-in a good way. When it comes to understanding the importance of structure, Babylon 5 provides a master’s course.

What If?

May 25, 2013

fictorians

Guest Posts Reading The Writing Life No Comments

ValoisTapestry_HeidiB_guestPost — Valois Tapestry

Every story had a question lurking just beyond its boundaries… What If? That question shaped the characters, setting, and plot of the tale told.

What If a farmboy left his home planet to join a rebel alliance (Star Wars)? What If all of the fictional locations of literature existed on a real map (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica)? What If a wizard lived in Chicago (The Dresden Files) and What If a two-thousand-year-old druid lived in Arizona (Iron Druid Chronicles)?

Growing up, I found I enjoyed most the What Ifs with fantasy or science fiction answers. If the answer to a What If was “literary” or real world, I wasn’t interested.

And always, always, it was the characters of the story, how they answered the What If, who kept my attention. They were the reason I went back and bought another book by that author.

So when I started writing my own stories, answering my own What If questions, I started with a character. Later I learned to use the word “protagonist,” but in fifth grade, it was just the person I wanted to watch in the movie in my head.

Much later, like after college, I figured out most of my What If questions came to mind while listening to stories about other protagonists, and the answer was provided by a side character.

The short story that became my first sale required the opening line “In Pigwell, time is not measured by days or weeks but by the number of eighteen wheelers that drive by my house.”

My question became What If a yeti terrorized the town of Pigwell every winter and a ten-year-old boy couldn’t stop it? (See what I mean about fantasy and science fiction influences?) So while the “hero” called in by the boy fights the yeti, the story is from the point of view of the boy, a side character.

My first novel’s What If popped into my head when my boyfriend told me about an RPG he played which took place in a fantasy city. I have no desire to play an RPG (dice rolls make my eyes glaze over), but hearing about his character’s adventure as if it were a movie can be fun.

The side characters in that kind of game are often referred to as NPCs-non-player characters, like a centaur, who give out important quest information. In my mind, What If that centaur ran a bar in a city overseen by someone who hated non-standard (Human, Dwarf, Elf) races? In the world of the RPG, he was a side character. In my world, he had a larger role to play.

Characters define the point of view of the story. The reader sees through their eyes and through their actions, the reader understands the plot. Thinking of my protagonist as a side character is also a helpful way to start a bigger story, since other players with other motives are then waiting on the sidelines to make their presence known.

Some series do a great job of this, such as the Legend of Eli Monpress. The thief is the protagonist, and as the story develops over the five novels, the reader learns how small he is in the grand scheme of things… and also how vital.

Because side character protagonists are the center of their world. They have to be in order for the reader to care about what happens to them. And you want the reader to care, otherwise they won’t buy your next book.

Imagine looking at a tapestry that spanned the length of a museum wall-huge and detailed at the same time. By focusing on one part of the tapestry, deciding to write from the farmboy’s perspective instead of the emperor’s, you get a different What If to answer. And you still have lots of room to tell future stories that include the other people and places and plot threads in the tapestry.

While every story started with a What If in the author’s mind, whom they chose to be the protagonist defined the adventure that happened.

And side characters can have some awesome adventures.

* * *

Heidi Berthiaume is a side character in an epic story who writes, develops children’s book iPad apps, edits fan music videos, and has almost figured out what her own adventure will be. You can find out more on her website and on Facebook.

The Cunning Man

May 24, 2013

Dylan Blacquiere

Craft & Skills Dylan Blacquiere The Writing Life No Comments

When I was younger, I had the fanciful notion that I would be a writer as well as a physician. Both of these were uncommon pursuits growing up in rural Prince Edward Island, and while both of these were viewed as fine goals, there were not many role models available locally for either of these. There was the kindly old family physician, of course, and he did in a pinch; in fact, it wasn’t until a significant chunk of the way through medical school that I decided upon neurology instead of family practice. But back then, I had an idea that his career would be someday my career. I would set out my shingle close to home and treat the locals. I had the idea that I would incorporate literature somehow into this-this was in the days before anyone had even thought of concepts like narrative medicine and patient stories-but I didn’t know how such a thing could happen. And I knew that I wanted to write things, perhaps even call myself a novelist, but I wasn’t sure how to make the two things fit together.

At the age of fifteen, I went to the local bookstore-I was already a voracious reader and spent my money there instead of on hockey cards, which was a Big Deal. While browsing, one paperback book caught my eye; the cover was a stylized portrait of a well-dressed man, a physician, holding a picture in front of him. But the picture was actually a chest X-ray, and the implication was that the sternum, rubs and clavicles were those of the doctor. Wound around the sternum, coiling between the intercostal spaces of the ribs, were two serpents, staring each other down in a semblance of the staff of Mercury associated with the medical profession.

The book was The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies. The back cover told me that it was a memoir of a doctor’s life, and promised the story of a doctor who knew his patients’ souls as well as their bodies. This was exactly what the Fifteen-Year-Old Me needed, wanting to find a middle ground between my medical ambition and my interest in literature. I bought the book, and then spent the next several years buying every book by Robertson Davies that I could find. In the years since, I have constantly gone back to reread his novels, his essays, his letters, and they have always had something to say with regard to either-or both-of those worlds.

Many Canadian students know Davies through his Deptford trilogy; Fifth Business is required reading in many high-school English courses, though I was never so fortunate. His writing was very literate; you had to work to understand his stories, but if you did, you would be rewarded with the richness of his language, the depth of his characterization, and the breadth of his interests, everything from small-town theatre to Jungian analysis to academia. He could be wickedly, savagely funny, and he was not always kind, as many of the characters were thinly veiled composites of the pretentious and the stupid. But the writing was never preachy, or awkward; he was a writer who expected the literacy of his readers, and his readers, me included, were proud every time their efforts were rewarded with some sage bit of wisdom or some interesting jewel to share.

I devoured his novels, and even tried to ape his style in my own writing (of course it never worked!) but as I grew older I found more and more inspiration from his essays and his letters. Several books of essays and speeches were published after his death; in one collection, The Merry Heart, he published a speech he had given to medical undergraduates titled Can a Doctor Be a Humanist? This one went right to my heart’s core. He talked of how the truly great doctors didn’t just consult lists of symptoms or mindlessly offer pills, but took the time to listen, to let the patient’s symptoms tell the true story of what was happening. He also spoke of the background of the medical profession, and the mythology behind the staff we use as our symbol, and most of all how we can balance Wisdom with Knowledge to become a truly great humanist physician.

He died shortly after I discovered him-one of life’s many small cruelties-and so I have been left sifting through his writing and the words he left behind, knowing that there won’t be any more, but still finding jewels of inspiration every time I read his work. There have since been many role models, literary and medical, but none have bridged those two worlds so successfully. I am still very early on my path as a physician, and I am still trying to find a way to have literature and writing be a part of that journey, but I can say with conviction that had I not found that book all those years ago, I would not be half as good at either of those things as I am today.