A few weeks back, I was having a hard time with an arc in the new book. Many threads were not converging as I expected; new ideas demanded the adjustment of settled strategy; focus was thin on the ground. I had a few of those days that feel like you’re trying to walk through a narrow door with a vast backpack. Then, on the long weekend, I found myself picking up my Pomera and just—typing a sentence or two—setting it down as parenting demanded. A while later, I’d pick it up again. Each time only asking the question: what’s the next thing that needs to be here? I loved it—and I realized that I was ‘playing’ writing the way I play Slay the Spire.

(Sorry, Mom and Dad, this newsletter’s going to be a bit weirder than usual.)

As Slay the Spire 2 launched in Early Access yesterday, and at the instant of its release a million Steam servers cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, the game and its reception among writers has been on my mind. I saw Isabel Kim post that “science fiction author likes slay the spire, in other news fork found in kitchen.” That’s true: love for the game is so widespread, though by no means universal, that I suspect publishing houses will experience a slight lessening of the load in nine to eighteen months, an inverse win-the-super-bowl-and-get-a-bunch-of-babies-in-your-city-nine-months-later effect as author time is consumed by the game.

Don’t worry, though, constant reader: even a substantial easing would only reduce publishing workload from inhumane to merely crushing. You won’t notice a difference.

Certainly the game is huge for me. Since I rediscovered it while working my way off the couch after a COVID bout two years ago, Slay the Spire has been a regular presence. I dug the game on release but now I put time into learning it: practicing, experimenting, watching streams to “git gud” as the saying goes. But since the peak of my interest came a bit later than average, I’ve been surprised to find even writers I don’t think of as gamers expressing excitement (or trepidation) when they consider the arrival of a new and more powerful Time Eater. Sure, “everyone’s a gamer now” (and the hobby is wide enough that ‘gamer’ only describes a particular isolated population among the legions who play games), and it’s not weird, I suppose, for a popular game to be popular, but it dovetails the sense I described above, that the writing process is actually a lot like Slay the Spire (and vice versa); the similarities, I think, enlighten the game’s appeal for writer-minded folk.

If you haven’t played StS (Mom and Dad), the game works like this: you’re Childe Roland, to the Dark Tower come—a fantasy hero trying to climb a big mysterious Spire. Each floor of the tower contains an “encounter”: a monster to fight, a treasure to claim, a risk to take. Your hero’s abilities are represented by a deck of cards. Each card represents a thing the hero can do: attack with a certain power, or block, or draw more cards, and so on. When you start the game, you have only a few basic cards in your deck. In each ‘round’ of every encounter, you draw five cards from your deck and you can play (on average, at the beginning) three of them. With every monster you defeat, you’re presented with three new cards randomly chosen from all the cards in the game (some of which are stronger and some weaker) and you can choose to add one to your deck. When you defeat a particularly strong enemy, or discover a treasure, you get may get a “relic”, which (most of the time) gives you a steady bonus - it makes all your cards of a certain type stronger, it lets you play more cards in a turn, it gives you a benefit every 3 turns, etc. This is a great thing—but if you fight too many strong enemies, you can easily die, which brings you back to square 1.

And that’s the game: make choice after choice, balancing risk and reward, considering combined effects. Does this card work with other cards in my deck, or with the relics I’ve earned? Am I risking enough? Am I risking too much? The game is turn-based (like chess), so at any moment you can sit and think for as much time as you want—or set it down for hours at a time, a key advantage if you’re a parent—but it’s so satisfying to make choices and see their results that it can easily draw you into a flow state. Which isn’t always a great thing for your play! Often you need to slow down and consider all your options, review your relics, lock in and go deep.

When we write, we start from floor zero: the blank page. But we have an intimation—like the second player in hypergame—of what game we’re playing, what choices we might face. I think it’s Thomas McCormack who calls this a ‘prelibation’, a sense of what you want to drink; I think this is also what many writers mean when they talking about genre and subgenre. What sort of game do I want to play? What space am I moving in?

And then you make a choice. And you make another choice. And another.

These choices may seem infinite and unconstrained to the outsider and the novice, but it’s amazing how quickly the aperture narrows—how rapidly the choices reinforce one another to create a structure. I haven’t found a better attempt to tease out the often-subconscious micro-elements of the process than Delaney’s “About 5750 words” (warning: pdf link)—it’s not how everyone conceives of their approach to the opening of a story, but it is a good and careful description of one process of thinking. Your choices—orthography, word choice, sentence rhythm, paragraph structure, scene structure—add up to tone and character and voice and genre—each decision either shoring up a reader’s sense of what’s going on (because they don’t know! they can only judge from an often-unhelpful cover, an often-misleading blurb, and whatever social vibe they may or may not have absorbed from their circle of readers, who may or may not be particularly insightful on the subject!) or complicating that sense, and either choice, to confirm or complicate, will either increase or decrease the key resource of the game, which is the reader’s goodwill. (And that closely related currency, the writer’s goodwill toward their own project.)

Speaking of choices: “goodwill” is not quite the right word but it’s the best I can come up with right now—“engagement” feels more technically correct but it’s so internet-poisoned that I can’t even—“interest” is close but evokes a Spock-like eyebrow-raising & suggests that the meaningful game here is intellectual not emotional—“arousal” may be psychologically accurate but it’s, um, suggestive. To what extent do the people in your audience feel they are doing what they came to your audience to do? This varies, of course, depending on who you are and what choices you’ve made, and who your audience is. In a jazz cafe, you may want snaps, an occasional soulful “mmmm-hmm”, a laugh of recognition at a particular trick of reference. In a certain kind of rock concert, you (used to) want people bleeding in the mosh pit. Nor is “what people came to your audience to do” a genre question really; it can be (often is) as narrow as a particular artist or band: someone in a Mountain Goats audience is probably there for, say, “No Children” and “San Bernadino” and for “Autoclave” and “This Year” and “Sax Rohmer” and “Picture of my Dress” and “Chavo Guerrero” and “Training Montage” and this is just turning into a list of Mountain Goats songs, isn’t it.

So you make a choice, you make another choice, a third. Each sentence gets you (and your reader) to the next sentence. Each choice, in tension and combination with every other, builds the project. You can feel your goodwill (and, hopefully, the reader’s) toward the project shift as it proceeds. But, critically: these choices are not altogether under your control. In Slay the Spire, there’s a lot of randomness: which three cards are presented this round? Which paths are available in this act? In human life and art, our choices are shaped by vast oceans of context and history and emotion and politics and chance, forces conscious and unconscious, of which we are aware and ignorant. In either, an attempt to ‘force an archetype’—to say “this is what I am doing no matter what”—can be upended by circumstance, including mechanisms inside our own minds that we do not fully understand and control. Something about a book you read six months ago, or an event unfolding today, or a change deep in your body or in your heart, may make certain choices you had planned to make un-makeable now. This isn’t a bad thing, or an indictment of your skill. The surfer’s skill does not replace the ocean; it doesn’t exist without it.

In Slay the Spire, your hero’s “hit points” rarely increase—but hit points are only one indicator of the actual number you’re trying to maximize: let’s call it “survivability,” the chance that your deck resolves each threat it will face, in order, before the end of the game without triggering a game over. With good luck and good play, you can build a deck of virtuous reinforcing cycles, achieving a condition of“escape velocity” where your deck does what it does no matter what obstacle it faces. Your book, too, can build on itself in this way: bringing the reader to new heights, each decision supporting the decisions to come.

When I started thinking about writing this way, many things started to feel easier, and I realized or remembered just how much fun this game is—writing, I mean! Way more fun than StS, though that doesn’t mean my mind or hands have infinite capacity for writing. (Burnout and physical and psychological constraints exist, we are not now that strength which in former days etc…) With writing, you get all that joy of crunchy choices, of sensitivity to what your deck / book is doing vs. what you want it to do vs. what is possible to achieve, that dance with context and condition—and you can edit, refining and selecting the choices that most support the project, dancing through time. You can even just sit with the book, or essay, or poem, asking yourself, wondering at, glorying in, what this is, with only constructive judgment. You can do it again and again. You can do it anywhere. It might reward all the time you can offer it, but you can take a meaningful turn in ten minutes, or less. A sentence, a word, an image. It’s not easy—but it’s always there.

And when you finish, you get to do it again.