Make it story-shaped or something
Dear reader,
A phrase keeps circling my head and that phrase is “make it story-shaped”. In lieu of knowing what I’m saying, here’s a list:
Stories have a kind of fractal energy. That is, at the paragraph and sentence level, you can sometimes see the same structures that you do at the story/novel level. (In some ways, that’s the premise of this whole newsletter.)
As such, some of my favourite moments in stories are when they zig instead of zag, confounding our expectations with a kind of reality.
As Robin Sloan says in his (lovely) zine: “Reality has a surprising amount of detail”. Similarly: the truth is always surprising. Humans, too.
A tip for creating at this level that I took from TTRPG creator Chris McDowall: the triple rule. TLDR; rather than saying ‘there was a place’, say what it used to be, what it’s doing now, and what else is it doing now. This works because reality itself rarely has places that are a single hermetic thing. Buildings have their own ghosts, their own side-hustles.
This also works for characters. A common symptom of underdeveloped writing is ‘two-dimensional characters’: in reality, nobody is an NPC just waiting for the player character to come. They have their own loves, wants, and yearnings, their own relations in the world.
Back to TTRPGs, I had the privilege of being a contributing writer to the upcoming TTRPG, Streets of Jade, based on Fonda Lee’s incredible Green Bone Saga. My brief was to write background information for two of the fictional countries within the world. I struggled with the brief until I realised part of my job was not to provide just history but story hooks. That is, instead of writing “The Tuni have a tradition of horseback writing”, I could instead write “a horseback festival takes place every year, with the best riders from neighbouring nations invited to ride”.
If in doubt, make it story-shaped.
Human-shaped for now,
Guan