Where's the Writing Lessons? Isnt IF an Interacactive Story?

John,
sounds like a good plan. I have also read some excellent books on novel writing that have helped give me some great ideas on character development, plot etc. In particular, I recommend “How to write a damn good mystery” by James N Frey. You can often find this used or on Kindle for a good price.

Despite the importance of character, plot, etc, I strongly recommend that you keep a relatively modest scope for your first piece of IF. Think of it as a short 3 act play with a few characters and locations, rather than an epic novel. There’s a fair amount of programming required to build locations, objects, Non-Player Characters, so it is often better to concentrate on a few things.

Be sure to try out different IF games that fit into the genre that you are planning on writing. In my case, it’s a mystery story and I have played many of the classic Infocom games like “The Witness” and more recent works such as “An Act of Murder”, “Lord Bellwater’s Secret” etc. These were quite inspirational for me. And needless to say, I have read my share of mystery and detective novels from the likes of Robert Goddard, Henning Mankell, Lawrence Block, Raymond Chandler, etc.

Not sure why no one recommended this, but the recently published book “IF Theory Reader” (Jackson-Meade & Wheeler) is also a tremendous resource. You can download a PDF or buy it from Lulu.com

Best of luck
–Zack
www.z-machine-matter.com

So very true.

And honestly, I’ve never gotten anything out of a writing how-to other than a general warm-fuzzy pep-talk. And a pep-talk can be valuable at times, but it’s juice, not function. I’ve had some colleagues that swear by the value of particular how-tos, and I’ve consumed stacks of them out of habit, but the only ones I really love, and keep around, are the ones that make me grin.

In my role as an editor, I’ve had a lot of writers ask me for books to read to help them hone, and I always sort of blow the question off because, in all seriousness, I think those books are mainly for people who want to daydream about writing, to kinda-sorta intend to write. The way to actually hone the craft is …

This.

Writing isn’t like baking a cake. There’s no recipe you can follow. If you want to be a good writer you have to write, over and over, until you stop being a bad writer.

If you want to know what makes a good story that’s a little different. Read Artistotle’s Poetics. Robert McKee has made a stack of cash selling writing courses which expand on the principles of Poetics, but frankly everything you need is there. Aristotle says the elements in Greek theatre are plot, character, thought, diction, music, and spectacle, in that order. And he complains that, like Hollywood today, they keep getting the order reversed.

IF already makes it hard to put spectacle and music first. Now you can do other things with adventure games than telling a story, but fiction requires plot, characters, motivation, and dialogue.

There are two basic approaches to interaction: the branching story, and the puzzle. Plenty has been written about these. I’ll leave it there for now.

Just had an interesting Uni talk yesterday about storytelling in the games, and short film industry that I think is pretty relevant. He was also a big believer in the 3 act story. I’m thinking his ideas would be useful for would-be game makers who don’t come from a writing background (and even some that do). They have a (good) idea, and go about making a story out of it in a very scientific way - none of their crew are ‘writers’ as such, so it would be a useful technique for people who don’t come from a writing background.

Talk:
dl.dropbox.com/u/25659759/Storytelling.mp3

The website for the company Hugh’s with, with many of the videos being talked about:
thepra.com.au/

PS - Andrew - they are also big fans of the 3-act story you mentioned. It seems to be a film technique.

PPS - He quoted Blake Snyder a lot. I just googled it - sure enough he’s a screenwriter:
suite101.com/content/save-th … pt-a246058

I have just been reading Inform 7 by Aaron A Reed. Chapter 4 is highly recommended for getting the game / story balance right. It has a lot of info on writing good descriptions that also achieve what the game needs eg a suspenseful description that also lets the player know they do (or don’t) need to explore further.

Well… it kind of is, actually, and there are indeed recipes you can follow. The difference is that you don’t want to follow the recipe for writing too closely, or be a clone of other writers. Mostly because those other writers are better at being themselves than you are at being them. Much of what you do in writing practice is not improving your writing but developing your own style.

On the most basic level, it’s true that there isn’t a recipe. But there are most definitely principles! If you never take the time to learn the principles, all you’ll accomplish by writing reams of stuff is to write reams of bad stuff and get very frustrated that nobody will buy the stories you write.

As a professional writer, I can assure you that there are ways to write well (many of them), and ways to write badly (ditto). If you hope to learn to write well, you need to learn the principles of good writing. Do not, I beg of you, choose to remain ignorant.

Although I don’t think writing is quite like baking a cake, I do think there are some standard techniques that are used in many different forms of writing. And these are true both in fiction and non-fiction. (Think about classic journalism, 3 act plays, hero’s quests, mysteries, whodunnits, etc.) I’m not suggesting that the greatest writing can be reduced to formula, but rather that there are conventions and best practices that can help provide a newcomer some structure and ideas on how to write well.

The IF Theory Reader book is a good start, but it would be fantastic for folks to share their ideas about what structures work well in IF with regards to pacing, character development, etc.

–Zack
z-machine-matter.com

I’ll go ahead and be the odd man out and say that writing is exactly like baking a cake.

There is a foundation craft (more than one, really), which can be learned, taught, formulated and possibly even perfected. The principles of craft are largely objective and achieve (for the most part) the objective portion of a work’s goals.

There is, on top of that foundation craft, an art (more than one, really), which cannot be learned, taught, formulated or ever perfected (thought it’s fun and often constructive to try). The principles of the art are largely subjective and achieve (for the most part) the subjective (emotional/aesthetic) portion of a work’s goals.

The efforts of the art, over time, also uncover new points of craft. New points of craft, in turn, can enhance the experience of creating the art.

Just like baking - cakes or otherwise. Just like any creative endeavor worth doing, really.

And anyone who thinks there’s no art in baking a great cake has never, I suspect, met one.

And just as you can buy crappy formulaic cakes at any supermarket, you can buy crappy formulaic games at any game store and crappy formulaic novels at any bookshop. But while the crappy formulaic stuff will always dominate every field (both commercially and in artsy and/or fartsy circles) it’s never the thing to judge a medium’s potential by.

Funny that many people have started to say how writing is like baking a cake. Here’s a thought, though - is writing for IF also like baking a cake? Is there also a recipe? Because that’s what this discussion is all about, and although some of the most basic recipes will work for some of the basic wordsmithing in IF (namely, the actual text in descriptions and dialog and whatnot) there’s all the other elements, like story progression and structure and stuff, that don’t translate well from a Static Fiction recipe.

Ghalev - I’m pretty sure you’re not describing a recipe. Following a recipe is like cooking with Bimby (which I do a lot of, and am otherwise useless in a kitchen, so I should know :wink: ). It’s all there - the ingredients, the times, the temperatures. You just follow evertyhing exactly and wham, you have a great-tasting dish. You can get creative, but then you’re not following recipes anymore.

You CAN follow a basic recipe and add stuff to it. That’s the sort of recipe I think exists for SF - there’s a lot of guides, rules, guidelines that amount to a fair number of different basic recepies (like “avoid over-using the passive mode” - saw that one in Stephen King’s “On Writing”, but it’s only a single ingredient to his own particular recipe).

What you’re describing isn’t a recipe, exactly - you’re describing the whole process of cake-baking, with the recipe being the foundation craft. And it’s that foundation that is a bit murky in IF. By now we’ve got excellent pointers, and one could say that if there IS a basic recipe for IF it lies in “The Craft of Adventure”. But other than that, we’re still experimenting as wildly as ever.

I did post a recipe. :slight_smile:

Kinda-sorta. The recipe is only a tiny part of the foundation craft, and following a recipe (really following it) would indicate a cake-baker who doesn’t even have all the basic foundations at hand yet.

Someone can follow a cake recipe without even knowing the difference between baking soda and baking powder, or without understanding the difference butter, low-vegetable margarine or high-vegetable margarine will have on crumb and texture, or without knowing the difference between cane sugar or honey in a cake’s moisture retention … Recipes are rote procedure that can be followed without understanding, while real craftsmanship can alter, subvert, vary, improvise change and ultimately discard the recipe based on objective understanding of what works. A good craftsman can make you hundreds of distinct cakes without any recipe at hand (though, without art, none of them will be cakes particularly worth remembering or celebrating), because he understands the principles on which the recipes are built.

I disagree that the craft foundations in IF are murky. What’s murky, I think, is the line between the craft foundations and the art built on them, and I think the blade that cuts the line cleanly is understanding that objective methods are useful mainly for objective goals, and any attempt to seek objective methods for subjective goals is fundamentally … well, noobish, really,* and that remains my take on the thread … it’s not some lack inherent to IF or some lack inherent to IF’s youth as a form … it’s a disconnect of understanding that applies universally to every creative endeavor in every time in history.

  • Technically I consider it ritualistic, but that’s for another thread in another context :slight_smile:

[quote]
Someone can follow a cake recipe without even knowing the difference between baking soda and baking powder, or without understanding the difference butter, low-vegetable margarine or high-vegetable margarine will have on crumb and texture, or without knowing the difference between cane sugar or honey in a cake’s moisture retention … Recipes are rote procedure that can be followed without understanding, while real craftsmanship can alter, subvert, vary, improvise change and ultimately discard the recipe based on objective understanding of what works. A good craftsman can make you hundreds of distinct cakes without any recipe at hand (though, without art, none of them will be cakes particularly worth remembering or celebrating), because he understands the principles on which the recipes are built.

[quote]
Well, in that case yes, we do have a recipe. We don’t even have to do anything about it in Inform 7, because the recipe’s already made - world-modelling, inventory management, general interaction. But it’s hardly an interesting recipe. If that’s what you mean, and that the craft is all the extras like using exposition, pacing and foreshadowing - and that the art is an extra step that makes all the difference - then you leave me choice but to agree with you. :slight_smile: Yes, there is a recipe, and yes, there are foundations. But they’re so insipid by themselves as to be useless. I got the feeling people were talking about a Black Forest Cake recipe, whereas you’re talking about the recipe for making dough.

Although we do have pointers (again, Nelson’s article) about how to make REALLY INTERESTING dough.

So I do think you’ll agree that there isn’t a recipe for making a Black Forest Cake in IF.

Inform 7 by Aaron A Reed. It shows you how to make Black Forest Cake (Sand-Dancer), or at least a good choc-mud cake. Sure it won’t be your game, but it will give you the fundamentals to begin making up your own recipes (like you said).

Touche.

So there, Original Poster - get Inform 7 and you’ll have your lessons, your recipe. :slight_smile:

Useful as far as they go, like any recipe. Useless if pressed into service for something they’re not meant for, certainly.

I’m not sure I understand the distinction (though if we’re sticking to metaphor it’s batter at any rate, not dough). But that may just mean the metaphor has exhausted its value for us :slight_smile:

Thanks for the correction. :slight_smile: By “BFCake recipe” I meant a recipe for something more substantial than just the bare, bare basics - like Sand-Dancer, as Tanga pointed out. Because from what I understood from your post, the “batter” would be the plain recipe, without the craft, the recipe for the foundation; and a BFCake would be something built up from the foundation with craft, if not necessarily art.

Thank you, gotcha.

Well, in that case I think we’ve had recipes for every kind of cake for years, with more always on the way. Given that a recipe is rote procedure based on prior success (which is to say, an imitation of the work of someone with greater understanding), we have as many recipes as we have working examples, copies of source code, or even the capacity to decompile :slight_smile:

But Sand-Dancer’s a recipe worth reading (and then a cake worth noshing), to be sure, despite its heavy-handed use of artificial color :wink: [but I already did that review …]

I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. Why are we painting babies again?

This has been a very helpful discussion.

To bake a dark horse of a different color.

…I just had the best idea for an IF game…