Well, I don’t really know anything about the scene other than the quote you provided, which includes not-knowing what it is that the MC did, so I was just throwing around general suggestions that I assumed could be alternative feelings to something triggering an are-you-happy-now (which I can’t not read as an accusation in a vacuum).
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Yes, you’re right, and I appreciate the kind words, Ray. I think something that can feel unsettling is these periods of little audience engagement, but that’s natural in our setting where these projects take so long to complete. Hope Deux a Deux is coming along well btw!
Goodness, I’m glad it sounds like you’re feeling better this month! Burnout is no joke. Best of luck with your goal, and congrats on unlocking your thread! lol
Big thanks, I know all of that is true. I appreciate the advice, Zozo!
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Bramble, my love.
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Hey ClearBlueStar!
I saw your questions in the thread about admonishing players’ choices, and I want to echo the advice to be careful with it. I played around with that concept slightly in my homestead route, in my second chapter, where [T.W. Gore, Horror, Violence Against Children]
the sister is killed by the Witch, and the Devil warns the MC they need to escape. If the player chooses to turn around and look anyway, they get this snippet:
Dark Scene
You shouldn’t. You recall a voice in your head saying you shouldn’t, but you do anyway.
You force your neck to the side and witness the naked backside of the woman, hunched over the table, feasting away from you. There is blood staining the walls and dripping down the table. As you follow the macabre trail, you notice a wide bucket beside her feet, where scraps have been thrown, and you see the small hand of your sister, resting over the rim, still and alone.
Grief twists your face as acidic agony spreads like wildfire from your gut to your throat. The only thing you can do is to turn away. Maybe next time it’ll be better to listen.
This is definitely the most gruesome moment in my entire game thus far, and players responded strongly to its shock factor. It kind of reinforces how the earlier narrative goes out of its way to say, “Don’t look.” But even with that, I wouldn’t actually call the player names like “dumb” or anything. Hope that helps; I know it’s a very specific example, and you’re not writing horror lol.
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Do you all have any favourite writing resources?
In line with my goal for this month, I have wiped the dust off my copy of Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin and it’s been more fun than anticipated to go through some exercises. So I thought I’ll see what everyone else here likes enough to recommend.
Not IF specific (I just assume there are a lot less). Most of the resources I used at some point are probably the ones you often see recommended online:
the Write About Dragons lectures, Writing Excuses (podcast, I prefer the older episodes), The Creative Penn (podcast), Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott, and I found this weirdly helpful ( Dangerous Writing App ).
Aside from the old ‘read more’ of course. I guess I do sometimes try to go out of my way to pick up something I don’t gravitate towards, like a screenplay (I actually think reading some has made my dialogues a tiny bit less awful).
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The Emotional Craft of Fiction. It’s intended for novels, but if you’re prose focused you can learn a lot from it. There’s a pretty clear divide in my writing before and after I started incorporating its advice, and my emotional evocation has increased tenfold. Highly recommend it, especially if you’re like me and struggle to put emotions into coherent words that aren’t primary colors.
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I haven’t read that book, I’ll have a look for sure.
When you say emotions, do you mean the characters’ emotions, or the tone of your prose?
Mainly asking because I liked a writing exercise I did a while ago for tone (from this episode, although I’d say feel free to ignore the episode itself 20.30: Using Why To Shape Tone–Writing Excuses – Apple Podcasts ). They ask you to write a a short scene depicting a character who pours tea for their beloved partner. Tone in version A is meant to be joyous, in version B it’s meant to be terror. That the scene is so mundane really helped imo.
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I guess both? Because you can use the prose to show the character’s emotions in a way that isn’t explicit. But yeah, it’s mostly about writing the emotions behind what is explicitly being said. Having characters lie about how they’re feeling or not knowing themselves while revealing it to the audience.
That sounds like a fantastic exercise and very much like what this book asks you to do.
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Oh, there’s a name for that 
. Yeah that’s what I’m doing on one of mine at the moment, although I am doing a proper rewrite of one of the endings too as it just isn’t working as is.
Honestly? Don’t do it. From someone who has, all you end up with is more unfinished WIPs. (I’m going back through mine to finish them up one at a time now as otherwise they won’t get done.) Three is too much, unless you’re only working on mini projects and even then scope creep happens. Pick one, two at most if you have a tendency towards writers block and need an alternate to switch between.
^This.
The general rule is show, don’t tell. If the player makes a choice and there are no consequences except the narrator telling them they’re wrong… well, that’s only going to work for a very specific kind of game where you have the narrator intervening in other places and unless done well will likely just annoy players. (Some comedy games for example might pull it off, but comedy’s tricky to get right anyway.)
From a personal standpoint, one of my pet hates is a game that “allows” you to make a choice then immediately invalidates it, because the author has decided it’s the “wrong” way to play the game. If the choice doesn’t fit the storyline, don’t add it. If you allow the player to make a “bad” choice, given them a proper storyline where that choice has consequences that matter.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have this part in unless this is the tone of the entire game. But that’s just me. If they’re reacting to another NPC being hurt, I’d write that instead. If they’ve done something they know is wrong, you could always add another choice for how the player feels rather than telling them off.
ie:
You know that your little sister will get blamed for the mess. You've set it up that way on purpose after all. And...
*choice
# You're starting to feel slightly guilty over it.
# You're concerned about what the fall out might be if she discovers it was you.
# You're feeling rather pleased with yourself at escaping blame.
# You'd do it again. It's not like she hasn't done the same to you before.
Regardless, it's too late to change anything now.
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Gosh, I adore Le Guin. Her anthropological, feminist writing guides my prose. I most enjoy The Left Hand of Darkness and this craft book! Wait, let me list more resources:
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White.
- Master Lists for Writers by Bryn Donovan.
- Mastering Suspense, Structure, & Plot by Jane K. Cleland.
- Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes.
- World Building For Writers by Maya Linden.
- 101 Worldbuilding Prompts by M. D. Presley.
- Save the Cat! Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody.
- The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass.
- The Conflict Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi.
- The 7 Book Red Sneaker Writers Book Series by William Bernhardt.
- On Writing and Worldbuilding Volume I and Volume II by Timothy Hickson.
I’ve accrued a lot over a long time. Some books I prefer more than others; many are on sale for cheap or available through libraries. 
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Abbi Emmons and Shaelin Writes are 2 writing channels I really like, if you’re interested in videos.
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Yeah I decided to kick the third to the curb, and just make both of them take place in the same universe. Writer’s block is very effective against me.
The choice takes place at the end, like the final choice before the game ends and becomes exposition if I decide to add it, so thats why I was playing around with it as a form of narration or maybe the characters around them.
they are hurting someone, but the only person who would have cared is gone.
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I don’t have anything to add, just want to reiterate that this is a great list of phenomenal resources.
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I really love her prose. I guess overall I prefer her short stories bit, but aside from The Left Hand of Darkness, I also quite liked The Word for World is Forest.
Thank you for all the recommendations, I know a few, but definitely not all of them. Seeing some of them made me think I should look for a mystery specific one for a change.
I don’t know either, that’s perfect. Videos are great (though they’ll most likely end up as a sort of podcast anyway).
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Thanks! I left some out that were way too genre specific.
I’m not sure if I added:
- The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass
I haven’t finished reading it, but it explores invoking emotions in the reader through prose. So far, at 14% percent, I’ve learned a lot.
I feel you. Why must it take so much work to play IF?
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starting to make myself a “quickstart” system to use for my own playtesting. 500ish words in today and i haven’t actually got any code in, just writing an explanation for what each option actually is (what the given build looks like, what choices it’s made to flag variables, etc).
i finally caved and started working on this because having to go through all the “skip ahead to Chapter 3” options MANUALLY each time i want to test what i’ve written is such a hassle. it makes me not even want to test! but ughhh. making the separate builds in the code to test out different PC builds (accounting for all their traits/character variables and ALSO all the variables that get set by playing through the prologue through chapter 2) is also a hassle, lol.
at least when i get it done, i know it’ll be SO much quicker to get into chapter 3 to read through it myself!! hopefully i can get the whole thing set up by the end of this weekend, middle of next week at the latest.
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It’s not specifically prose- or game-related, but I’ve always loved William Goldman’s books on screenwriting, “Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade” and “Which Lie Did I Tell?”
Gamewise, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Game Narrative Kaleidoscope, in which you can find a short essay about writing lore from yours truly, and 100+ other fantastic perspectives.
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Ugh down with the flu again (this is like the second time in 3weeks. My immune system must be shot at the moment.) I ending up getting bored of being cooped up in my room (and not trusting my head enough for complicated statistics which I was meant to do) so instead got a lot of progress done on my mini ectocomp entry instead somehow, so at least the day wasn’t a total write off.
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Maaaan it’s so hard to take ideas from the brain and get them written down into a finished product. I WANNA PLAY MY IF SO BAD but I can’t if it all just stays in my head 
But at least the good news is that I’m sooo close to finishing the “prologue “s first draft that I can nearly taste it….. then I got a whole ass chapter to write before I want to actually post it publicly! How do y’all do it man
@HalfFinished I have the exact same problem! I like to reread the bit that I wrote and research for the perfect words and it just wastes so much time lol. One thing I’ve done to help slightly is trying internalize that “the first draft is telling the story to yourself”(sadly I don’t remember who I’m quoting ), which makes me sometimes write like I’m verbally telling a story to someone. Like instead of getting all prose-y, sometimes it’s best to just get from point A to point B, then we can clean up the prose in the second draft.
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Woke up yesterday with a sudden fever, so instead of writing I’m reading up on urban legends.
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