I wrote up a pretty long list of things I learned over the course of writing my first games (which I posted on tumblr and patreon last year) but it fits this topic so well that I present it here as well. It is weirdly indented because it was pasted from lists that originally had numbers and bullet points, but we’re all fine with that.
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Summary
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Writing a thousand words a day is fine. It’s good, and it’s achievable. But if your goal is to write crazy-long interactive fiction (as seems to be the fashion) be aware of what that means: a thousand words a day, will get you to a million words in somewhere around three years. Million word IF is getting more common and expectations are rising. If you want to write two million words at that pace, now we’re talking six years. You either need to write faster or you have to have realistic expectations for when this thing is going to be done.
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I have to reiterate point 1. Writing long interactive fiction takes forever. You have to be prepare to pour your life force into it. I was sitting writing Chapter Six and I suddenly thought about a scene from Chapter Two and I said, aloud, “is that from the same game?” It seemed impossible, because I had written it so long before. If you aren’t ready to spend years and years on this, this might not be your genre. I am lucky that I happen to write (and type) super fast, but even so, years and years.
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Because long interactive fiction takes so long to write, if you don’t have a character bible, you are going to have a really rough time of it when you have to describe some minor character’s facial hair about whom you last thought of sixteen months ago. At the same time, every second you spend writing a character bible is a second you aren’t writing the thing itself.
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That leads me to this point: when you write like this, you give up a lot too. Time to play computer games, to go to a fall festival, to just sit with friends on the sofa and talk. You are just there, writing, alone. And thoughts about cost-benefit start drifting into your mind. “If I want to start learning to read Ancient Greek, think how many hours that would take away from writing!” So you have to be very very careful that it doesn’t invade everything, including your thoughts when you are doing other stuff. You need the other stuff. Without the other stuff you get boring and you lose the fertile ground for words to grow in. But my point is that when you see a great piece of writing, there were a lot of choices made, things that were given up, and time that was carved out for it, and it can be painful. You have to go into this open-eyed.
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The back and neck are the weak points. They give out way before the hands, on me, anyhow. After a day of writing, I feel like my spine has fused. Combine writing days with exercise days. Especially as you age, which you will if you choose to write long interactive fiction.
Summary
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I email myself my current draft every time I finish writing. Have some way of preserving every single version. I can’t tell you how many times I have to go back and refer to an earlier version when I realize I liked it better the way I did it last week. There’s assuredly a higher-tech way to do this, but this works for me.
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If you are bored when you are writing, the writing will be boring. Enjoy your own writing. Laugh at your jokes. Feel bad for your characters when they are sad. If you’re feeling, that’s a good sign.
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If you go to a café and bring a notebook and a sharp pencil, you can enjoy a nice writing session and be in the world for a while. Writing you do with a pencil in a notebook will be different in quality and texture from writing at the computer, and I can’t explain why. Mix it in.
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Carry a little notebook with you that fits in your pocket. The ideas will pop up randomly throughout the day. This is how you snag them. Write a hundred down and maybe two will be good. I have done this on carousels and in faculty meetings.
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This last one I particularly want to address to my younger self who was trying to write novels and stories in middle school and high school, as well as to everyone else working on early stuff. I used to be very annoyed at the process of writing because (and I remember saying this to myself) I didn’t understand the point of writing when nobody was going to read it, or maybe one or two friends but probably not. Writing felt like a thing I did that I spent hard work on for a long time, and then I put it in a drawer.
Summary
What I wish I had known regarding the above was that this is the equivalent of training in some mountaintop retreat, honing my craft, doing the million pushups, becoming a writing ninja. I wish someone had told me that it didn’t matter if anyone read it. That wasn’t the point. I was figuring stuff out. It takes a really long time to create your own writing style. This is how it happens. Just do it, and do it, and do it. The practice is its own reward, not publication, which I incorrectly thought was my goal at the time when I was learning how to write.
Two traits are great for minor characters. This guy has an uneven mustache and a tendency to mix up left and right. That lady wears only purple and holds a steak knife as if she were daring you to take it from her. That person smells like lemons and keeps asking you if you want to take a tour of the wax museum, please, or else they shall lose their job. Two traits are plenty for a minor role, and often, they will suggest other things to you. Why does that person smell like lemons? Honestly just writing that up I want to write a story about those three people.
For more important characters, start with three traits–not just little gimmicks like above, but bigger stuff. How does this person act and move when happy? How when they are in repose? How do they react in anger or when acting out? Those three pillars have been the foundation of many, many of my characters who developed into very fleshed-out people. You only have to start with three broad strokes, and then the subtle shading will follow.
When you write a narrative with tons of characters, people will forget who is who. *You* know because it’s your world, but they will have a really hard time remembering one hundred characters! But you can cheat like this. Write characters like Aunt Primrose, Inspector Ambrose, Col. Firesnuff, Deputy Hardcastle, Uncle Chum, String-bean Sally, President Ernie, Dr. X, the Reverend Theobald… Yes. Giving the reader the information right in the name makes it easy for everyone. Sprinkle those in. I like to also just call a character by first and last name, too, like Johnny Buttons, or have a name that just *fits* the character like Mopsie. These are all mnemonic aids, and the reader will have much more fun.
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Talk when you write dialogue; say it out loud and see how it feels in your mouth, where you stress words, and how your body and face want to move when you say it. Do gestures, big ones, when you read your work aloud. This will make the dialogue feel more natural, more spoken.
Have reference art right in front of you when you write. Find a picture that reminds you of a character or a place and stick it to your wall or put it on your computer desktop.
Some parts of your work that you labor over will never, and I mean ever, noticed by anyone, like the trial scenes in Chapter Eight of Tally Ho; some parts that you think will just be little nothings that nobody notices turn into huge deals like suddenly people are interested in your former servant and wouldn’t it be cool if Starling were a love interest. There is no way to predict this.
Read everything, everything, everything. Read all interactive fiction you can get your hands on. Read all sorts of prose styles. Read poetry. Read history. Read weird genres you don’t think you’ll like. Scavenge words, images, plots and keep them in a little notebook to mellow for later use.Throw no piece of writing out. Even if it is bad. Put them in a drawer. Put old bits of plots, old lines you write, character sketches, dumb ideas, short stories without ends, just throw them in there. They will slowly age into something, and they will end up becoming something. You don’t know when that will be, or what it will be. But I have dipped into my old story drawer more times than I can tell you.
Let tomorrow-you solve problems. Write the problems into your narrative without knowing how your characters will respond or how your plot will resolve or how the mystery goes. You don’t have to know. Just set up some interesting problems. The resolution is for tomorrow you to deal with, too bad for them. Today-you gets to write cool story.
Outline thoroughly and then ignore it as much as you want. The outline is to keep you honest. Ignoring it and going off on your own is fun. Say yes to the scope creep. Let your work get long and baggy and weird if you want. It’s fine.
Find your writing location and environment. I drink coffee and listen to music on headphones while I write early in the morning. I don’t write after lunch because the product is worse. I learned this by trial and error.
If your work is long, you will age and change with your work. This is interesting and can make your work nicely complex. Lean into that. This isn’t so much a piece of advice as something I’ve noticed.
Finally, be gentle with yourself. Don’t be your harshest critic. There’s a whole internet for that. If you write something and there it is before you, you have done something most people cannot do. If the you in five years, five months, five days looks at what you wrote and hates it, that’s a sign of your growing expertise and aesthetic sense. But even so, be gentle with your own writing.
I like the e/er system for its brevity above all. But the long variable names clearly work for a bunch of people, since I see them talked about with some frequency.
Dealing with whether someone’s wearing trousers or a skirt/dress is such a whole thing. I try to write around it, but that doesn’t always work out.