Lowell doesn't dress up to run games anymore, unfortunately.I’ve started tabletop playing again, although it’s via Google Hangouts rather than in person. My brother (whose excellent gaming and storytelling blog, Age of Ravens, you should check out) running a Changeling: The Lost campaign and it’s a great way to spend a little time with both him and my sister-in-law, along with meeting some new fellow players. I really love what he’s doing, which is using a system called Microscope in order to collaboratively generate the setting for the game, and it’s making me wonder about the possibilities of it for generating a shared world setting.
We went around the “table” first generating some high level concepts, such as vampires being very rare in this world, the existence of neon elementals, and some rule-specific stuff that kinda flew past my head, but which I’m understanding more as I keep going through the rules. The game’s set in Las Vegas, but successive rounds helped define the specifics of the world and some of the NPCs, like Wayne Newton: Werewolf Hunter or the Count, a bitter, twisted man who runs The Society for the Preservation of Vampires. Lowell’s blogged with more complete details here.
I really love this sort of session, because it’s so much fun to take someone else’s addition and riff on it. After the first round, the person starting each one had to come up with what’s called in Microscope terms a “lens,” something that each addition that round must reference. Ours were: guides, corruption, and alien abduction, and if you look at Lowell’s write-up, you may be able to trace where some of those items came from.
Interesting. I recently went looking for a new set of RPG rules to replace C&S rules I used to run. Never heard of Microscope, and it looks intriguing, though I’ve never heard of a set of rules that doesn’t use a GM (sounds more like a wargame than an RPG, though I spent a couple of years running/playing in a shared Champions setting which amounted to pretty much the same thing).
Rule set I’ve picked up is something called “The Burning Wheel.” Generic system (not for a specific setting except is is fantasy, though another book is out which adapts the system to scifi) and I’m trying to adapt it to use my old fantasy setting, though I may have to “crash” it and build upon the ruins (I’m speaking literally, not figuratively). Character generation is kind of complex (it’s the one weak point I’ve seen brought up in reviews) but the system seems clean and simple. Still reading it, but I’ve already picked up the other three books the Griffon had for it.
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Popping Pimples on Paragraphs: 5 Things To Watch For
Subject your prose to an up-close, rigorous inspection that goes sentence by sentence, word by word, to remove the "pimples" of excess words and bad constructions.Some writers don’t rewrite; others do. I’m among the latter – by the time a story goes out, it’s passed beneath my eyes at least four or five times, often significantly more, and at least one of those passes has been a read-aloud. If that’s not your style, perhaps you’ll prefer this story prompt, this post on three things that end a story well, or the always popular Rambo Cat. If you’re with me in a preference for the polished, though, here’s some techniques for fine-tuning prose.
Towards the end of working on something, you often get weary. You’ve looked at that sentence so many times it’s become meaningless. Perhaps you reach the point of the final polish and think, “Well, it’s good enough already.” It’s not. Give it one last gloss, one last rub of the magic word-rag to bring its surface up to such a mirror-bright sheen that the editor can see their humanity reflected in it.
Talking to a friend, I compared this to going over each paragraph looking for zits, words or phrases that are little ugly clots marring the sentence. Groom the prose like a show pony, trimming dead-ends of lifeless conjunctions or combing sentences into parallel structure in order to bring them to a glossy shine.
1. Remove adverbs. An effective way to find instances of adverbs is to search on “ly” via your word processor. Nine times out of ten, if not more, the adverb’s a signal that a better verb is needed: “dashed” instead of “ran quickly” or “shouted” rather than “said loudly”. Find that verb and snip off that lumpy adverb.
2. Too long sentences (and paragraphs). Split up long sentences, whose meaning may waver and transform somewhere between the first word and the last. You want varied sentence construction, a mix of long and short, unless you’re trying for a deliberate effect by sticking to one or the other. This level of pass is a good place to get out the shears and cut through a few conjunctions.
3. Cliche comparisons and figures of speech. Watch for tired phrases and spend a moment to come up with something fresher. Use a random tool to spark ideas if you need to. Liven things up.
4. And then. Look at the beginnings of sentences to see if their first words are necessary. “And” and “Then” are common ways to begin a sentence that are usually unnecessary. Those words should only begin sentences if they’re needed for pacing. Otherwise, they’re extraneous.
5. Bad sentence constructions. It’s easy, with long sentences, to get confused and a touch ungrammatical. It’s okay to break the rules of grammar but make sure it’s deliberate and not accidental.
Now put away your sandpaper and blow gently on your paragraphs. Part of the process is letting the words rest for a little while. Now’s the time to do that. Go out into the sunlight or evening, leaving your writing behind locked safely in drawer or computer file – steeping, aging, mellowing until you’re ready to look at it again.
Tiptree's beginnings always pack a punch, signaling the conflict of the story without being overly overt about the strategy.In an earlier post I mentioned establishing the story’s conflict as something that is often best done in the story’s first three paragraphs. In order to expand on that, I’ve drawn examples from one of my favorite speculative fiction writers, James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, all of which are available in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.
One of Tiptree’s classic stories, “The Women Men Don’t See” may be one of her most celebrated, leading to responses from other writers like Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (Kindle version) and my own “Clockwork Fairies” (Kindle version). Tiptree uses her titles to maximum effect and you’ll notice that each of these beginnings interacts in a significant way with the title preceding it.
I see her first while the Mexicana 747 is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her seat, saying “Sorry,” at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger blur in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them again.
The title plays off nearly every line: “I see her first,” (who? is it one of the women from the title?) “a double female blur,” “the near blur,” “the younger blur, “registering nothing,” finishing up with “I never would have looked at them or thought of them again,” at which point the reader is screaming why? why don’t you see them? The answer to that question is crucial to the story.
Here’s another Tiptree beginning, this time of “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” which uses the strategy of referring to a memory to reveal the conflict. The memory is connected to gender and embarrassment, which will also turn out to be crucial to the story.
Lorimer gazes around the big crowded cabin, trying to listen to the voices, trying also to ignore the twitch in his insides that means he is about to remember something bad. No help; he lives it again, that long-ago moment. Himself running blindly — or was he pushed? –into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior High. His fly open, his dick in his hand, he can still see the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. The hush. The sickening wrongness of shapes, faces turning. The first blaring giggle. Girls. He was in the girls’ can.
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read” is Tiptree at her best, examining gender norms and conventions with a ruthless, scathingly honest eye. Somehow that first moment of embarrassment, that moment of being in “the strange toilet” encapsulates so much of what that story is about and how alien the sexes can be to each other as well as how strange their container, the norms that make them up, which constitute the walls of “the can” itself, are. Look at how the center of his masculinity is framed visually: the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. There is so much going on in that first paragraph, including sensory details like the twitch of his insides, the blare of a giggle, the pattern and threat of a zipper, that it’s worth copying out, pulling apart sentence by sentence to figure out how it’s working.
Let’s finish up with Tiptree in a moment that puts everything up front, in the short story “We Who Stole the Dream”:
The children could survive only twelve minims in the sealed containers.
Woah. We don’t know what’s going on precisely, but we know crucial details. We have a deadline and it is only twelve minims. While we don’t know how long a minim is, we know it’s not much time because of that “only”. Plus, there’s an auditory echo of “minute” that makes us think they’re of similar length.
What’s at stake? This lives of children, for pete’s sake. Not just child, but children, multiple. And we know how they’ll die: suffocation. It would be hard to write a tauter, more dire beginning.
Writing exercise: write three first lines. They can state the stakes, as in the third example, or refer to some memory or object that encapsulates the conflict, as with the example from “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Include two titles for each, one that plays off the beginning and one that does not.
For bonus points, read “The Women Men Don’t See” and use that as your inspiration.
Feel free to post some of your best first lines on here, I’d love to see some!
One Response
Interesting. I recently went looking for a new set of RPG rules to replace C&S rules I used to run. Never heard of Microscope, and it looks intriguing, though I’ve never heard of a set of rules that doesn’t use a GM (sounds more like a wargame than an RPG, though I spent a couple of years running/playing in a shared Champions setting which amounted to pretty much the same thing).
Rule set I’ve picked up is something called “The Burning Wheel.” Generic system (not for a specific setting except is is fantasy, though another book is out which adapts the system to scifi) and I’m trying to adapt it to use my old fantasy setting, though I may have to “crash” it and build upon the ruins (I’m speaking literally, not figuratively). Character generation is kind of complex (it’s the one weak point I’ve seen brought up in reviews) but the system seems clean and simple. Still reading it, but I’ve already picked up the other three books the Griffon had for it.