Playing Tabletop RPGs Can Make You A Better Writer
Today we are eight shades of excited to have Margaret Dunlap on Back of the Box to answer a few burning questions for us!
Magic is real, and hungry — trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Freshly awake to just what dangers are lurking, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like the label.
Bookburners is a 16-part Serial, presented by Serial Box. From a team of writers headed by Max Gladstone and including Mur Lafferty, Brian Francis Slattery, and Margaret Dunlap, this collaborative effort unfolds an epic urban fantasy narrative across an entire season in weekly installments.
Read it or learn more at SerialBox.com!
SB: Did you personally know or know of any of the other writers involved before this project?
MD: I didn’t know any of the other writers before I arrived at our story summit last October. I’d heard of their work and knew them by reputation, but the only person on the team I’d actually met was Julian. When he told me who was going to be writing for Bookburners my first reaction was something like, “Well, no fear of being the smartest person in *that* room.”
SB: Your background is primarily in television and webseries, but most of the other Bookburners authors come from prose fiction. What was it like collaborating with them?
MD: On Bookburners, we discovered that even though no one else had worked in a writers room per se, we all played tabletop roleplaying games, which is, at its heart, an exercise in collaborative storytelling. The qualities that make a good player or DM–listening, using other people’s ideas as launching points for your own, and generally playing well with others–are the same things that make for the kind of writer you’d want to collaborate with on something like this. Everyone was totally game and excited about the project, and I’ve had a blast working with all of them.
SB: How do you approach a problem as vast as constructing a new world?
MD: I came into Bookburners fairly late in the process, so most of the big world questions were already settled by the time I was on board. I got to pitch in for the part where you take the implications of that world and figure out how it is reflected by (and in) the characters.
SB: Do you workshop each other’s episodes? If so, what is that process like?
MD: Our team workshopping takes place mostly in the early parts of the process. Everyone turns in their outlines and first drafts to the other writers (plus Julian) before they go to editorial, and then we meet via video conference for feedback. I feel like our notes for each other tend to focus mostly on continuity and “big arc” questions. “How does this event affect something that’s coming up later on, or reflect what we’ve already established?” “Is characterization consistent between writers and between episodes?” We don’t often get into line notes, both because we’re looking at early drafts, and because I think we all appreciate the different flavors brought to each “episode” by our individual voices.
(This article originally appeared on The Back of the Box, the blog of Serial Box Publishing. Serial Box is the premier publisher of serialized fiction. Learn more at SerialBox.com.)
SB: What defines a great story?
MD: Man, that’s a big question. I feel like what makes a story great is very much a matter of perspective; a story that’s great to me might not be to someone else, even someone with generally similar tastes. If I had to define one quality of a great story, it would be that it resonates with an audience, whether that’s an audience of one or one-million.
SB: Do you have a favorite Bookburners character or story arc you’d like to talk about briefly?
MD: I love all of our leads, but I also really enjoy exploring our more minor players. These are the little guys, usually created to serve a specific story need or add color to the world and then fade back into the background, but sometimes they surprise you and turn into more. You plant them as tiny seeds in one episode and then watch as they grow into something you never imagined.
SB: Finally: what are you reading?
MD: Not nearly enough! It’s staffing season in L.A., so I’m reading a lot of the new pilots or catching up with shows already on the air. My “to be read” pile is literally hip deep. I depend on audiobooks in the car to keep me from falling hopelessly behind. Right now, I’m waiting for my library to get the third volume of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy in and listening to Ghettoside by Jill Leovy.
Margaret Dunlap is currently one of the writers on Bookburners. Before joining the team, she wrote for Eureka (SyFy) as well as ABC Family’s cult-hit The Middleman. Most recently, she was a writer and co-executive producer of the Emmy-winning transmedia series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and co-created its sequel Welcome to Sanditon. Her short fiction has previously appeared inShimmer Magazine. Margaret lives in Los Angeles where she taunts the rest of the team with local weather reports and waits for the earthquake that will finally turn Burbank into oceanfront property. She tweets as @spyscribe.
This article brought to you by Serial Box. For more serials, articles, and behind-the-scenes looks, head over to SerialBox.com
Originally published at blog.serialbox.com on October 5, 2015.
