Writing Excuses: Response

I listened to Writing Excuses Season 10.20: How Do I Write a Story, Not an Encyclopedia? and Writing Excuses 10.18: Build an Entire World? Are You Crazy?.

These were both picked specifically to help me in my IF game development as I struggled with the world I built and the language that surrounded it.

While creating my game and the world it takes place, I also created some new terms that rooted characters in the Net. I understood that new lingo can be confusing, but I didn’t want to repeat the meaning every time a word was shown. In my first draft, if someone missed the first definition, they might be taken out of the story by confusion over a word they don’t understand. “How Do I Write a Story, Not an Encyclopedia” helped me create a system to keep users informed, but not in an annoying or repetitive way.

I identified and focused on which information was key to the player’s understanding. For example, understanding the term “Glitch” is necessary for my game because it’s part of the catalyst for the journey and also helps a reader understand how the Net (my world) views people. It serves multiple purposes, similar to my word ‘arc’ for humans who lived in the real world. First, it helps the backstory and motivation for the creation of the Net, but it also is a term that Luna, my main character, uses to describe things that don’t quite fit in or are unique.

By using a character’s point of view, an author can slyly sneak in references and context clues that give the user/reader the information needed without being direct about it. I learned that I can use the world and context with my new words to clarify meaning and offer hints to readers through perspective. The intended effect is that players understand what these words mean, but don’t feel like they’re getting the same information over and over again.

The episode “Build an Entire World? Are You Crazy?” gives guidance on how to create a world for a story while not getting overwhelmed by outside details. I learned that I can let the story inform the world and vice versa, editing each. One can’t exist without the other and it’s important to remember that the world exists to serve the story.

The next key point is to do research for your world. This is something I hadn’t really considered while brainstorming, partially because I feel like I at least somewhat understand the difficult topics I’m dealing with (ableism, emotions/psychology).

I really resonated with the “iceberg” metaphor: the reader only sees the tip of the iceberg but assumes that the rest is there. The iceberg is your world, and through your story you reveal parts of it, but you must also be convincing enough to make the reader assume that you know everything under what’s showing. However, this doesn’t mean that you have to know everything under the iceberg, rather have the big ideas mapped out and context for things that happen in your story.

Both of these podcasts made the overwhelming task of creating a new world seem a little less overwhelming.