RPG Prose Style exemplars

[clehrich]

As most of you know, much of my professional work is, unfortunately, devoted to grading--I mean teaching writing, as in academic prose style.  Not surprisingly, then, I have been working on writing pedagogy for some time now, with some mild success in various areas.

Ben's recent rant thread, and a number of older threads on this forum, have discussed how to write well for RPGs.  I'd like to share something that has recently happened in my classes, muse on it a bit for practical purposes in gaming, and then ask some questions.

Depending on where and when you went to high school and/or college, you may recall that the major burden of writing teaching usually falls on English teachers.  This has led to a common conceit: you read good literary prose, and somehow that teaches you to write good analytical prose.  The process is commonly bolstered by a certain amount of grammar work, at the least in the redlining applied to your papers.

Now in my work, since I know very little about literature in a formal way, I refuse to follow this model.  I teach history and religion, about which I know a good deal.  But until recently, I have been forced to teach introductory classes about literature and only more advanced writing classes on things I know about.

In the introductory syllabus constructed by my program (Boston University's College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program), there is an assignment called "Imitation."  What you do is take some passage, selected by the instructor or the student, and you transpose it to talk about something else.  The idea is to ape the original writer almost perfectly, so that you are trying to convince your reader that the passage was actually written by the writer in question.  For example, you decide to lift the description of Mr. Utterson from the beginning of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and make it about your own father or uncle.  The theory is borrowed from Stevenson himself, in his essay "A College Magazine" (Memories and Portraits).  By imitating a good writer creating a particular effect, you add that effect to your toolbox as a writer, and can then use it when you need it.

Now that I am finally teaching history at the introductory level, I had my students imitate either Carlo Ginzburg (The Night Battles) or Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre).  Not all the pieces are great, but what I do see is that there is a fantastic jump in almost every student's basic prose voice.  Suddenly they all sound controlled, intelligent, and fairly graceful.  I never found this to be the case with literary imitations, and I know a lot of my colleagues feel the same way; my colleagues who also teach creative writing say that it's a wonderful exercise for that purpose, but crappy for analytical prose.  So I am stunned at how well this works: you imitate exactly the sort of voice you want, choosing someone who is simply fantastic at it, and lo and behold you get the voice you want.

For example, in The Night Battles, Ginzburg opens with a 3-page presentation of the facts of a case, including a phenomenal amount of detail.  It's so dense and complicated that it's a little tricky to follow, and it's rather flat and dry in a number of respects.  But what's cunning about it is that Ginzburg's voice is running along next to a case that is so bizarre that you're amazed.  This combination puts the reader in a weird position: the whole case just seems funny, as in really laughable, because you just can't make heads or tails of what the peasant is on about.  And the point is that the inquisitors were in exactly this position, and were totally stumped.  The passage is brilliant and hysterical, and as an opening gambit it's a bolt of lightning.

I believe the same thing should work for RPG prose.  What we really all ought to be doing (but mostly won't) is picking out small sections of games as we go along.  We think, "Gosh, that's very powerful and evocative right there."  Then we come up with a strange game concept and write that little piece of it.  And we do it again, with a new concept.  And we keep doing it until we have this little piece of style down pat.  Then we do it again with another piece we find effective.  Eventually we have a whole toolbox of techniques for excellent RPG prose, and can put it all to work in constructing a really wonderful game.

Now to my mind, the difficulty (apart from the time involved) is that I can't think of all that many games that are this well written.  Fortunately, we only need some bits and pieces, not whole games.  Even there, however, there is a constant tendency to pick out games that are in their rules, concepts, or play effective, rather than those which are well written.  For this exercise, the latter is important and the former irrelevant.  Of course, one cannot fully separate style from content, but the point of the exercise is to do exactly that as a writing technique.

So here's my first question:

Has anyone consciously done this?

My second question:

Can you pick out any passages, from any game relatively widely available, that are stunningly well written?  Forget about quality at any other level.  Just prose.  Anything?

I note that OAD&D was always very well edited, and sometimes well written, but it's been far too long since I combed through those texts so I can't pick passages.

Anyone want to give it a shot -- picking passages I mean?

Finally, anyone want to comment on the value (or lack thereof) of the exercise?

[Ben Lehman]

This is interesting advice.

As far as I can remember, I have attempted this once, with Polaris at various stages in its development.  The first is that the setting material is a direct apeing of the style of Shreyas Sampat, which I gather is itself at least somewhat influenced by Rebecca Borgstrom.

I don't know if it counts, since background material is not quite the same thing as mechanical text, but I nonetheless think it is a good idea.

One really important thing is that, if you imitate someone's style, it will tend not to be obvious to anyone else.  As in -- you will think that everyone else will think you are ripping off Game Author X, but everyone else will barely notice.  And, yet, by taking on aspects of their style, you will have improved your own writing.  So don't be too afraid of "stealing."

yrs--
--Ben

[Rob MacDougall]

That's a very fine idea, Chris.

Thinking of the games I know best: parts of Unknown Armies are IMHO very well-written. If we're talking about setting and campaign advice as well as rules, I'd also mention your buddy Ken Hite. The content of his work gets more attention than the prose but I think he has a gift for conveying giddy gamer enthusiasm about his subjects that few can match.

It's harder to think of mechanics sections that are particularly well written, because when they are, the prose doesn't always stick with you; you just internalize the rule without giving the text much thought.

Have to think on this further.

Rob