How do you keep the fires burning?

[Brian Leybourne]

Hopefully this is the right forum to post this question, if it's not I'm sure I'll hear something really quick :-)

I've been working on a project for one of the Forge games, I don't want to say too much because I have not cleared "discussions about it" with the game designer, but suffice to say I'm doing a great deal of development for a new sourcebook (which about gives it away anyway for those who know where I mostly post *grin*).

My question is to the other game writers/designers.. how do you keep the fires burning? The project I'm working on involves a great deal of fiction writing along with mechanical development, and it doesn't take that long before the spark of, err.. "originality" isn't the right word, but I can't quite think what is... "creativity"?

"sanity"? :-)

What I'm getting at is that this is the thing I love. It's what I have always wanted to do and it's a fricking blast doing it, but it gets hard staying, er..  "fresh"? Yes, that's the word, FRESH. After a while, all of your fiction starts to sound similar and you have to throw stuff away because it's not as good as you were writing yesterday, and you're not having as many sudden flashes of cool insight as you did when you started, and...

I'm not sick of the project or anything, quite the opposite, but do you know what I mean? I'm sure most of you must, and many of you are presumably old hats at this. So, what do you do to rekindle the flames?

[S.Lonergan]

Dude, take things from a different angle, if your writing about one side of a conflict, take a look at things from the other side.... Try writing about something completely irrelevant and you might come across a concept that can be intergrated into what your doing.

Like I said, im not a very good writer, but take things from a different angle and you'll see a whole fresh point of view..

[Tim Gray]

Like many really obvious things, I'd forgotten this till quite recently: the more edits or writing stages you do on a piece, the staler you get. I've tended to tinker with things in odd bits of available time and then leave them for long periods. But the work weighs on your mind in the meantime, because you know you want/need to go back and finish it. I might want to take a different approach in future. (There are, however, good reasons for having at least one significant gap in a project - it lets you come back with greater objectivity, and your subconscious will have been chewing on the ideas in the meantime.) It's also a good idea to identify milestones when you can congratulate yourself and possibly have rewards.

[Mike Holmes]

Write lots and lots of bad stuff. Then come back later and fix it. Figure out why it's bad, and change it until you like it. Works for some projects.

Mike

[Clinton R. Nixon]

This answer's going to seem overly simple, but I think the solution is relatively simple:

1) Write something every day. It doesn't matter if it's your current project or not. I wrote Paladin while working on Donjon as a way to take a break.

2) Play games. No matter what you're playing, ideas for your own game will be spurred by play.

[Blake Hutchins]

Brian,

As far as your fiction goes, list the kinds of things you want to illustrate, and then visualize a number of scenes to carry those points across.  Mix up the circumstances.  As you do so, you should easily identify whether you're repeating yourself such that all the scenes look alike from this "top-down" level.

Once you've gotten a plan, it's all about the storytelling.  Keep it short and sweet, keep a consistent point-of-view, don't weaken your prose with too many adverbs, and render a pithy, interesting scene.  If something feels too predictable or lacking in freshness, put in something unexpected.

Process-wise, I agree with Mike.  Get your shitty first draft DONE and then revise.  Pay attention to your targeted word count.  Keep things terse.  Know what kind of response you're trying to evoke in your readers and stick to that.  Once you've gotten a decent second draft, run it by a few people with an eye toward general reaction and then specific nits.  Identify places where the reader wanted to gloss by a graph or two, or where s/he dropped out of the story.  Fix those spots.

As an aside, you might also consider that game fiction, particularly those snippet vignettes you commonly find in WW or DP9 books, does tend toward the predictable.  Mostly I think this is a function of less-than-stellar writing, but in some cases, it's just because those vignettes don't afford enough space to let you develop much that will catch the average reader off guard.  Writing effective short-shorts is an art unto itself.

Best,

Blake

[M. J. Young]

I think this has been alluded to, but a good part of keeping fresh is to have several irons in the fire. I don't think I have fewer than a dozen projects going right now, and I move from one to another. Some of these are priority projects; that only means that if I'm not sure what to do I'll do them first.  Others are back burner things that I go to when I'm particularly inspired to write something. Try to make them as different as you can manage. I've got a series of novels, some theological work, the Game Ideas Unlimited column (Gaming Outpost), the Faith and Gaming column (Christian Gamers Guild), a couple of other books and papers on various subjects, all moving forward at varying speeds--and I'm always ready to start something else if the fancy takes me and then look for a place to use it. (And besides, I write a lot of forum posts and newsletter postings.)

This way if you get stuck on one thing, you change what your brain is doing quite drastically to do something else, and it simmers on the back burner until something else bubbles to the surface.

The other ideas are also good; this one works well for me.

--M. J. Young

[Caveman Lawyer]

I've been designing mine for 11 years; it's gone through 4 entirely different revisions. Sometimes I have the spark, and sometimes I don't. What works for me is knowing when to hunker down and "get it out" and when to put it down for awhile. I just went almost 4 months without writing a thing. Anyhow, taking a good break is what works best for me... assuming you have plenty of time to finish!

[ADGBoss]

A few of the things that has recently done me a great deal of good is:

1) Talking to other game designers and game players
and
2) GEtting into philosophical discussions regarding gaming. What one previously person mentioned about gaming. Play something. IT works the same wit discussing other games, campaign etc... If your writing, write, if your game designing, play.
and
3) Hack off your Left ear (no just kidding). Seriously take a look at the literature or music or art which surrounds your genre. If your doing fantasy browse the fantasy section, Sci-fi do the same etc...


hope it helps but honestly sometimes you have to muddle through. Keep pushing and pushing until you break through

SMH
ADGBoss