The Art of Filling White Space

[SlurpeeMoney]

I have done the research. I've come up with daring new concepts. I could play the whole game, right now, with what is in my head. But now, when it comes to filling the white space, my head just stops.

This has been a problem for me for nearly as long as I've been tinkering with game design. I can come up with games and game ideas like it's nobody's business, and I can run around telling everyone how incredibly cool my new game is going to be, but I just can't make the words march in order across the page. I mean, sure, the words go where I want them to go. I can even form intelligable sentences, occasionally, but whenever I go back and read what I've read it seems horribly inferior to anything I've ever read before. I'm sure this is only a confidence issue, and I've seen it in other writers who are really quite good, but I want my game to be perfect.

How do you get around this to get your game published? How do you force the words to make the vision in your head the game other people will play?

Maybe this is just a rant. Maybe other folks here are having the same problem. Dunno. Just had to get it off my chest.

Kris

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I have done the research. I've come up with daring new concepts. I could play the whole game, right now, with what is in my head. But now, when it comes to filling the white space, my head just stops.

...

How do you get around this to get your game published? How do you force the words to make the vision in your head the game other people will play?

Maybe this is just a rant. Maybe other folks here are having the same problem. Dunno. Just had to get it off my chest.

You want someone to pat you on the back and give you some kind of unspecified support. We don't specialize in that here. We specialize in the concrete and give help to real problems.

There's only one solution to what you describe. Go and write. Every day. And until you write down your game, you're not "tinkering with game design." You're not doing anything.

Call me harsh, but you need to go write every day for a month and then come back. Then you might be ready to learn something.

[Valamir]

 

but I want my game to be perfect

no you don't.

You want your game to get written.  That is completely different from and largely opposed to "perfect".

Perfection is the enemy of good and the sworn foe of progress.


Crap written down is automatically better than perfect in your head.

[MatrixGamer]

To quote James Thurbur "Don't get it right get it written."

When you get it down on paper, it is a first draft. You will rewrite it and make it better later on. Personally I keep a note book handy and write my ideas down as they come so they're on paper before I tell anyone. Maybe that makes it easier to write the first draft - I don't know.

It seems that the issue you're dealing with is learning how to write. This is not so much about picking words as dealing with the emotions that arrise when picking the words.

You might try writing for amateur magazines. That way you'll see your name in print and be exposed to the emotions that go with that. Repeated exposure will make it easier to trust that your writing is fine. I did this in the late 80's and it was very helpful (it also lead to a lot of gaming contacts.)

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[Larry L.]

Dang it. From the subject, I had hoped this would be an interesting thread about layout.

[Andrew Morris]

Yeah, just write. That's the best advice, and the hardest to follow if you don't know how to break it down into smaller steps. So, go a step further. Don't even worry about first drafts, revisions, etc. Write down anything...and I mean anything. Write down why you can't write. Don't stop. If you're stuck on a point, write "I'm stuck on this point. I just can't seem to figure it out. I want to say something like X, but I keep coming back to Y. I wonder how I'll solve that problem. Oh, wait, I just thought of something..." You get the picture. After you're done, go back and cut out all the non-essential stuff. Then build off of that.

Another way to go is to prewrite. Everyone hates doing it, but it's very useful for giving your work structure. Remember back in grade school, when you had to create an outline for your papers? Do that. Or make a flowchart. Or do anything else that lets you map out where you want to go in broad strokes. Then you'll have a skeleton, and you just need to flesh it out.

[Eric Provost]

Yeah, just write.

Everything that Andrew said in that paragraph is how I write.  I have two full legal pads full of my notes on FH8.  Then there's the pockets worth of scrap paper I jot down things as they come to mind.  Most of which is crap.  Numbers thrown all over the page so I can visualize the balance of the system.  Stream of thought things like "Crap!  Why isn't the CR system meshing with the CS system?"  I kinda 'talk at the paper'.  Once I've done all that scribbling I put my notes aside and refuse to look at them while I'm transferring what I now know about my game onto the lappy.

So, yeah... Echoing what everyone else has said here;

STFU and start writing.  And don't worry about what comes out.  Just worry that something comes out.  Lots and lots of something.  Perfection is a trick of the mind.  There's no such thing as perfection.

-Eric

[ADGBoss]

Remember if it were easy, everyone would do it. It takes Discipline and if your not used to it, Discipline can be a very hard change to mae in your life. I am sure any number of people here can relate anecdotes about what it took to discipline themselves for writing. I know I am still strugglign with it.

I find that creating small managable stages works best for me. Write a one page synopsis, then a one page playtest. Does not matter if no one else sees them (though this is helpful). What matters is that you get it done and accomplish it.  It does get easier (well it has for me) and it probably will get easier for you.

The trick is convincing yourself that you do not have to write a 96 page book with color prints all at once. That takes time.

Sean

[Keith Senkowski]

Is there an echo in here?  Like everyone else says, just sit down and write.  I write every day.  Half the shit is garbage.  Actually most of the shit is garbage, and a lot of times it is just notes I jot down into a notebook I carry with me everywhere.  But it keeps me fresh.

One thing though that works for me concerning writers block is to work out of order.  When I wrote up CoS, I would spend one day working on religion, the next day on the Cell creation, the third on whatever-the-fuck.  The point is I just wrote on whatever caught my fancy that day.  It let me keep working and making progress while I sorted the whole thing out.

And like Ralph said, don't try to make the perfect game.  No such beast.  Just try writing a good game and take it from there.

Keith

[Lance D. Allen]

To add something that's perhaps a bit more helpful (Personally, I think Clinton and everyone thereafter harshly misinterpreted what you were requesting, but I could be wrong) Find someone who doesn't have your writer's block, and have then do the prose.

First though, you'll need to follow everyone else's advice; Write it down. Then if you're not satisfied, hire a writer to turn your text into the final copy of the book.

[Michael S. Miller]

If you're having problems organizing your thoughts in good order, I suggest you read the entire thread Shooting the Sacred Cows. Towards the end, Chris Lehrich gives great advice on the use of an outline for organizing and revising

[Paul Czege]

Kris,

I'm sure this is only a confidence issue, and I've seen it in other writers who are really quite good, but I want my game to be perfect.

I think Scott McCloud's 24 hour "Dare," and the "Game Chef" incarnation of it show a keen awareness of how and why people get and stay creatively blocked...and have the potential on some level to be an effective counter-agent. You get blocked when you can't keep your brain from focusing on needing to be brilliant/perfect/impressive in your creative efforts, for whatever reason. The "Dare" attaches a different objective to the creative endeavor, one of completion and effort, and in so doing works to melt away at the paralysis mode.

Paul

[jdagna]

Clinton, I think you're being a little harsh.  There's a very common cultural misconception that good writers just sit down for a month straight, type stuff out of their head and then publish it as-is.  One of the great poets of the 60's once claimed that his best poem just came to him as he walked on the beach and that he wrote it down in a finished form when he got home.  When he died and people went through his things, they found evidence that the poem actually took him more than six months to write, with dozens of revisions.  There's a reason why editors get paid as much as writers (and often more). 

People get fed these lies about how the creative process works and then (quite naturally) get frustrated, confused and afraid when their own experiences don't match up. 

You have to explain to people what to expect, what to do and how to do it.  THEN you go tell them to just do it.  Having them just go do it with all the lies and misconceptions intact is just a recipe for frustration.


Anyway, two things for SlurpeeMonkey:

1) If you can explain your game to a person, record that with a cassette tape, then type it verbatim.  Don't edit it or think about it until it's all down.  Then come back to it and either work on editing it into something meant for written language or keep it by your keyboard and use it as an outline while you rewrite it.  Eventually, you'll be able to just type it out like you're having a conversation with a virtual person.  Then, you may eventually get to a stage where you can filter the conversation into a good first draft without needing to put the conversation to paper at all.  But the key is to get something down.

2) Eliminate the word "perfect" from your vocabulary.  Perfectionism is a fear of rejection - after all, if you never finish, you can't be judged on it (and if you absolutely do have to finish, you'll have minimized the potential for judgment).  But writing doesn't work that way (honestly, nothing does).   No matter how good you are, even if you achieve perfection, most people won't like what you do (and, odds are, you'll be one of them).  I agree with a creative writing prof I once had a class with - learning to handle rejection is more important than anything else in writing. (With self-discipline being second and actual writing ability a distant third).  But it's important to realize that that you don't get over these fears in some psychological epiphany.  They're always with you - you just learn to perform in spite of them.  That's a big part of why everyone is saying "just write."

Also, I don't know where you live, but I'll bet there's a local writer's group.  Go find it and attend a few of their meetings.  You'll never look at the business of writing in the same way again.

[timfire]

I usually "build up" to it. I start with a bare bones concept. MAYBE one page. Whenever I have a thought---a single thought---I write it down. The more I write the more that comes to me. 1 page turns to 2 turns to 4 turns to 8. When I got a whole bunch of random ideas written down (usually after a couple of weeks), I try organizing them into a bare bones outline. I just continue doing that. Overtime, you'll think up more stuff and it'll grow. Once you get around 10 pages or so of random ideas (which could take weeks or months), you'll start to see where there are holes. Once those holes get filled in, you might be able to get a playtest going. After some playtesting, you'll know what additional rules you need to write. After you "finish" your rules and you start talking about your game, you'll get a good idea of what you need to explain better.

And you know what? A year and a half later you're premiering your book at GenCon!

[Larry L.]

And you know what? A year and a half later you're premiering your book at GenCon!

What's that? Whoo! Finally...