Emily's second article

[Ron Edwards]

Hey everybody,

Emily Dresner has presented the second in her series of articles about the nuts & bolts of RPG publishing.

Discuss!

Best,
Ron

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I would like to thank Emily Dresner for her article.  Particularly the bit about using your word processor's Outline feature.

It's doing amazing things to The Wheel for me.  My original draft had the organization of a pile of dirty socks and twice as ugly.  I've only been fiddling with it for about ten minutes already and it's already much, much better.

Wow.

I say again:  Wow!

I don't know why I didn't try it sooner.  Mostly I'm just lazy.  Writing an outline is like writing another draft.  Part of it may have to do with reading Stephen King On Writing recently.   King suggests NOT using an outline since it leads to plotting your story rather than simply "letting them happen."  (Quotes don't indicate a direct quote per se.)  He even went so far as to point out that most of the novels he had plotted weren't all that great.

This is no doubt one place where writing stories is not one whit like writing a RPG.  In fact, playing an RPG may be like writing a story, but writing an RPG is probably like writing a grammar textbook or a similar How To sort of book.

You need to organize it.  You can't just wing it like that.

So, thanks Emily.  It's a big help already.

[Emily Dresner]

Stephen King's On Writing gives some spectacularly poor advice for starting writers, especially for technical writing.  You've no doubt found out by now that stream of consciousness writing doesn't work very well.

I'm very happy that these things help _somebody_.  It motivates me to get off my butt and finish the series.