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

SlurpeeMoney wrote:
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.

but I want my game to be perfect

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

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

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.

Andrew wrote: Yeah, just write.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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

I'm going to provide the advice given me by Peter David (Marvel Comics, Star Trek Novels....)

"If you want to write well, you've gotta start reading.  A lot!"

He went on to elaborate in an article I found years later that you write what you read.  If you don't know how the genre is supposed to be written, or what has been done, you're going to have problems writing about it.  So my recommendation is a variant of that.  Borrow or buy gaming books and start reading them and analyzing them in how they were written, organized and formatted.  Do you like the Palladium "Two Column" style that had taken over the industry, or the single column AD&D / GURPs method?  Which chapters go where?  Do you use sidebars?  And of course, what kinds of anecdotes and flavor text do you use to add interest to your game?

So that's my amateur advice with a bit of advice I got from a pro.  So take it for what it's worth. ;c)

I have to agree with whoever cited the outlining thread http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=9546.msg99870#msg99870.  As is later noted in that thread, this can work with headers just dandy.  In fact, that's one of the primary planning steps that we do here at my "real job" at McGraw-Hill (textbooks and RPG books have lots of similarities).  Make a gigantic outline of every part, chapter, section, segment, and heading.  Anything that you feel it important to set of with a different typestyle should be included.  This will (a) allow you to normalize your typestyles, which is about ten times more important than anybody thinks it is, and (b) recognize the holistic structure of the entire affair.  Note, though, that the outline will change -- many many times.

If you haven't started writing yet, try and block out that outline as detailed as you can from where you are now (it will change -- many, many times).  Double-space it and print it out, and use this as a checklist of sections to be written.  You do not have to do them in order.  You do not need to write the chapter opener before you write the sections within it.  They do not even need to work together yet -- you just need to get them down on paper.  As you write the sections, check off or grey-out or strike them off your outline.  As you go, you will think of new sections that need to be added to support the sections you are writing; you will find that some sections aren't really important after all.  The outline will change -- many many times (catch a theme, here?).  What's important is that you have a list of bits and pieces to write; usually it's a simple matter to write bits and pieces; it's writing an entire book that nobody can do all at once.  The other important thing that this does is give you a tangible and relatively accurate sense of progress, which is key in any long writing project.

(I find -- and this is totally idiosyncratic and anecdotal -- that it's useful to name the files with their outline numbering, so that they will line up in order in their directory -- filenames like "2.1.4 Solagraphy" and "3.2 Thematic Batteries".  Then, badda bing badda boom, you have the listing in order in your window, which makes manipulating the pieces easy, especially when the outline changes the order of things (and it will change -- many, many times).  You just change numbering in the filename, and the directory sorts it where it's supposed to go.)

Once you have most of the sections written, you might start to slap them together in larger files in the order the outline has them.  Writing in transitions and making sure the elements are explained in order (Die Promotions aren't explained until four pages later, I can't use them as part of this example here...) will entail some healthy edits, but once you are done and have plugged the holes of the last segments that remain to be written, you will finally have... a first draft.  Editing said draft is a whole nother thread. :)