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[PA Comic] Monday, October 7, 2013 - How Do Writings
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
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They've been using Macs for years, dude. It was even mentioned in the Downloadable Content podcast for the 5th April, 2005.
Don't sweat it, Jerry. You got this. The framework is already there for you. The topic is the Eyrewood. You've established enough of the universe to get started. Now it's just picking whatever parts of it you want to zero in on, or taking some 'what if' question you happen to like, and expanding to taste.
Googling this brought up a book about... tweets? Or digital creation and brevity which doesn't seem like the advice Scalzi gave
The 'dark and stormy night' line does tend to do that. There's even a contest based around it, in which you're challenged to write the opening sentence to the worst novel in the world.
Gamer Dater - My Video Game Dating Website full of Faygo
Strip Search Wastebasket of Broken Dreams App I made
See, now I also want a Dr. Raven Darktalonblood novel written in the style of John Gabriel. Perhaps a Gabriel/Franzibald collabo Darktalonblood/Grimm Shado Witchalock crossover.
Real-life Gabe is actually completely off of Apple products at the moment.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2012/02/29/stewardship
I remember a number of forum responses to this being, "dude, Boot Camp." I don't know if he ended up listening to that and keeping a Mac.
Gabe also may have bought a PC recently, although it's not clear if it's his "work" computer, or just for gaming. From last June:
http://penny-arcade.com/2012/06/29
When was the last time we saw a shot of their work area? The last 4th Panel episode was June 2012, and it shows Tycho with an Asus monitor instead of an iMac:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/southern-exposure-4th-panel
You're probably right, but I also interpreted it as saying if you don't write with brevity, you won't last for the long haul of a book. The reason I think this is because one of Tycho's main sources of humor is intentionally overwritten prose. That's great for a humorous news post, but not for a full fledged book that is designed to be gripping and compelling (as I'm sure Eyrewood will be). You write adult books at an eighth-grade reading level not because your readers are stupid, but because for a long work it's simply exhausting to employ the full extent of your reading skills. I played Rain-Slink 3 and was utterly lost as to what was happening in the final act (granted, much of my confusion surely came from not playing 1 or 2). But again, Rain-Slick was primarily a work of comedy, so it worked. For an actual novel, I look forward to seeing him flex his "less-is-more" chops.
I get the impression they almost never remember the watch gag unless they are doing the strip live and the audience reminds them.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
"I have a bad feeling about this."
"Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood."
When I first got my Boxbox, I was looking for game suggestions, and everyone, bar none, said, "Alan Wake."
Why?
Because I'm a writer. I also do for-fee editing for college papers and some freelance editorial work, mainly for friends. First of all, the notion I'd want to play Alan Wake because Alan Wake is a writer is vaguely insulting. I don't even like reading about characters who are writers - only if the writing is incidental to the character (see: most Stephen King stories) and not the main focus. Not only did Alan Wake manage to make the writing prominent, it also kept it in the background at the same time. I'm under the impression that my friends recommended the game because there's a dearth in interactive fiction when it comes to the representation of writers, but the truth of the matter is, the things that make a writer interesting are not at all things that would translate well into a video game. Unless it was about Hemingway. Getting drunk and wrestling sharks is pretty awesome no matter who you are.
Second, Alan Wake himself, for a renowned writer, wrote some fucking shitty prose. All of the pages picked up read like the writer was nominally familiar with the horror genre but failed to grasp any of the finer points. It's like putting paint on a desk-fan, aiming it at a canvas, and saying yeah, I've got this Pollack thing down pretty pat.
Finally, the game was kind of bad. Repetitive, shoddy combat. Nailed the atmosphere, though.
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
It means to begin by writing something small, and then allow the story to grow from there as more questions come up.
It's similar to saying start in the middle. Write 20 or so pages of all your characters on a short adventure. The preceding chapters become "who are these people and how did they get here" and the following chapters become "with one goal accomplished our heroes move onward, but to what?". That gets you your whole (long) story, but it began as a short story that could have stood alone with minimal modification.
Actually, I loved the game. It's a great story, particularly when you keep in mind that the maker's of the game seem self-aware that Alan Wake is a bit of a hack. Keep in mind that there's a lot of renowned writers in the real world that are completely fucking terrible. Have you actually ever sat down and read a Tom Clancy novel? If you haven't, do yourself a favor and don't. Yeah, Hunt For Red October is a fantastic movie, as are a lot of movies based on his books, but the books themselves are pretty horrifying.
Just remember: we live in a world where Fifty Shades of Grey is a best seller. Alan Wake being both an awful, shit writer who pumps out crap worse than the goth kid in my junior college creative writing class and is yet supremely popular is not hard to believe in the least.
But yeah, Alan's basically Dean Koontz, and the game even pokes fun at it. And without actually having a copy of any of his novels beyond the game itself, it's possible that he might be awful at prose, but ultimately tell a good story. Seems unlikely, I figure he's just a hack all around, but I think it's worth considering.
I don't know where I got it into my head that he was a respected literary figure, but that does change my perception of it quite a bit.
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
While there are certainly instances of certain types of writing that don't necessarily sustain themselves for the long haul, I would say that this is, generally, terrible, terrible advice. Hell, most of all of the most critically acclaimed writers of our time write beautiful, dense, lush novels. E. Annie Proulx, Salman Rushdi, Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollman, Umberto Eco, Roberto Bolano, TC Boyle, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, etc. all come to mind off the top of my head. People write books at an eighth grade level because those are the books that they can write, people write books at a post graduate level because those are the books that they can write. It's not a BAD thing to write more "simple" prose (I could give you a whole other list that goes from Bowles to Murakami to Wolff, but I will abstain), just as it's not a BAD thing to write more complex, intricate prose, nor is one necessarily better for a long work.
Write short to write long should always and only be interpreted to mean: Just write. Maybe it's a sentence, or 100 words, or a page or 10 pages a day, but just write. When you add them all up, they come together and make the whole thing. Further: just write that sentence and go on, don't worry about your metaphors and similes, don't worry about making the protagonist flawed and the antagonist redeemable, don't worry about fleshing out the subplots and figuring out the exact texture of your hero's mighty sombrero when it eludes you; just keep writing. When you get to the end, take a look at what you put on the page and then figure it out. The only writing advice that's worth a damn is to write as much as possible and to read as much as possible, because everything else is personal preference and half-baked philosophy that differs completely from individual to individual.
I'm only saying all this because I know a lot of aspiring writers who always use the absolute longest word they know in every situation and make the characters talk like crappy Shakespeare, and will use the defense of saying they don't want to dumb it down. But communication is a two-way street--i a writer is not communicating to his audience, he must shoulder some of the blame. Which is why (back on topic, yay!) writing is so dang hard.
I basically just assume it's "Stephen King: The Game." Where you play Stephen King in a Stephen King novel, except you're called Alan Wake.
Alan Wake definitely is self-aware as far as the writing goes. It's intended to homage a lot of things (I say homage because it's more respectful than a parody or mimicry), including Twilight Zone, Stephen King, and in my opinion, the older Resident Evils (in that it's a scary game, but puts fun above absolute terror and isn't too cool to be tongue-in-cheek). I don't know if the manuscript pages are *intentionally* bad, but they're not trying to win any awards. And given the "Episode" format, I think it's more trying to emulate a thriller show (like the aforementioned) than a thriller novel.
/late to the conversation