Hi! Welcome back. Today I wanted to talk a bit about my general writing process, since I talked about Nano last time.

Did you know there’s a whole other draft of Video Star?

So I got (checks) 17,606 words into the first draft. There’s a lot of changes there - for instance, in the first version, you wake up at Waypoint Kindness and have to convince Turquoise to let you live. There was plenty to like about this draft, and some scenes that ended up in the current version, but the big issue was I had no fucking clue what I was doing.

For projects like, say, the end: a tragedy of three parts, I don’t tend to do hard outlines. I have a vague idea of where I want the story to go, or at least where it should end, but I generally just write and lay the tracks in front of me as I go. Plenty of writers have used this format to great success, but I, at the very least, am not really capable of utilizing it for visual novels! Because the games are so choice-based, I couldn’t tell where the story would branch, or what was relevant, or where it should even go. Also, nobody had any motivation, because the Video Star uh. Was not in it! The Video Star haunting people was a second draft addition, after I got 17,606 words into the first draft and realized that Worthy, Turquoise, etc had no motivation or reason to do anything. Giving the story the goal of “exorcize the Video Star” made the story really click. Someone else could probably write a dreamy meditation on a post-God world, but that person is not me.

Writing all this, I’m very self conscious that this is coming off like when JJ Abrams said “you know what’s crazy is if you start writing a Star Wars trilogy you should probably know how the next two movies go before you make the first one” and everyone (including me) was like “oh my god the man cannot write”. In my defense, I am not a professional writer with decades of professional experience and a huge budget behind me. Nobody is paying me to be this wrong.

So, with that failure/learning experience, I went back to the drawing board. What helps me, story wise, is to separate it into arcs. With the end: a tragedy of three parts, I built a three-act structure out of Fullmetal Alchemist’s alchemy - comprehension (what is in the world?), deconstruction (a great change tears the world apart), and reconstruction (how do we rebuild the world afterwards?). I knew each act should be about five or six scenes, and for the final act, I knew the scenes would alternate between Mason/Riley and Dylan/Ashley. Because I had that structure in mind, it made it a lot easier for me to improvise off of that, and each scene was essentially built like I said earlier - laying the tracks down as the train is running.

With the Video Star, I ignored my current draft and went back to basics. I understood that the issue was that Worthy had no motivation other than “not die”, which is the default for humanity, so I needed to introduce conflict. Thus, the Video Star haunting important NPCs or locations, which led to figuring out what those locations were and who those NPCs were. There are four skills in the game, so four locations, final location has to be [THIS MIGHT BE SPOILERS IDK I’LL EDIT IT IN IN LIKE AN ARTBOOK OR SOMETHING]. Now the story is a lot easier to improvise, because I understand each arc is “Worthy goes to a place, figures out who is being haunted, stops the haunting, repeat till the end”. This also helps the branching problem I was having earlier, where I found myself writing entire new settings and arcs based on minor choices.* 

(Also, I couldn’t find a good place to link this, but I found this article SUPER helpful in thinking about choice-based narrative structure!)

If you’re curious about my actual *writing* process, I write directly in Twine, which helps me visualize the routes. Right now the story looks about like this, though it is too long for me to screenshot the entirety of it:

I use labels in Twine so I can remember which blocks are in progress (yellow means I’ve started writing and need to finish, orange means I haven’t written anything there yet and need to). The green label refers to the last block I put into Ren’py, so I can remember where I left off and what still needs to go in. Once I put the text into Ren’py, I make sure the labels and variables are correct, fix my spacing and such, and then add in sprites and backgrounds and all the other visual elements. In Twine I will often note if something is in dialogue (even the narration) or if it is in what Ren’py calls “NVL mode”, which is when the text takes up the entire screen. I do write my variables into Twine (formatted for Ren’py), but the syntax isn’t always correct, so that’s when I will clean those up and make sure the program can read them.

*If you are starting out in game dev, you are perhaps going to think “games these days are not responsive enough! I will make a game that REALLY REACTS to your choices!” This is a beautiful and noble impulse and it will kill you. Yes, the only thing stopping you from making a game that radically changes with the player’s choices is that that’s an awful lot of writing. If you, like me, are a stone cold idiot, you might think “writing! That shit’s easy! If the only thing stopping me from making Extreme Choices Sim 2020 is WRITING, well then -” NO. STOP. STOP RIGHT THERE. BE KIND TO YOURSELF. Figure out a structure. Make sure one path works. Then you can have as many branches as you can handle, but please get a baseline down first.

CURRENT PROGRESS: Plan was to write 10,000 more words this month. In some way, quantifying words like this feels a little insincere, BUT it does help me make sure I’m writing every day and making consistent progress. I did NOT write 10,000 more words, because I was busy getting married for the second half of the month! I don’t regret that, obviously. I love my wife very dearly (I’ve called her my wife ever since we got engaged). It is difficult to establish patterns of productivity when you’re deep into holidays and big events, but my goal for 2023 is to at LEAST finish writing, so! We got to about 5,000 new words this month for a grand total of 37,543. There’s a few branches that need cleaning in the second act, but there are a few routes through the entire second act, and I have begun writing the third. One thing I have learned: while I typically write chronologically, I have allowed myself to move forward with the third act so that I can switch between that and the remainders of the second act, which helps break the monotony tremendously. I have also started moving sections from Twine to Ren’py so I can make sure they actually work and start adding sprites, etc.

Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year! See you next month!