Jonas Ferry’s blog

I just read Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), and was amazed by the similarities to Vincent Baker’s article Creating Theme. I’m going to start by talking about King’s book, and then relate it to roleplaying.

I briefly scanned the biographical first part of King’s book, since I’m not particularly interested in his childhood at the moment. The second part was a lot more interesting, when he started talking about how he goes about writing a novel. In short, his suggestions are to forget about pre-planning the plot, but instead focus on the characters and the situation they’re in. He claims all his novels start with a basic idea, like “What would happen with people locked in a car with a rabid dog outside?” or “What would people do if 99% of the population died?”. From that basic idea he creates characters and starts writing.

King’s working in a three-step manner. First he just writes the whole novel, without looking back, and then he goes through the whole thing to look for linguistic and logical errors. Another very important thing he does during this first revision is to look for an underlying theme, a premise. The theme is different from the situation, even though certain situations more easily give birth to certain themes. Let’s say the situation is that someone finds out a friend has done something criminal. The obvious question is whether they will tell on their friend or not, this can produce the theme “Friendship is more important than anything” or something, but almost any theme, even seemingly unrelated to the issue, could be used to give the story more depth.

A very interesting thing King says is that the most important thing in a novel is the story. A fictional novel doesn’t have to have a theme, but it has to have a story. The thing is that if you have a story and happen to find a theme during the first revision, so much the better. This can raise your novel from good to excellent, and the novel will stay longer with the reader afterwards.

This is all done behind a closed door, without getting feedback from anyone. The reason is because it may hurt more than help if you need to explain the significance of the green colour of the heroine’s clothes, if there is no significance. You won’t know until you’ve finished. After the first revision, where one of the goals is to reduce the word count by 10%, you can show the writing to a couple of people whose opinions you value. This is the basis for a second rewrite, and after that the novel’s done.

To conclude what King’s saying, the three main parts of a novel are the story, the descriptions and the dialogue. To start writing you need a situation, you need characters and if you’re lucky or know what to look for you’ll get a theme.

In “Creating Theme”, Baker says that you need three things:

A) An issue.
B) Characters with a stake in the issue.
C) A dynamic situation.

When you have this, you turn it loose and see if a theme emerges. This is exactly the same thing as King is saying, exactly the same, and I find this very interesting.

King warns the future writer not to create a plot before starting to write, since the result often feels forced. The same thing applies to roleplaying games, of course. In older tips to the GM you could read about flow-charts to mark decision points and stuff like that, and a common suggestion in both writing and adventure design is to come up with the ending first and then lead the story there. King argues for the exact opposite view, and I’m sure roleplayers interested in narrativism would do the same. According to King you will reach an ending when the situation is resolved, when the dog dies and the people can leave the car, and that’s when you should end. A pre-planned plot in a roleplaying game always wrestles with the problems of railroading and frustrates players who feel less important in the story creation.

When I bothered my girlfriend with this view of how writing relates to roleplaying she said “Isn’t this obvious?”. Well it is obvious, but only after someone says it out loud. Now I’ve heard it from both Stephen King and Vincent Baker, and I this is the way I want to roleplay at the moment.

Finally, I have some stuff to say about revisions where you prune your novel when writing and how the same thing is impossible when roleplaying, but that’s another topic that I might revisit. Another topic could be the three ingredients “story, description and dialogue” and how you handle them when roleplaying.