The Empty Page (video)

A different take on an earlier writing essay:

https://youtu.be/Wl2h0KlOoV4?si=gmg4TG5KolscRPcT

See it, hit like please, much appreciated.  Hope you enjoy the visuals.

The Empty Consequences of Glamorous Writing

For shorthand, let's call the moment, "car-off-a-cliff"... the split-second, disastrous consequence when every plan, every hope, every possible reward, is now plummeting to an irretrievable death. Writers dream of such moments, for it gives us a chance to turn a story on its head, to surprise and shock the reader — and to invest the remaining characters with an opportunity to be devastated, resilient — all those great things that seem to make a story meaningful. But while the moment is a great twist... is it a good idea?

Many include such things in their books for the sake of spectacle. We're encouraged to do it; sometimes we're shamed if we don't do it. But there are consequences to such plot points that many don't consider. To begin with, much of the momentum, character and anticipation is cut off, like a light switch... though it's of necessity that we make everything up to the point before the cliff as real and believable as possible. Readers invested in the plans we've laid out, who want to know the success of those plans, will feel cheated when all that is ripped to tatters by a cheap, perhaps gratuitous-looking plot device. Up until then, if the readers are with us, they've listened to the hopes and expectations of our former, now-dead characters... and as a reward for that, we've swooped in, slapped them across the face and killed the likeable characters we've built for what might reasonably be seen as no good reason. Think of the scenes now made redundant by the car's flight. Consider how they'll look to a reader wanting to read the story again — how hollowed-out, since it all comes to naught. In some cases, scenes will look deliberately designed to pull the reader's chain; in others, that the scene need not have been written at all.

Continued:

https://alexis202.substack.com/p/the-empty-consequences-of-glamorous

Writing Without Looking

This blog is running behind the number of substack articles about writing, so I'm going to fix that.  I'll be posting one a day until we're caught up.

Where writing is concerned, we can easily spend years discussing specific situations, how they might be introduced and managed, the importance they bear regarding a larger narrative, mistakes made, poor judgment, assumptions, writing strategies... and so on. The number of directions we might take in introducing two characters to each other would allow us to write not one article on their meeting, not two, but really as many as we might choose to write. Writing is fractal. Any narrative moment can be woven into a world of intention, technique and consequence. Writing itself is a dynamic and inexhaustible field... limited only by our willingness to look the beast in the eye before flinching.

Let us assume that we've chosen to introduce two characters to one another as a love interest — which I choose specifically because while the film rom-com genre is in its death throes, erotic fiction is surging. It really doesn't matter what traditional writing trope we might begin with: the introduction of an expert, such as the "detective"; the death of a character; the spiral into disconsolation at the end of a romance. Yet I'm going to choose this, because in the previous essay, we brought it up as one way we might start a novel.

Continued:

https://alexis202.substack.com/p/writing-without-looking

Solve it Through Writing

When teaching others how to write, giving an example of our own work is the third rail. Doing so invites distraction. Instead of demonstrating the desired principle, the presentation of work itself is questioned, picked apart and criticised. The broader lesson is forgotten. This is made worse in that a sentence or even a paragraph of writing rarely stands sufficiently on its own to impress — especially if we're discussing fiction, as opposed to academic or scientific writing. It is for these reasons that creative writing teachers avoid demonstrating their work in any way, shape or form. The counter to this is that many such teachers are published authors... and that if the student wants a demonstration, the teacher's book can be purchased.

This restraint, however, has led teaching the practice into a swamp. Forced to lay out "principles" rather than hard evidence, advice has long been mired in what not to do, what isn't good writing and what techniques don't work... while the reverse is a malodourous concatenation of advice like "just write," character templates, three-act arcs and a plethora of other process-driven techniques that do not address the grounded substance of actual language, sentence-by-sentence communication and word choice. We dare not say, "choose this word," because it beckons a rush of voices telling us we're wrong, or that another word is better.

Continued:

https://alexis202.substack.com/p/solve-it-through-writing

This Week's Wiki

For those not following me on Patreon, this is a list of adjusted or rewritten Authentic Wiki content compatible with 1st edition D&D, or merely of interest, updated in the last week.

• Bailey Hamlet
• Dagger (weapon)
• Efreeti
• Acid-based Attacks
• Normal Fire
• Sword (weapon)
• Venom (substance)
• Abbey
• Facility
• Gain Proficiency (sage ability)
• Icy Conditions
• Koalinth

More Than a Character

To give a character depth, writers imagine that the best strategy is to give them a deep, abiding trauma. We use this approach to vitalise them; to enrich and make them memorable. And we suppose, because they've experienced an awful, often staggering event in their lives, we use it to explain the character's motivations. This, we say, is the burden they're carrying; this is the reason they act as they do. We've seen this writing strategy used in hundreds of stories, so we believe in it. We think it works. But it doesn't. Not really.

A character that has suffered upheaval is unquestionably more interesting. As people, we are defined intensely by the bad things that have happened... but what is more important than the upheaval is not what it motivates us to do each day — but how we got past it. How we grew. Meaning is not discovered in the horrible thing itself and its imperative... but in how we've risen above the horrible thing by strength and will, thus redefining ourselves. This makes a far stronger, far more relatable character than those personalities who never seem to get over anything.

Continued:

https://alexis202.substack.com/p/more-than-a-character

Abkhazia

Feeling better, but haven't gotten myself into a place where I'm banging away at the wiki, not yet.  Instead, yesterday I spent time working on a map of Abkhazia, found at the bottom of the wiki page.  For those who don't know, this is on the east end of the Black Sea, the northern edge of what was ancient Colchis.  I'll add the map here, too:

Today is also my day for publishing another essay about writing, so I'll get on that.

Getting Your First Book Published

Turns out, I'm getting quite a lot of traffic on substack from folks here going there using the link to these articles.  Thank you for that; I assume you're interested in writing advice.

I've been thinking much about the subject and about the effort to remain positive, to not tear down, not to criticise and only to give purposeful advice that improves one's ability to write.  Not like the stuff I write here.  So this post would not belong over there (though I'm not really going to be critical).

What I'd like to do is offer a realistic breakdown of the writing industry at this time, without discussing publishers, writers or writing.  Just plain facts.

Suppose you're a first-time author and your book succeeds in getting on the Times Best Seller list.  As it happens, most debut authors get an advance between $5,000 and $50,000 before the book is finished.  If you get the latter, you're lucky.  As it happens, an author only earns royalties after the advance is "earned out," which means that the sales of the book have covered that upfront payment.  And yes, its entirely possible, in now and present times, to get on the NYTBSL and NOT have your book succeed in earning you $50,000.  But if you get that advance and you don't earn it out, you get to keep the rest.  You don't have to give it back.  Unless you sign a contract.

If your book is hardcover, you'll typically earn 10% on the list price of the book.  That's $2.50 every time a $25 book sells.  If it's a soft cover, the percentage is usually 7.5 to 8.  For ebooks, authors typically get 25% of the publisher's net receipts, but the ebook price is itself cut from the book price.

I've heard long-time authors refer to new authors as getting their "$7,000", which is in the range of what's typical — which is why they don't give first time authors $50,000 up front, unless you're famous for some other reason already.  But let's be generous.  Let's assume your book sells so well that it earns almost four times that: a nice, round, $25,000.  Well done you.

Here's a question: how many 8-hour days at McDonalds would you have to work to make $25,000?  Well, as many cities and places in America are starting to pay $15 an hour for that sort of job (and it's minimum wage in Canada, but obviously not with the USD buying power), let's use that as our baseline.  Number of days?  208.  That's about five full-time work months, assuming 5 days a week.

At this point, we need to ask ourselves, what's the typical length of a book on that makes the list?  Based on observable trends, industry standards, what publishers expect... on the whole, the range is typically between 85,000 and 150,000 words.  In general, if you're writing on a social issue, or with regards to a cultural subject, its easier to come in on the short side of that.  If you want to get into fantasy and sci-fy, expect to be on the far side of that.  But let's go easy.  Let's split it down the middle and call your book 120,000 words.

To equal your McDonald's paycheque, how fast do you have to write?

We can divide this into three phases.  Phase 1: get your first draft finished.  This is easy, like falling off a log.  You have 125 long, wonderful days to do this, so it shouldn't be a problem.  You only need to write 960 words a day.  That’s assuming a smooth, clean pipeline from brain to page. It assumes your plot works, your characters behave, your world makes sense, and the dialogue doesn’t sound like a school play. It assumes you aren’t stopping to sketch a battle map or rework a broken subplot.  You can't lose any weeks worldbuilding rabbit holes, you can't hit any dead ends and have to go back and fix, you can't have extra time to research or make a youtube video about your progress.

On the other hand, McDonald's expects you to be in on Monday, while the book can get shelved for three years and no one carps.

Phase 2: Rewrite your book; you've got 52 days.  You haven't time to fully rewrite the novel, not if you want to get it done in time to earn the same money you'd get at McDonalds.  So, at best, you'll revise about half the book, 60,000 words, trusting the rest.  Rewriting is more intense than writing so you'll need to step it up to 1,155 words per day.  About. 

Phase 3: Edit & Polish.  This is the easiest of all, right?  The book's written, you just have to trim, tighten, fix awkward phrasing... and be very careful not to have a crisis of conscience that your book is actually shit and you ought to write it over again.  After all, there's no pressure — it's not like the people who buy your book or write criticisms of your work, or post things on youtube or social media are going to denounce you, right?  I mean, the world will understand.  I'm sure it will.

How many words a day?  5,000.  For about 29-31 days.

There, you're done.  Congratulations, you've just earned minimum wage.

Assuming your book does sell $25K and not $7K.  In which case, maybe that big win you imagine where getting published is concerned is going to be something of a let-down, huh?

Here's my perspective.  I have been working "writing" jobs since 2004, by which I mean career work for journalism, media and business, 30 to 40 hours a week, and not a minimum wage.  I got those jobs because I could write.  Not in the overblown, dramatic, drum-banging way that fantasy fiction seems to demand nowadays, but through the use of direct, plain english.  In this regard, much of the time, I haven't been successful at this.  I've been unemployed a lot of the time and forced to work jobs that weren't writing oriented, and because of my nature, I've tended to over-stress my interests in D&D and other subjects over soul-crushing day jobs.

But in 20 years, I've earned 14 times the $25K calculation above in wages, by writing.  My self-published book, How to Run, made me personally that much, and Lulu and Amazon an equivalent amount.  Without stress added on by those who would exploit me.

Therefore, it's my personal opinion that the goal is not to learn how to write like those on the best seller lists, but rather, how to write.  Writing is an excellent way to earn money.  Employers really like people who can write.  They want to hire them, and they want to like them.  Forget the glamour.  Just get the skill.

Brick by Brick: the Architecture of Storytelling

In discussing writing, it's of necessity that we investigate the process of writing at a level beneath grand, sweeping gestures. I have alluded to words as "bricks," which must be laid out and mortared carefully, on a scale so fine that it can be difficult to see where this or that sentence properly lays a foundation that enables the building to stand well. So let's get our hands dirty and attend to this process.

I'll propose a story about a woman and her son, and the horse ranch they have. He goes off to college and leaves her alone, with her approval, as she wants a good life for him. For a year, let's say a chapter, she struggles with the ranch, getting by but not doing well. Whereupon her son returns, licking his wounds from a bad relationship and having quit school in mid-semester. She comes home and finds him in her living room, hurt, distraught; she listens as he explains himself.

Continued:

https://alexis202.substack.com/p/brick-by-brick-the-architecture-of

This Week's Wiki

Issues continue; I haven't been well much of this week, so there are only a few links again:

• References (trade)
• Horse Gait
• Feeding the Poor
• Religion
• Agder (added 6-mile map)
• Gold Standard (trade) (completed)
• Identify Earths (sage ability)
• Assisted Riding
  

Easy Answer: Have Chat Do It

A few readers have seen that I've recently rewritten a part of my trade system.  I haven't changed any of the math or the method, but it's now on a new format and the writing is somewhat clearer.  Still, there are those who can't follow the math, and I can't blame them.  It's always been difficult to keep it in my head; I have to puzzle it out again every time I come back.

But, I have confirmation of it's legitimacy, which I'm going to share here.  As it happens, ChatGPT can read an html table if its posted; and chat has no memory.  If I copy and paste the text and html tables into chat, without comment, meaning that it has no reason to assume its mine, the answer I get is:

"This detailed system for pricing raw materials in a game world using gold as a reference is quite comprehensive and well-thought-out. It provides a framework for economic interaction in a fictional setting that mimics real-world principles, especially the idea of using a stable commodity (gold) to anchor the pricing of all other goods, ensuring that the market remains balanced and consistent across different regions and goods."

It then goes on to explain the system without being asked to do so.  Therefore, what I propose to do, below, is to post the html version of the wiki page.  Then, if you really want to understand, copy this into Chat and feel free to ask it questions.  It can explain it better than I can.

The '''gold standard''' explains a method for pricing raw materials in a game world based upon their raw material production and their comparative availability, determined by a single location's geographical relationship to those places where goods are produced. Before the system below can be employed, "[[References (trade)|references]]" must be placed in the game world, either arbitrarily or randomly. Additionally, details for the [[Transport (trade)|transport]] of goods must also be calculated. These details are necessary for the work that is explained and shown below. __TOC__ In determining a price for raw resources — agricultural produce before coming to market, mineral ores, harvested oils, quarried stone and more — gold is a convenient standard because, first, it occurs naturally as nuggets or flakes, and is therefore tradeable without alteration. The first tokens of currency were fashioned of gold, with minimal hammering. As a material, it's rare, measurable and consistent — unlike, say, a system based on labour or grain production — especially since European-consistent cereals aren't produced at all in many parts of the game world. Gold is therefore practical where pricing is concerned. With gold as the standard measure, we ensure that the value of gold itself differs only slightly from place to place. Otherwise, the effect on the price of gold would cause all other prices in the system to fluctuate wildly (and make the availability of gold the only meaningful factor in determining those prices). The method employed here, therefore, is to make gold 100 times less flexible than the price of any other material. "Flexibility" itself is a system-defined metric with its own logic, which we shall explain going forward. == Gold Price == Let's begin with the value of gold in the fictional market we've introduced elsewhere: that of [[Locating References (trade)|Marzabol]]. On that linked page, we defined the number of gold references in Marzabol as 1.2 — after transport distribution. The total references in our localised "world" is 2.0, that Marzarbol has access to most of it. The total production of physical gold within this narrowed system is 2,640, or 1,320 oz. per reference. To handle this, we build the following table: {| class="wikitable" style="float:left; margin-right: 25px; text-align:center; background-color:#d4f2f2; font-family: inherit;" |+Gold References ! style="width:70px"|local references !! style="width:70px"|total references !! style="width:70px"|production !! style="width:70px"|unit |- | 1.2 || 2.0 || 2,640.00 || oz. |}<div style="clear:both;"></div> This shows the initial structure of the table we want, giving us only those things we know as raw data. We can see this as a foundational table intended to be built out step by step, to explain the structure of the system. This gives space for each concept to be introduced and defined before moving on, promoting understanding without overwhelming. Our next step will be to determine how much physical gold is flowing in and around Marzabol. To do this, we divide the production by the total number of references, then multiplying that by the local references. It can be seen below that the columns are identified left to right by letter, and top to bottom by number. The heading "local references" is "A1", so that the local references for Marzabol is "A2". The differently coloured line at the bottom is not part of the table, but rather seeks to translate the table into an excel spreadsheet. {| class="wikitable" style="float:left; margin-right: 25px; text-align:center; background-color:#d4f2f2; font-family: inherit;" |+Locally Available Gold ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|E |- ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|1 !! style="width:70px"|local references !! style="width:70px"|total references !! style="width:70px"|production !! style="width:70px"|unit !! style="width:70px"|local availability |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|'''2''' || 1.2 || 2.0 || 2,640.00 || oz. || 1,584.00 |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2/B2*A2 |}<div style="clear:both;"></div> Columns F and G seem to be a repeat of columns to the right, but for other goods that are not gold, these numbers given the world value of that commodity in gold, as well as the local value in gold. It's interesting to note that 2 references of wheat are considered by this system to have the same value as 2 references of gold. This leap means that the whole value of wealth in the world is not equal to the value of gold alone — but is, rather, a completely separate total. Prices are not measured by comparing the total weight of a given commodity — say wheat — against the total value of all gold. Rather, the total value of all wheat depends on how many "wheat references" there are... with each reference being equal to the value of the weight of gold in the world divided by "gold references." Likewise, the number for "oz. per local availability" seems deceptively simple, because the value of an ounce of gold is correctly 1:1 with the price of gold. Wheat, in comparison, is produced in a vastly larger volume than gold; 2 references for wheat in Marzabol would weigh an approximate 89.7 tons, using medieval Earth as a comparison. The two piles would be the same value, but each ounce of wheat would be price correspondingly less. {| class="wikitable" style="float:left; margin-right: 25px; text-align:center; background-color:#d4f2f2; font-family: inherit;" |+oz. per Local Availability ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|E !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|F !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|G !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|H |- ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|1 !! style="width:70px"|local references !! style="width:70px"|total references !! style="width:70px"|production !! style="width:70px"|unit !! style="width:70px"|local availability !! style="width:70px"|world value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|local value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|oz. per local availability |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|'''2''' || 1.2 || 2.0 || 2,640.00 || oz. || 1,584.00 || 2,640.00 || 1,584.00 || 1.0 |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2/B2*A2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=C2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=E2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=G2/E1 |}<div style="clear:both;"></div><div style="clear:both;"></div> The role of this next column seems to be a point of contention — yet those I've seen attempt to duplicate my work without seem to run into a problem of expanding scale. A sort of elastic constant is necessary to restrain the flexibility of prices. In cases where local references become miniscule compare to the total world references, the end calculation tends to become stratospheric. Therefore, this constant, (B2/C2*0.02)+1, restrains that variability; but the formula here is given as it would appear for any other commodity. For gold, as promised, the flexibility is adjusted as seen in the table below: {| class="wikitable" style="float:left; margin-right: 25px; text-align:center; background-color:#d4f2f2; font-family: inherit;" |+oz. per Local Availability ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|E !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|F !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|G !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|H !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|I |- ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|1 !! style="width:70px"|local references !! style="width:70px"|total references !! style="width:70px"|production !! style="width:70px"|unit !! style="width:70px"|local availability !! style="width:70px"|world value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|local value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|oz. per local availability !! style="width:70px"|adjustment for rarity |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|'''2''' || 1.2 || 2.0 || 2,640.00 || oz. || 1,584.00 || 2,640.00 || 1,584.00 || 1.0 || 1.0003 |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2/B2*A2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=C2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=E2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=G2/E1 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=(C2/B2*0.0002)+1 |}<div style="clear:both;"></div><div style="clear:both;"></div> Now that we’ve established all the foundational values, we’re able to determine the final price of gold — or, more precisely, the price of an ounce of raw gold in a specific market. However, rather than express this value in gold pieces, we will convert all prices into [[Coin (symbol)|copper pieces]]. This is done for two key reasons. First, copper is the lowest denomination of coin, making it the most likely to yield practical, non-zero values when measuring small quantities of goods. Second, copper serves as the most widely used coin among common persons in most game worlds, and therefore offers the clearest point of reference for understanding everyday value. By pricing everything in copper, we gain both mathematical precision and economic realism. The number of copper coins per ounce of gold depends, first, upon the amount of gold actually found in a "gold coin." In the system described here, 1 troy ounce of gold = 31.1035 grams; most gold coins in the time period weighed approximately 7⅛ grams and were a mix of half-gold and half-silver and other materials, notably nickel and zinc. I eventually settled that 1 troy ounce of pure gold provided sufficient material for 8.715 "gold" coins; an oddly precise number, but one that's stuck. Again, traditionally, much of history worked on a comparison of 15:1 for silver coins to gold — far from the purely researched D&D standard. For the sake of a number more easily divisible, I settled on 16:1 silver to gold; silver coins tend to be around 13 to 15 grams of silver and other metals. Copper coins often weighed as much as 25 grams; and because there were few materials to mix them with that weren't almost as valuable as copper, the sheer size of the coin tended to give it value. Still, with the adjusted rate to silver, I settled on 12:1 copper per silver piece. This makes 192 c.p. per g.p. {| class="wikitable" style="float:left; margin-right: 25px; text-align:center; background-color:#d4f2f2; font-family: inherit;" |+oz. per Local Availability ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|E !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|F !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|G !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|H !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|I !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|J |- ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|1 !! style="width:70px"|local references !! style="width:70px"|total references !! style="width:70px"|production !! style="width:70px"|unit !! style="width:70px"|local availability !! style="width:70px"|world value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|local value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|oz. per local availability !! style="width:70px"|adjustment for rarity !! style="width:70px"|c.p./unit |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|'''2''' || 1.2 || 2.0 || 2,640.00 || oz. || 1,584.00 || 2,640.00 || 1,584.00 || 1.0 || 1.0003 || 1,673.78 |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2/B2*A2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=C2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=E2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=G2/E1 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=(C2/B2*0.0002)+1 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=H2*I2*8.715*192 |}<div style="clear:both;"></div><div style="clear:both;"></div> This gives a price in c.p. for how much 1 ounce of gold costs, specifically for the market in Marzabol. Other markets would differ, but because the flexibility of gold is so reduced, differences are able to go unnoticed by players moving from place to place. This makes gold a firm, reliable commodity, which is desirable for measuring hundreds of other products against it. The system portrayed in this example is inordinately small and therefore exhibits more price flexibility than would be typical in a fully developed trade network. But as more and more regions and markets are added to the premise, gold prices and most others stabilise even further — especially if we add a good, healthy number of gold references to the overall. It's recommended that the number of gold references vs. all other references should be about 1.3 to 1.4 percent. Thus, if there were 25,000 references throughout the system, about 350 should be for gold. That would reflect numbers drawn from earthly references gleaned from source material in mid-20th century encyclopedias (which are closer to a medieval equivalent than a present day comparison). Contrariwise, I strongly urge the reader not to make similar adjustments to other products; these products do not affect the value of every other thing in the system and therefore can exist in isolation to those other things. As well, strong fluctuations in the presence of these things will create scarcity and game drama. These aspects should not be smoothed out in the way that the price of gold should be. == Other Resources == Now we can look at the process for calculating the prices for other undeveloped goods, comparing these to gold. To begin with, let's examine how these same calculations might affect our simplified reference for "ore." In a better defined system, the exact types of ore would each have references of their own, but as this is for demonstration, assembling different ores together should serve our purpose. The following adjustments can therefore be made to the table: {| class="wikitable" style="float:left; margin-right: 25px; text-align:center; background-color:#d4f2f2; font-family: inherit;" |+oz. per Local Availability ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|E !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|F !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|G !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|H !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|I !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|J !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|K |- ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|1 !! style="width:70px"|resource !! style="width:70px"|local references !! style="width:70px"|total references !! style="width:70px"|production !! style="width:70px"|unit !! style="width:70px"|local availability !! style="width:70px"|world value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|local value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|oz. per local availability !! style="width:70px"|adjustment for rarity !! style="width:70px"|c.p./unit |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|'''2''' || gold || 1.2 || 2.0 || 2,640.00 || oz. || 1,584.00 || 2,640.00 || 1,584.00 || 1.0 || 1.0003 || 1,673.78 |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|'''3''' || ore || 1.2 || 2.0 || 8,000,000.00 || lb. || 4,800,000.00 || colspan="5"|details to come |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|E2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D2/C2*B2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=D2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=F2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=H2/F1 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=(C2/B2*0.0002)+1 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=I2*J2*8.715*192 |}<div style="clear:both;"></div><div style="clear:both;"></div> Note that the unit employed to designate one commodity from another does not need to match that of any other. We can thus price anything from carats to heads of livestock, without needing to adjust the formulas by which the desired number is obtained. The end result, column K, gives the price per column F, the unit given. This brings us to the world value of ore in ounces of gold. This is a bit tricky. Whereas 2 ounces of ore are the same value as two ounces of gold, remember that "local" gold has been adjusted for rarity. This means that we want to multiply the total references for ore against the value of gold '''in Marzabol''', which is distinct from its universal price. Another market would have a slightly different price for the same amount of available ore. Value is mutable, depending on our location — we want our trade system to reflect this. The bottom line of the chart gives the excel calculations for row 3. {| class="wikitable" style="float:left; margin-right: 25px; text-align:center; background-color:#d4f2f2; font-family: inherit;" |+oz. per Local Availability ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|E !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|F !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|G !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|H !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|I !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|J !! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|K |- ! style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|1 !! style="width:70px"|resource !! style="width:70px"|local references !! style="width:70px"|total references !! style="width:70px"|production !! style="width:70px"|unit !! style="width:70px"|local availability !! style="width:70px"|world value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|local value (oz. gold) !! style="width:70px"|oz. per local availability !! style="width:70px"|adjustment for rarity !! style="width:70px"|c.p./unit |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|'''2''' || gold || 1.2 || 2.0 || 2,640.00 || oz. || 1,584.00 || 2,640.00 || 1,584.00 || 1.0 || 1.0003 || 1,673.78 |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|'''3''' || ore || 1.2 || 2.0 || 8,000,000.00 || lb. || 4,800,000.00 || 3,347.56 || 2,008.56 || 0.000418 || 1.033 || 0.7235 |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|E2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D2/C2*B2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=D2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=F2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=H2/F2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=(C2/B2*0.0002)+1 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=I2*J2*8.715*192 |- | style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"| || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|A3 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|B3 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|C3 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D3 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|E3 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|D3/C3*B3 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=C3*$K$2 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=B3/C3*G3 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=H3/F3 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=(C3/B3*0.02)+1 || style="background-color:#fcf6e9;"|=I3*J3*8.715*192 |}</div><div style="clear:both;"></div> For those unfamiliar with excel, the dollar signs in Excel formulas are used to lock a reference, preventing it from changing when the formula is copied to other cells. $K$2 means both the column K and the row 2 are fixed. So no matter where you copy that formula, it will always pull the value from cell K2. This ensures that every resource uses the price of gold in Marzabol as a stable anchor for comparison, instead of shifting to some other row or column during replication. It's essential for keeping location-specific constants intact across multiple rows. We've thus built a template for any undeveloped good we wish to include. All we need do is repeat the line containing ore and adjust the numbers for how many local references there are, how many total references throughout the system for the commodity, and how much production we care to assign per reference. If we increase or decrease a number, that change is reflected in the calculations to make a given commodity's price rise or fall. If we introduce a new location in our game world, and increase the number of references to ore in that location, all things being equal, the price of ore will rise... UNLESS we also increase the amount of production. This is counter-intuitive, but references indicates VALUE, not SUPPLY. The actual production indicates supply. The system therefore doesn't operate on ill-considered supply counts, but upon a structured, location-weighted model, with the availability of references creating a counterbalancing "demand."

The Story Writes Itself

This story was chosen as Top Story on Sunday at Vocal, but I never did publish it here.

I think it might do some good to discuss structure at this point, or at least the concept of structure, where it pertains to writing. What the story is, where it's going, how it's relevant... and what our motivations are from moment to moment. Let's take a plain, ordinary piece of writing as a stepping-off place:

Janine set the plate before her husband, knowing how much he liked sausages and hoping that it might give him strength to face his day. Fridays were always hard for him, she knew that. It seemed a little odd, sometimes, how far they had come together, to where the day of the week mattered more than things like the birth of their two daughters, now ten, or the angst they once felt when they'd struggled through university together, almost two decades ago. Sitting in her own seat, she thought with a smile about the cute boy that had sat next to her, across the aisle, whom she once pined after in hopes that he'd ask her to the upcoming dance. Now that boy was across the table from her... with a big grin on his face at the prospect of the sausages.

On a small scale, we're invited to look at this not as something grand or mechanical, but rather as an unfolding of details. We start in the present, tether that to things that are ongoing, then stretch out to provide more context as to their lives. Then, we stretch back first to one memory, failing to dwell upon it, then further still to the beginning of their lives, seeing them at different ages... then looping back to the present again by invoking the effect of the first action we described. This is plain nuts-and-bolts writing; any time that we want a paragraph that grounds our reader in a given moment, we can repeat the structure again; not so stringent that it might be noticed, but comfortable in knowing that this structure has been used reliably for centuries.

Yet here the tendency is to ask what genre this is — and therefore to suppose that this structure adheres to a specific sort of genre, that relating to family, personal history or even love. But this is a superficial reading, one that many new writers perform without thinking. It supposes that because the overt subject is sausages, this itself defines the purpose or "nature" of the thing being described, an error that unfortunately assumes words are not bricks, but inherently fixed to certain kinds of structure.

We haven't said enough in the above to delineate it as a specific genre. Janine and her husband could be having their breakfast on a space station. Her husband's "Friday" could be the day he takes the ferry to dump the body of whatever hapless person these two murder each week. He might have to deal with the local home owners' meeting on Fridays while she dresses and heads off to the legislature as a congresswoman. A truck, being chased by police, might be mere seconds from crashing through the wall; it might kill her husband; it might launch them both into some horrific kidnapping scenario. We don't know what the next paragraph might say, but it may well say anything we want.

Consider this problem with regards to our story's greater inherent structure. Suppose, knowing nothing about the plot, we begin with the idea that Jack is going to shoot Ray in the fifth chapter. That's all we know. What do we need? Well, we need a motive for Jack to do it, which requires the presentation of incidents within the story that supplies and explains that motive before the bullet begins its journey. We need an opportunity for Jack, so in some way he must be able to find Ray, arrange the meeting, expect the meeting to happen and have a pretense for the space itself. We must build Jack's character in a way that plausibly explains a person who is willing to shoot another person, regardless of whom that is. This plausibility extends to others who know Jack, who must in turn plausibly be willing to be married to him or friends with him... which creates a number of sequences we must invent to explain to the reader how those relationships function. At the same time, all this has explained nothing about Ray. Why is he, why is shooting him the best plan, what does Ray want, what are the consequences of Ray's being shot at... because, as yet, we've said nothing about the success of Jack's plan. Does he succeed? Or is Ray merely injured, or missed? And after the shooting itself, we still need to express Jack's reaction to his own choice, the reaction of those who find out, Ray's reaction, the general fallout and much, much more. We don't need to invent a plot. We need only start with this character makes this choice, then suss out all the implications of that.

A story built this way is never arbitrary, never contrived, because every piece of it has to fit precisely together like a jigsaw puzzle; any piece that must be pounded into place will inevitably look, to the reader, that it doesn't belong. Moreover, because we, as the writer, are solving the problem before writing the story, our peculiar way of solving that puzzle defines a necessarily unique, personally-affected approach. I wouldn't find the reason for Jack to search Ray that my best friend might, or that my daughter might, or that the neighbour across the street might. We aren't the same person, so our view of what makes Jack, or his wife, or his children, or Ray, or the detective going over the details or any other character in the story, will always differ. We can use the same premise a myriad number of times... but change any puzzle piece in our initial conception, and every other piece has to change in turn.

The plot evolves from the premise; the characters also, because they must plausibly exist in a specific way, that we guess at and settle into, as we become more familiar with their voices. But where, in all this, does genre do any heavy lifting? How does knowing the genre of the story I'm telling contribute to the character's choice of actions. It might suggest a setting, but then, it would have to be a setting we could manipulate to fit the premise... and we might find ourselves incapable of placing it in an urban ghetto, in Indonesia, or in an Edwardian setting. We are limited by our understanding of place and time, and our capacity to research and grasp those things. The genre we pick is far more defined by where we can imagine ourselves, than the reverse of imagining ourselves in genre we don't understand.

A premise like "Jack shoots Ray" might seem to adhere to a classic action or thriller... but it could just as easily be a western, a conflict between professionals in a factory setting, a family drama, a science fiction story or, of course, a murder. The shooting could be premeditated... but we haven't actually stated that it must be. The shooting might be accidental. It might happen while Jack is cleaning his gun, or while two friends are hunting together, or in a slow-paced crime drama where Officer Jack mistakes Officer Ray for a perp on the run. We might be on a battlefield, we might be rounding the horn on an 18th-century frigate, we might be two boys aged eight. We absolutely have not, through our premise, established anything yet except that a bullet flies between the two named persons. We can't even say for certain that they're both men.

In building a narrative, it's up to us to confront our own blind spots. The naivete of our writing, its ordinariness, is based not on the premise, the supposed plot or the characters, but upon our limitations in seeing what's possible, as well as our prejudices about what kind of story we want to write. If our interests in stories are extremely narrow, that will define the hard boundaries surrounding the writers we can be. Even in any particular genre — a term invented for the purpose of selling books, not writing them — our fluidity of mind and capacity to think outside the norm provides infinitely odd and engaging possibilities. Writing isn't limited. The number of plots, the concept of newness, the so-called impossibility of originality, these things reflect the limits of individual human beings, who are expressing their limitations, their incapacity to see further than they can, their unwillingness to drop suppositions and inflexibility. Their limitations need not be ours. We need not measure ourselves as writers by their standard.

How much skill we have is a limitation, but it is one we can train ourselves above. Vision, very often, cannot be trained. It is often shaken by a staggering, usually unpleasant, metaphorical blow to the ego. But if that doesn't happen, our vision, or lack thereof, can cripple us no matter how good a writer we are. "Seek, therefore, the sight of the world you know not," was the 19th century approach. In this present, it is merely to open pages on an internet that we shy from opening. Unbind yourself, Prometheus. We must look outside our curated realities, our safe, familiar algorithms, our ideological comfort zones. There is no barrier between us as writers and the knowledge, perspectives and realities we lack — except willful blindness. Nothing is definitely true where it comes to expressing the story we have to tell. We need only have one.

This Week's Wiki

It has been a slow week.  I spent quite a lot of time with Archangel and another map, and with other projects not seen... and this is the point in my efforts when I'm not merely editing, I'm creating files from scratch.  The first three below haven't been new; but I've been transferring them from old wiki and they've needed a fair bit of work.

Not making excuses, only explaining why there's less links to click.  Assuming anyone likes these posts.  Some of these are pretty big.

• Gold Standard (trade) (incomplete)
• Forced March
• Progenitor
• Enchanted Weapon (spell)
• Detect Hidden Creature (sage ability)
• Creeping Doom (spell)
• Extension I (spell)
• Cloth & Materials (sage study)
• Agder
• Archangel
• Artillerist I (sage ability)
• Dimension Door (spell)
• Cloudkill (spell)

Archangel Updated

 Archangel is completed.  Thicker maps indicate reliable, posted, defined borders; dotted lines show undefined, "soft" borders through wilderness.  Added to the wiki page, where the map shows up better.

Dialogue and the Writer's Dilemma

Dialogue, regardless of the medium, embodies the meeting, exploration and conflict that exists between two or more human minds, expressed from a place where each knows their own thoughts perfectly — but while guessing the thoughts of another through sounds, physical cues and familiarity of time spent. It is messy. It is full of misreadings and mistakes. It is often clumsy and frustrating... and for the most part, we should expect that it's made worse through the prejudices, assumptions and plain stubbornness of the participants.

It is for all these reasons, and more, that dialogue is difficult to write. As writers, we are handicapped by our own minds, the only minds that we have full knowledge of... while for the most part we are struggling to represent minds that are not us, do not represent what we believe, and want things that we would never want. It is a mystery that we're able to do this at all.

Each of us, when we speak, has an agenda to which we've committed ourselves. We want to say those things that are important to us in the moment. We say them because we want others to hear. Their hearing is crucially important; we don't just want to speak, we want to be heard — and we surround ourselves, naturally, with those people who, over the course of time, we trust to hear us when we speak. This is the first rule of any character that speaks in any medium; it is not that they wish to speak for the sake of expressing themselves, but that they wish to be heard and validated as people.

When we are not heard; when we are dismissed or discounted by another — this is the beginning of conflict. When we are heard and granted consideration for our thoughts; when others seek to lift our thoughts and embellish upon them, this is when we feel emboldened, enriched and refined. We hate the former people, who ignore us. We fall in love with the latter.

Thus we have the whole sweep of interaction between participants in a dialogue. We know others who attack our speech; those who bicker with it; those who are indifferent and those who pay it lip service. We have those who consider our words, who are affected by them, who become excited when we speak and who stop, stunned, as their present is changed by something we've just said. In the nuance of this scale, we place every reaction to every word that's spoken in our presentation... with so many possibilities that it seems, nearly always, that we drown in how we're supposed to slice these hairs with our writing knife fine enough to make it sound like proper dialogue.

I cannot teach, here, in a single article, how to write dialogue. No one can. We are plagued with advice to make dialogue 'believable" or "realistic" or true to the "character's voice" — prescriptions that do nothing in providing us with aid, like someone asking for cream in their coffee by saying, "not a lot, not a little, just enough" and so on. We need an approach that enables us to ask the explainer to "say when" as we slowly pour the cream out, so we can judge exactness in our efforts. But that is not forthcoming, and won't be, largely because writing dialogue is a matter of feel, not precision.

Let's come around again to that first point: we want to be heard. Imagine our first character not in terms of a list of personality traits, but simply in this: if you were the character, what would you want to say. What would you want the others to hear. In this case, I'm not asking that we imagine ourselves to be the character, but rather, to start from a place where we, the person we are, is the character in our story. Before we can guess what others might say for themselves, we must know what we would say.

We have to understand our own voice. This is key. We can do nothing for the rest of the world until we say what matters to us, that we want the reader or the audience. It is our work; we have undertaken it. That must be, because whatever we write, we feel others should consider it. If we can't precisely define what that thing to be heard is, then we're wasting our time trying to write other people we understand necessarily less than we do ourselves.

Writing in a diary helps us find this voice. We write, for ourselves, with the confidence that we, at least, will hear ourselves, by starting with "I think" or "This happened to me." Spending hour after hour, fifty hours, a hundred, more... we become fully aware of this voice inside us, far more than ordinary people do. Far more than we used to before beginning. It is like learning to use a tool. We start using it badly... but with time and practice, the tool becomes more comfortable in our hands, as we learn steadily what we can do with it. And inevitably, what a surprising precision the tool possesses, that we never imagined once upon a time.

There is something quintessentially missed in the diary process however, which nevertheless becomes apparent. We're writing, but we're not listening. Our characters, as depicted in a dialogue, must do more than speak... they must listen. When Jack speaks to Joan and wants to be heard, this is only possible if Joan listens; and when Joan answers, anything of value she might have to say to Jack relies upon Jack listening. So it isn't enough to practice writing. We must practice listening, too. No matter what it is that others say, we must learn to guess more profoundly in seeking out that hidden little nugget of what thing it is they want us to hear.

Therefore, when the diary is closed, the writer must wrest self from chair and seek to converse. Cast off the shyness and doubt about what we might say and seek out conversations with others, whose motives are to explain to us what they think, Seek out dialogue structures through presenting obstacles for others to knock down with their words, their thoughts, their doubts. This is not to say we should lie to others, or play mind games, but rather to be less concerned just now with what we might want to hear and more interested in what they want to say... and thus, to plough the earth before them so that they might spread their seeds of wisdom. Learn to listen. Not only to the words, but to the cadence, the momentary hesitation, the doubts they have in trusting us, the strange roundabout ways they have of getting to the point — without our needing to hurry them or force them along a path comfortable for us. This is how we acquire other voices in our head, that belong to others, that we might express them when the time comes to write our story.

And if we should find that we're not trusted at once, all the better. We will want to write two characters that don't trust each other at once. We'll want to investigate and define for ourselves that moment when someone shifts from hesitancy and feeling us out, to finding our attentions worthy of that person. We are unravelling, more than most, that point we made at the front of this: skill in guessing the thoughts of someone, through the words and sounds they project, through the physical cues of their body, through the amount of time that we've spent sitting across from them, getting to know them, finding out about their lives and sacrificing our immediate needs and desires in order to be educated by theirs.

But beware: there is peril here. Just as too much familiarity with the application of paint can destroy beauty; just as too much knowledge of how a chord contributes to music can disenchant music... knowing too well what people think and feel, and how to record that imaginatively against their will into a story they never wished to take part in, can destroy one's faith in human nature.

Seeing all the layers of people laid bare, having dissected every nuance, peeled back every intention, just so that we might better fashion dialogue — at what price, Faust, at what price. What would we surrender to have knowledge and power over what others want to hear and say, such that we can wield it like a wand to heal or a dagger to cut? Those who know little of language realise how dangerous it can be, or how intensely affecting our words spoken in just such an order can set a house to crying or a house to violence. Is this what we want? To be old and grey and bereft of company because through our efforts to write, we discovered to our unhappiness what petty, unfulfilled human beings really are? Is it worth it?

Writing is an act best performed alone. One reason we become acquainted with this loneliness descends from the time we've spent with others... and no longer want to spend. It is not music; writing does not have an audience. We will never in truth hear applause at the moment when we've completed our performance... instead, it comes months, even years after, and nearly always from those we know do not understand what we've written. This is not a lament. It is recognition that we do not seek to know others so that we will like them the better. We seek to know because we want to represent them better, as fictional beings that we control like a god. There is nothing empathic in this... and we should not pretend there is.

Archangel Map

This started because the Archangel page on the wiki lacks a map of the halfling land so named.  I'd like a six-mile map for it, but of course if I wait until I get here in the normal order of things, I'll be dead before I get to this part of the world.  So yesterday and today I've spent a little time working on it.  Obviously, the county isn't finished, but I'm in no hurry.  It's not that big a realm, and it's not exactly civilised... but it is far moreso than other parts of the world this far north.  The elfland to the west, Egreliia, of which Essenia is one village, is much more civilised though.

Anyway, I thought some readers might be interested.  I've been enjoying the hell out of putting these "province" pages together, complete with descriptions for individual settlements and production.  One more impossible to finish task, but what the hell.

I'll throw a pdf up on my patreon page.

This Week's Wiki

For those not following me on Patreon, this is a list of adjusted or rewritten Authentic Wiki content compatible with 1st edition D&D, or merely of interest, updated in the last week.

• Call Woodland Beings (spell)
• Fortification (sage study)
• Ice Devil
• Dim (cantrip)
• Spike Stones (spell)
• Standard Bearer (sage ability)
• Weapons List
• Sticks to Snakes (spell)
• Centaur
• Find Familiar (spell)
• Locathah
• Parley & Negotiation
• Leverage (sage ability)
• Cognitive History (sage ability)
• Insect Plague (spell)
• Multi-class Characters
• Trip (spell)
• Set Snares (sage ability)
• Blindness (spell)
• Blur (spell)
• Equipment Notes
• Abkhazia

Stop Pitting Your Characters Against Each Other

We have postulated that it's best to start a work with two main characters. We ought really to have six to ten, like most casts in books, plays and films, but let's not dig ourselves in deep too soon. Let's keep with two for now and add later. I'd like to talk about directions our work might take, but before we rush into that, we have two pits to avoid — that almost no one avoids, because it's so easy for writers to go there.

What makes it worse is that I, you, anyone who's well-read, can instantly think of half a dozen classic, famously successful books that indulged in what I'm now going to say we should stay away from. Therefore I must express a caveat: it isn't that these pits are bad, in and of themselves... it's that when they're indulged in by someone who doesn't know how, the consequence is just awful, irritating, masturbatory writing. Which is to suggest, until one gets the hang of writing well, it's probably best to steer clear. Later, with a little
experience, every writer should try their hand, for there's plenty of room to explore there. But if you're reading this because you don't know how to write, well — let's try to get onto safer ground.

And, in fact, ground that's far less travelled.

The first pit is this, in a nutshell: each of our two characters is in conflict with the other. They don't like each other, they don't want the same things, they're trying to kill each other, surpass each other... there are choices. In a thriller, we have the last one standing. In a romance, we have foreplay. In a mystery, we have one in the open and the other in the tall grass. In a drama, we have two spiralling a drain.

We humans are naturally competitive and so this seems like a good idea: lots of arguments or drag out fights, motivations to one-up the other and there's momentum to be found in each racing against the other towards the end. But a problem arises in that a story built on two characters clashing can easily become exhausting, predictable or frustrating. If the conflict is all-consuming, there's little room for complexity beyond the back-and-forth struggle, and that can wear a reader down. The issue of likability is crucial — if you only like one character, the story feels lopsided, and if you like neither, there's no real emotional investment. Readers end up either rolling their eyes at the stubbornness of both characters or feeling detached because there’s no one they truly want to follow.

One "solution" is to make one of the two characters so likable that the reader is automatically drawn to them: most crime stories that follow a cop, most hero stories, most fantasy novels, and of course mysteries that revolve around the clever detective, rely on this. But this character has limitations; as we avoid giving them flaws, because any flaw might cause the reader to dislike the character, they become two-dimensional... and if we're writing a series of books, this just becomes worse as we progress. Inevitably, there's nothing to relate to and their inevitable victory feels cheap. And while there are readers who connect with this, these tend to be those who don't recognise their own flaws and believe themselves to be "just like the hero." Such fans get to be troublesome for a writer that wants to achieve more than a brief notoriety.

Moreover, many writers dive into this pit because they have personal grievances they'd like to resolve. It enables us to grind an axe we have, explaining how so many villains wind up being corporate managers or political figures, or indeed any authority, as the writer deeply wants to set them up as the straw man who goes down before the worthy, principled hero. Such works, if they're ever finished (and most of them never are), tend to be woefully heavy handed and thick with the writer's fingerprints, so that it's not hard to see the writer living out a fantasy. Writing such a book seems like a really good idea at the time. Don't do it.

Writing two characters in conflict takes an extremely delicate hand. Both need to be thoroughly fleshed out; both need to have a solid, justifiable stance, which has to be so tight that even a reader that hates that stance has to accept that it's reasonable. Finding masters who achieved this means going back to works written many long years ago, because if the book has survived on the shelves since the time of Dickens, Lawrence or Hemingway, it's probably proved its worth. But we're not these people, not imaginably yet, so let's walk around this pit and move on.

The second pit is to perceive that, because the story is being told in past tense, the characters in the story are concerned with the past and not their futures. I'm not going to get into a discussion here about present and past tense writing... I'm merely saying that, for the character who is struggling to improve their situation in our work, that character ought to be thinking about his or her future. All too often, instead, as writers we worry far too much about that character's past.

While backstory and past struggles can add depth — though I counsel against them unless absolutely necessary — the experience for the reader, reading about someone in the past, who is concerned mainly with their past, is just dull. Interesting people think about their future. Their thoughts are filled with what are they going to do next, and certainly with what they're doing right now; they speculate, they reason, they anticipate... they get excited about what they don't know. If the character spends the book remembering how mother and Aunt Martha were, and what great food they made, while remembering how they were going to do a bunch of things they're not doing now, so they can feel ennui about their present, non-active life... oh gawd, please just give them a gun. Maybe the narrative can follow someone with ambition instead.

If that backstory is the work's first two pages to explain why the character is quitting their present job so they can go DO the thing they failed to do, that's a story. Explain why we've jumped from this road to that and then never talk about it again. The plan is set up: now we want to watch the plan in motion.

The less time we spend explaining "why" a character does anything, the better. It ought to either be obvious, "I always wanted to be rich," or something that drives the character's enigmatic personality; "As I always did at times like these, I took out a quarter and flipped it." That's it. We've accomplished the premise. The character flips quarters. Why isn't relevant until the last ten pages, when we explain it with two sentences in the denouement and it makes perfect sense.

This last, of course, was used in No Country for Old Men. Where it worked fine. We only need to establish that the character knows that it's being done, so the reader can surmise there must be a reason. Of course, it's obvious that as a writer we better have a good one, when the time comes; but the goal is not to dwell upon it, not to monologue about it, not to let it take over the story.

There, let's walk around this pit too. Careful right there. Don't fall in.

Writers spend a lot of time by themselves, so it's self-evident why they don't see the alternative I'm going to recommend. We need to take our two characters and have them start the book together, on the same side... against everybody else.

This allows us to maintain all the same functional conflicts that the first pit offers: as they essentially like each other, they want the same thing... but they can disagree about how to achieve it. They can end up going one-on-one with an opponent, because they don't need to be together all the time; but they can come to each other's rescue. We can distribute the skill set between them, so that the other sometimes comes up short. And we can still have them do all the things a single person can do: take down the bad guy, find the murderer in the bushes, even re-ignite their love life in any number of novel, unexpected ways.

This has been the premise of hundreds of police dramas, since Arthur Conan Doyle balanced a superhero with a plain old ex-military doctor. As he is grounded and relatable, Watson humanises Holmes. One has sharp instincts and is exceptionally sharp-minded; the other is brave, stalwart, empathic. The conversations allow for a give-and-take that is deeply felt wish fulfillment for millions of readers: my other half, my support system, my wake-up call, my rock, my friend. I have no idea why writers don't rush to this approach. It has proven incomprehensibly successful for well over a century. It may be that writers are misanthropes, but I think it's more probable that the approach requires the writing of meaningful, engaging and plot-relevant dialogue.

That is a miasma we must leave for its own discussion.

Starting the Character Conflict

Many writers, finding themselves alone, let themselves think that it's natural to begin there: a writer, sitting in a room, alone, puzzling out a series of thoughts. Only, it's not a writer. It's a bartender looking at patrons. It's a teacher watching children file out from a room. It's an ice cream vendor watching others in a park. Somebody by themselves, with the power to observe, who can express a set of thoughts that revolve around feeling superior to others.

Let me just reach in and and gently lift your hands from the keyboard, setting them in your lap. Don't start your story this way. Distance is not insight, observing is not a story, feeling superior is not a virtue.

Stories don't happen to people... they happen between them. It's far more interesting to watch two people struggling to figure each other out than to watch us wrestling with ourselves. So let's do that. Let's put the pity party on a shelf and write a story about two people. And here's what makes it hard: neither of these people are going to be us. To repeat the aphorism, it's more interesting to watch us explain two people than for us to explain ourselves.

If that makes you uncomfortable, that's a good thing. Anything that pushes us past the impulse to make writing a mirror for ourselves and into a window into the rest of the world, increases the likelihood that someone will like our story. After all, now they have three people they might potentially relate to rather than one: person A, person B and us, describing them.

What comes next is even less savoury for many an artist: these people have to like each other. Stories about people hating each other are irritating, two-dimensional and inevitably tiresome. There are many, many stories that already exist that indulge themselves in the discontent that pesters our mood when we think about writing, especially when we haven't been successful at it. Though to be completely honest, every writer intuitively understands that it doesn't matter how successful we've been, the next book must stand entirely on its own. That's how the reader sees it, so we must also.

There is a strong tendency to think that tension means conflict — and that, therefore, if the two hate each other, more conflict, more tension. But it's been demonstrated only by every good book ever written that there is more tension and conflict in two people who love each other, or depend on each other, than there can ever be in two people who feel only hate. So let's lean into this part of human nature and make our two people care.

Creating a scene that enables this demands a clarity about spontaneous human interaction: with improv theatre, it's known as the "yes principle." The expectation is that when person A says something odd, off colour, intrinsically emotional or whatever... the other person must "go with it" in a fully committed, positive way. No other option is permitted, because every other option kills the interaction.

Let's take something simple; the simpler, the better, because things that happen every day are instantly comprehensible. Writers tend to pooh-pooh the ordinary, rushing towards worlds that are already constructed of weird bricks — but the better goal is to start plain, then add bricks of whatever shape we want in due course. So as we begin to stain our blank white page with symbols, let's be boring.

A character in line at a grocery lifts her card to pay for groceries and the reader doesn't recognise it. She tries again, and it fails again. And she... does something off colour. She breaks down crying. Now, this can be a man or a woman; each embraces its own social characterisation. Our other character, again a woman or a man, has been, like an improv performer in our imagination, has been put in a place where they must say "yes." How might we best do that?

Our ability as a writer depends on how we answer this question. A poor writer reaches for the most obvious solution; person B offers to pay, person A accepts, person B says something cute, person B says something cute back, an invitation is given, our person A and B are in coffee shop explaining themselves to each other. Normal, everyday, positive interaction. It works... but could it be better?

Here is the real struggle where a writer steadily progresses in ability from ordinary to talented. Writing instructors, lacking any better way of lifting a writer's senses, fall back upon gimmicks and techniques like "write your way out of a paper bag," which essays to force the writer into solving a problem that appears initially to be insolvable. But this approach is misdirected; we don't get out of paper bags in writing literature... we write ourselves into them by failing to understand that mundane, easy solutions are not the answer we want. We can be ridiculously inventive writing our way out of a bag — an artificial constraint we'll never have to solve — but writing our way out of the mundane, our daily experience, is far harder. We live in the mundane. It is our crippling illness.

There is a strong tendency to shatter the mundane with a weird brick: "... and then the aliens landed." Which is laughable, makes for good comedy, and sometimes achieves a temporal success with an audience until someone else tops it. But the majority of readers won't buy in. They're too jaded; they know the writer "ran out of ideas." Which is true. We didn't solve the conundrum at the cash register. We had aliens do it for us. We should not blame the reader when they can clearly see the hand waving behind the curtain.

If we remove the failed card, we can find an example of this scene solved by someone 50 years ago, in a song that hit home. Dan Fogelberg wrote, "Met my old lover in the grocery store; the snow was falling Christmas Eve. I stole behind her in the frozen foods; and I touched her on the sleeve..."

There are no weird bricks, no sudden spectacle — just a man seeing an old lover in a grocery store. It is universal, it is timeless; it demonstrates how hard a perfectly normal, mundane scene can punch right in the gut when ordered rightly. If this construction can hold the weight it does, why shouldn't we be able to match that? We are living lives that are full of intensely felt moments, thousands of which have never been implanted into a story, have never risen above the story we tell others in the coffee breakroom — and yet which we still remember with perfect clarity decades after they've happened: bitterly, happily, embarrassingly. With emotions that others can share as intensely as we felt them.

Those moments are waiting, ready to be put to use. Some will be hard to employ. We may find ourselves tearing up as we write out the words. Others will arouse shame that is so acute that we feel pain with every keystroke. But what we feel, the reader can feel. What we have experienced, the reader has also. That is intrinsic to the whole pattern of this human experiment we're stuck within. None of us have seen the aliens land. We've almost all had ex-lovers.

Mind you, this isn't about writing what we know. It is writing what we've felt.

This Week's Wiki

For those not following me on Patreon, this is a list of adjusted or rewritten Authentic Wiki content compatible with 1st edition D&D, or merely of interest, updated in the last week.

• Freshen (cantrip)Charm Person (spell)
• Beast Forms (sage ability)
• Aural Setting (sage ability)
• Town
• Restoration (spell)
• Span (spell)
• Light (spell)
• Part Water (spell)
• Beekeeping (sage ability)
• Grey Elf
• Sheba
• Abattoir (vendor)
• Cheetah
• Enlarge (spell)
• Phantasmal Feature (spell)
• Flame Strike (spell)
• Abbassides (dynasty)
• Adab (ruin) (real world place, though the image is fanciful)
• Senses I (sage ability)
• Type-8 Hex
• Spook (spell)
• Dispel Malevolence (spell)
• Find Place (sage ability)
• Actor I (sage ability)
• Animate Dead (spell)
• Wound
• Combine (spell)
• Alarm (spell)
• Jackalwere
• Flavour (cantrip)
• Javelin (weapon)
• Purify Food & Drink (spell)
• Shield (armour)