Let’s play a game

There is a sort-of meme that surfaces from time to time that I’ve been thinking about for a little while. It’s structured as a comment, and then a reply to the comment by the same author.

It goes something like this:

I would like to run a Dungeons & Dragons campaign but just play it by myself and DM it myself.

I have been informed that is is called writing a book.

This strikes me as something I should try. World-building I can do. DMing a game I can do. DMing a module I wrote myself, including ad-libbing things along the way, I can and have most certainly done. Moreover, there are novels from both the Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms collections that really did start life as an adventure module, so people have clearly done this before! One highly memorable character in the original Dragonlance trilogy occurred because a player rolled a critical hit on a spell, causing the NPC to become utterly devoted to the player character in question. Not what was intended, but it worked so well in the story.

It also strikes me as an approach that I have not seen any article about “how to write” actually talk about. Maybe there’s an opportunity to be had…

Now, of course, to create an adventure story in such a fashion.

Handling Death in a story

Us human beings have a kind of macabre fascination with death. We always have. Maybe this is because death is a part of life. There are always things dying for us and near us. Plants. Animals. People.

Exploring death is a ripe subject for a story. In today’s modern western society, it has been said that we don’t see personal death as much as in other cultures or societies, nor as much as in past centuries. We do see old age death, though. I had a grandfather recently die basically of old age. And although it was sad to see him go, he was 71 and that is generally considered a decent length of life.

An untimely death of someone much younger is often handled differently. You might think that a violent and untimely death of someone we know, whether pre-meditated or an accident of circumstance, is not something the average person will encounter much if at all in their lifetime. But that’s not the case, as many non-caucasian people in the US would testify. So such people can and do tell stories to help share to those who have not. And also to help themselves understand the own reactions.

Anne McCaffrey’s famous novel The Ship Who Sings does that. It is a series of short stories and in the first one, we meet Helva (the titular spaceehip) and watch her story unfold as she begins life as a human brain wrapped in a spaceship. And we also see her as she falls in love and then sees her love killed in an accident basically right before her electronic eyes. It is a strongly emotional scene. McCaffrey is on record as saying she wrote this story as catharsis for dealing with the death of a family member.

The TV series Broadchurch also does this. It looked at what a death of a young boy does to the residents of a small, somewhat isolated British town. We see death dramatised on our movie and TV screens so much more than our parents and grandparents, particularly a most deliberate kind of death: murder. This story was an unusual telling, though. It begins as a Police Procedural. This is a modern version of the classic Murder Mystery story that’s been with us for decades and still makes for blockbuster movies and long-running TV series. Broadchurch takes one or steps in that direction, then does the narrative equivalent of stopping and taking a long look around. It is at that point it then becomes an exploration of how a murder creates ripples and waves in the relationships of the people in the town. Some people have to deal with the deceased not being there anymore. Others have to work out how to talk with others dealing with this. There are secrets uncovered, motives questioned and relationships sundered. There are many and varied reactions.

But that is holding a mirror up to the real world.

In speculative fiction, particularly classic Fantasy, death is not always permanent. Sometimes it almost feels like it comes with the genre. Almost. In settings like The Forgotten Realms there are numerous ways to be resurrected or to live on beyond death. This is kind of expected as its world rules are Dungeons and Dragons and in this world and others with highly pervasive magic systems, it is often possible to resurrect a killed person. This is not always the case, though. In David Edding’s Belgariad, resurrection is a highly dangerous exercise. It only happens when the plot demands it.

J. K. Rowling takes this further. Again, this is a magic-rich world where a lot of medical problems have magical solutions, from broken bones to the common cold. But not death. It is a key story-point in one of the later novels that even in Rowling’s world, death is permanent and irreversible. And it is significant that Rowling puts her characters (and readers) through the wringer over several deaths that happen. In fact, defeating death is the goal of the villain of the whole series. And look at what it does to him!

Rowling’s handling of death is a touch point curiously close to the real world. It was remarkable when I read it and still is when I re-read it.

But do we need to explore death in stories? In a sense, yes: it is an important part of being human. There is a certain fascination with it’s permanence and trying to put it off as long as possible. Or even entirely. And this is why stories get written about it.

 

Promote This Blog

Sometimes I wonder if I promote this blog enough.

Writers of all kinds generally need promotion, whether they write for a trade magazine or are a published novelist. If (or when) you get paid for your writing, promotion is often part of the deal. Your magazine editor can promote your writing better just by putting your article closer to the start of the magazine, for instance. Likewise, a major publishing house spends time and money getting people to look at the titles of its writers.

But bloggers and self-publishers are kind of on their own. Self-publishing is often held up as a way of getting a much bigger royalty on your work – except that you then have to do all your own marketing, too, now. Out of your bigger royalty. It’s a business, just like a publishing house. Some writers enjoy this, but not all of them. I think this is one reason the major publishing houses are still in demand from writers.

Coming down from a Conference high.

Well, Conflux9 is done and dusted and I thought maybe I should blog about the experience before I start forgetting things.

It was the first time I’d been to anything even like a writers’ conference and definitely the first time I’d stayed at the same hotel. Once I’d checked in, then found the conference registration desk and registered, I loitered in the foyer along with other attendees, making new friends and gradually letting people find me who I knew online, mostly from Twitter. It helped my Twitter avatar was a real pic of me, which was not entirely deliberate.

The best of the best

The Australian Writers’ Centre* is once again running the Best Australian Blogs competition. I was a finalist last year, which was a huge surprise, given I entered on a lark! Apparantly someone like my writing.

I haven’t entered myself this year, as this blog is going through a bit of a quiet period. But anyone can enter someone else’s blog. (Ugh – that sentence sounds awkward.) Not that I’m asking. Well, maybe I am. But any of my readers think I’m worth a shot, feel free.

* They’ve had a name change. They used to be called the Sydney Writers’ Centre but decided to expand into other cities n Australia.

 

The Practice of Persistence

This is my sixty-first post.

I hadn’t been keeping much track, to be honest. But when WordPress told me after the last post that I’d posted sixty items, it really struck me that I’ve actually been doing this for some while. I know some bloggers write far more and far more often. But part of the reason this blog has survived is because I don’t post that often. And I made sure I was happy with that. Amongst other things, it gave me time to get used to regular blogging without the stress of always having to figure out something to say.

Hopefully with all that practice, I’ve gotten better at this blogging lark. 🙂

On Emerging Writers

What is an “emerging writer”? Emerging from where? And I thought writers developed. They don’t spring upon the world fully formed. But perhaps “developing writer” doesn’t sound quite so good.

I went to the Emerging Writers Festival in Sydney yesterday. I nearly didn’t go but a friend was asking on Twitter and that put the thought in my head. I had often read about the EWF in Melbourne, where it covers a week or more of programs. Then, too, I’d been to the Sydney Writers Festival this year and was distinctly underwhelmed. The problem with the SWF is that most of the program seems to be adulation of writers, with just a fraction of the content about helping new writers.