Joshua Unruh's Blog, page 4

Apocalypse What Now?

I wrote a humorous article over at PolicyMic about the so-called Mayan Apocalypse and why we should be interested but totally not freaking out. Go check it out and share it around a little bit, will ya?

Just what the HELL is going on with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?!

As an adult who grew up in the 80s, I regularly have the joy of reintroduction to a barely remembered treat from my childhood that turns out to be full of darkness and horror. This year, that reintroduction was Rankin & Bass's stop motion animated masterpiece, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

I have a five year old son and seeing things anew through his eyes can be a real treasure. For instance, even after the Star Wars prequels stole my give-a-damn for that franchise, watching the original trilogy with him managed to make my grinchy heart grow at least one size larger. But in the case of Rudolph, imagining what it was his little eyes and ears saw and heard dug out a pit inside me. A pit filled with existential dread...and misfit toys.

If you haven't seen this monstrosity recently, my mother tells me it's on CBS tonight at 7pm. If you burst into inconsolable tears, don't blame me.

This thing is wall-to-wall horrors for the modern audience. Although, honestly, I'm beginning to wonder how it ever passed muster even back in the day. I don't have the time nor do I have the mental capacity to dissect this thing minute by minute. I plan to hit the high points and hope they suffice as explanation why this will not be seen in my house EVER AGAIN.

Rudolph's dad starts out super excited about having a baby boy, gets a little shaky on it when the nose starts glowing, and then outright sees Rudolph as a problem to solve once Santa pipes up.
For most of his life, Rudoph is not loved unconditionally by his father. Which sorta leads me, as a dad, to ask if he's loved at all.
This mistreatment continues when Rudolph's nose is revealed to the other young reindeer and everyone "laughs and calls him names." Nobody is punished or admonished for this, not even in a bid for pity.
The only reindeer who is nice to Rudolph is Clarice, a female yearling, and her dad forbids her to see him. There is no comeuppance. (Note: It could be argued that Rudolph's mom is also nice to him, but then again, she fails to protect him from his father's douche baggery.)
Santa apparently thinks the snow at the North Pole isn't the only thing that needs to be pure white. He consigns Rudolph to the reindeer purgatory of "not being on the sleigh team" and also banishes (perhaps via intermediaries, but still, he is the autocrat of the North Pole, isn't he?) broken or "misfit" toys to a concentration camp.
When Rudolph is welcomed back into the fold, it is not because everyone suddenly realizes they were douche canoes to him in the first place. It is explicitly because his "deformity" is now useful.
There is no shame felt by anyone who mistreated him.
There are no life lessons learned about how different doesn't mean bad.

It's like Rankin & Bass asked the question "Why make a show about bullying when we can make a show about state sanctioned bullying and why it might be kinda okay"? This thing isn't just a poorly made or stupidly juvenile piece of yuletide drivel, it is an actual Christmas Spirit Killer.

But then there's Hermie.

Hermie is a "misfit elf" who doesn't want to make toys. No, Hermie wants to be a dentist! Of course, because this is a film about the inherent horrors of deviating from a blessed, state-sanctioned norm, Hermie is ridiculed for his desire that all elves have healthy teeth and gums. And, because we need a couple of guys who can go on a road trip together and discover that their deformities aren't the only ones that will get you kicked out of Christmas Town by that fat fascist bastard Santa, Hermie runs into Rudolph when he's on the lam as well.

They go off on their own, have adventures, meet Yukon Cornelius, and run like hell from the Abominable Snow Monster. Through all this they forge a mighty and lasting friendship.

But here's where things get a little weird. It is abundantly clear to me (and to every other adult I mention this to, by the way), that Hermie is gay as a picnic basket and "dentistry" is a euphemism for homosexual sex.

Yes, really.

Just take a look at Hermie. All the other elves are uniform and, frankly, hideous little gnomes. But Hermie is absolutely fabulous! His face is cherubic, his hair perfectly coiffed, his voice has just a hint of a lilting lisp. Plus, and this is pretty key, his focus on dentists and becoming one borders on the pathological. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is that excited about teeth. Of course he demands -- while bursting into song, I might add -- "why must I be a misfit?"

Did I mention our nearly first brush with Santa was him singing a number where he declared himself the "King of Ding-a-ling"? My God, the hypocrisy of the North Pole.

"You don't mind my red nose?" Rudolph asks. "Not if you don't mind me being a dentist," Hermie responds. Later, Rudoph insists to Hermie, "Whatever a dentist is, I hope someday you're the greatest." See how caring Rudolph is? He even wants good things for Hermie's first boyfriend.

Honestly, just assuming that every naive mention of dentistry and dentists is actually referencing gay men almost salvages this thing enough to be watchable. But just to prove that no part of this monstrosity can be entirely uplifting and uncreepy, Rankin and Bass give us a scene between Hermie and the Abominable Snow Monster. The Bumble, as he's eventually called, is knocked out, whereupon Hermie perpetrates dentistry on him against his will.

When the Bumble wakes up from his roofie-induced brush with "dentistry," he is toothless and there is -- I shit you not -- blood splattered snow. As my friend Hill said during the Facebook conversation I accidentally started with my musings, "The yeti emerges completely toothless-- all gums. I could take the innuendo further, gentlemen, but I am not sure you want me to."

No, my friend, we do not.

The most amazing part of all this is that none of my observations involve much reaching. This is all pretty much text. Even the "dentistry" angle is so thinly veiled as to be a winking joke with the audience. This is not adult eyes focused on a beloved childhood masterpiece. This is calling an awful thing awful...and maybe also wanting to high five Hermie. (No that's not a euphemism. Pervs.)

So for the parents and grandparents out there who haven't seen this thing in decades and think it would be a nice night at home with the kids, think again! Look upon this image...and shudder.

Bitter-SWEETS

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Kody Chamberlain. He's a friend of my friend, Brian Winkeler, who had invited Kody to OKC to talk to our AdClub. Brian was cool enough to make me his +1. Kody's talk on the creative process was very enlightening and has caused me to tweak my own process. Not only that, but I've taken some very tentative steps toward an all new project that would never have occurred to me without our lunchtime conversation we had before the presentation even started.

But the most immediate discovery was Kody's creator-owned comic book series, SWEETS. To my friends who know my fiction predilections, picking this up was a no-brainer. SWEETS is a cop procedural set in New Orleans mere days before Katrina will hit. There have been murders, it's starting to look like a serial killer, and the best guy for the job is mourning his daughter (dead from a hit-and-run) in a way that's going to get him fired. On top of all that, Katrina is blowing down their necks and promising to obliterate evidence and lose witnesses to the winds.

Before I say anything else, I have to praise the artwork in this book. Kody is a veteran of graphic design  as well as comic book art and it absolutely shows. Kody mentioned in his AdClub talk that, because of his roots in commercial arts other than comic books, he has several different styles in his repertoire. It absolutely shows.

The A Plot is purposefully muddy colors and fake ink splatters to show a very real world approach to the police work. To show the killer's viewpoint, Kody drains the color from that style and adds some other oddball touches that demonstrate just how skewed the killer sees things. On top of this primary style (with tweaks), there are flashbacks done in a cartoonish style with a more vivid but still very muted color scheme. You always know exactly what part of the story you're looking at literally at a glance.

Considering I have recently read superhero books where I could not figure out what was happening from one panel to the next, I find this incredibly impressive.

So all this beautiful, engaging art is used to tell a sordid tale of serial killings, mysteries, psychic madams, grief, dealing badly with the grief, working the murders like cops, shady deals all around, and some amazingly well written dialogue. The art from an industry veteran is stunning and it is an incredible effort from a debut writer.

Basically, I couldn't suggest it more. Go buy it now!

Everything I Need to Know about Elections I Learned in Kindergarten (This Morning)

This morning I had the distinct pleasure of assisting my son's kindergarten class with taking part in the entire school's mock election. It was mostly humorous, a little sad, and a very little horrifying. At the end, though, I had to admit that I'd left a kindergarten class a little more educated, although probably not in the way anyone would have preferred.

First, my son's teacher did a great job of explaining that Americans have the right to take part in their government and one of the main ways is through voting in an election. Then she explained that elections are where each citizen, through their vote, picks which candidate he or she thinks is best for the job.

Now, as a very apolitical and cynical human being, I already thought this was putting a brave face on things. But it was also kindergarten, so I figured starting them out with shining optimism and preserving it as long as possible is the right move. So point to Miss C.

But then one of the kids asked who the candidates were. Miss C. explained the current president was Barack Obama and his main challenger was Mitt Romney. Then the room of 5 and 6 year olds flipped feces.

So many of these kids had deeply held opinions about these candidates and voiced them in the same frantic, high pitched tones they would use to beg for candy or more recess. I couldn't parse any specifics (a fact that saddens me for lost comedic value but heartens me because I don' t know if I could sleep at night knowing there are rabid Republicans and Democrats in kindergarten), but they all boiled down to something like "My [parent] says he [the candidate] is doing [horrible thing] to the country!"

Miss C.'s response to this was a firm and only slightly louder than the children, "WE ARE NOT DISCUSSING WHO WE'RE VOTING FOR. THE SECRET BALLOT IS YOUR RIGHT AS AN AMERICAN." She was so stern, though, that I couldn't help but add in my head, "And also a requirement for this class."

Then she ordered the children to line up, and we marched them down to the polling area. We had to wait a bit for the first graders to finish up, and while we were there, I mused. Between the lining up, the forced march, and the waiting for your turn to vote en mass, I sorta wished I'd brought some small green caps with red stars pinned to them.

Once we entered the polling area, each kid had to check in by saying their name. I thought that was pretty lax security, but, honestly, that's about the height of the bar at actual polling places too. A driver's license? Seriously? I had three or four of those in college, and only one had my actual name on it. You want to make it tough? Have the kindergartner write their full name. That would be the equivalent of a DNA scan on me.

This is when the ballot itself was explained. It's also when I realized that programming our system to fail happens as early as kindergarten by well-meaning and loving people who are doing their best to explain complex things to simple minds. As a person who believes that the thing you're voting on becomes less and less important the further it moves away from you geographically (until you reach the nadir of Washington DC where literally nothing that happens there really matters in a substantive way), it was a true shock to me for the following reasons.

Despite having several judges and very interesting state questions on our ballot, the only things on the mock ballot were presidential candidates and their running mates.
The third party candidates were referred to as "the guys you don't hear as much about."
The pictures of the candidates were photocopies so Obama looked way blacker and everybody else looked way whiter. (I really want to make a joke about how Romney couldn't be whiter, but then you'd think I'd tipped my political hand when, in fact, I mostly just think Romney is a deeply typical rich white guy.)

Here began the most fascinating lessons. Despite the rules against it, there was a lot of loud whispering about who was voting for who and why. There were also several kids who forgot what they were doing halfway through the process. I had to re-explain the whole thing and make sure they checked the box properly. Then each child in turn meandered, a little dazedly, over to the ballot box, dropped their ballots in, and received "I Voted!" stickers.

As they sat with huge, beaming smiles on their faces comparing their stickers, I had an epiphany. They believed utterly that they had just done something of staggering importance by using an ill informed opinion to decide what name to make a mark next to before dropping that opinion into a magical box where somewhere, somehow, that opinion would count for something.  They were all immeasureably proud of themselves...for about five minutes. They forgot about the whole thing by the time we made it back to the classroom, and will probably keep on forgetting about it for at least the next four years.

And if that's not a metaphor for the actual grown-up election, I don't know what is.

The Point of Bullets

Here's a few things I wanted to let every one know all at once. Sadly, this means some of them that could become blog posts probably won't now, but I don't care because I have lots of opinions to wave around at people.

A random conversation with AaronPoguedid result in my plan to write the first drafts of several fantasy novellas I won't have to do second drafts of because it's Somebody Else's Problem, the first drafts of not one but two fantasy novels (one very fun and low fantasy, the other very serious and high fantasy), and fixing my Weird Western novella finally. I'm going to try and do most of this in about six weeks. The biggest hurdle is how little prewriting I've done on the novels.
This may result in some more silence here, but it may not. We'll just have to see.
I still haven't caught up on Arrow but I really, really want to. Watch this space for more reactions.
The above is brought to you at least in part by the responses to my last blog post. Apparently I can manage to be some sort of bridge between the Nerd Culture that produces Rage over changes to things and the Pop Culture that wants to care about guys in masks punching criminals (for instance) but only on their terms.
BTW, as much as I understand and accept the above, I'm taking suggestions on future topics because right now, other than Arrow, I got nothing.
The Man with the Iron Fists was freakin' AMAZING, you guys. Go and see it. Lovingly crafted Grindhouse Kung Fu Cinema. If you don't love it, I'm not sure we can be friends.
I'm seriously wondering how people have time to watch television. I have a lot of what sounds like quality television I'm really interested in watching, but have no time in which to do it. Yet Big Brother and Honey Boo Boo get audiences. WHO HAS THE TIME FOR CRAP?

Okay, more semi-random musings to come I'm sure. Especially as I pre-write such vastly disparate styles of writing, I bet all kinds of wisdom (or what passes for it around here) drips from my blog like honey from the comb. Also, tomorrow is Election Day in the USA where I live, so if you aren't entirely cynical about the process, go do your civic duty!

So…What Do You Guys Want To Talk About?

Later this week, I'll tell you how a random conversation led to the new Consortium Books publishing plan where I write a book in the next six weeks for a near Christmas release. (I AM NOT DOING NANOWRIMO! THE TIMING IS COINCIDENTAL! BESIDES, IT'S MORE THAN ONE NOVEL!)

Today, I'm hoping for some opinions. I have no idea if I'll get any because I have no idea what my readership is really like. I know a few people who read my blog, I glance at my Google Analytics now and then, but I make no real effort to attempt getting to know you unless you engage via comments.

That's not an indictment. I lurk on lots of blogs, or only comment rarely, so I can't fault anybody who does that here. However, by the same token, I don't expect those bloggers to give a rosy red rat's tuckus who I am unless I speak up. If they want to try and puzzle out who I am as a demographic that's fine with me. I can't comment on what people find enjoyable. Doing that to you guys sounds, to me, like getting dental surgery in North Korea.

But now I'm curious if I can get some input from my usual suspects and maybe even from some lurkers I assume exist somewhere out there. Let's find out!

I plan on returning to the writing advice for gamers because I'm turning that into a book later. I also plan on periodically doing some daddy blogging because my kid is awesome and funny, I'm even funnier, and those will eventually probably be a book also.

But other than that, it's all random topics in my head. Arrow is shockingly well written while the Green Arrow comic is so painfully off the rack I can't even muster the energy to be mad about it. Community is great. I like the concept of pulp television. Anthologies and short stories versus the traditional novel. My kid asked me to run a roleplaying game for him and I'm super excited. My regular RPG group is amazing and all noobs, there's a story there.

It's all random. And I'm happy to write about random stuff. But lately I've also been enjoying blogs that are random stuff AND non-random stuff. John Scalzi's Whatever is a fine example. He does commentary and political posts, sometimes of a very serious nature, and even when I disagree with them, they're well-written and fun. I bet I could do that!

But would anyone care?

That's where the informal questioning comes in. What would you guys like to hear from me? All random? Some non-random? Politics? Religion? Q&A? More writing advice? More gamer stuff? More general pop culture commentary? More general culture commentary? The voluminous but catch-all Other?

Tell me! Comment here, at Facebook, Twitter me (I love saying that, it sounds so dirty). Whatever. Just let me know.

And if I hear nothing, then I'll create a Blog Random Encounter Chart and roll on it, AD&D style! That actually sounds like fun!

Arrow Isn’t a Bullseye But Does Hit the Target

Being a fan of comics books, it was hard to miss when the CW network announced its latest foray into the world of superheroes. Arrow, named for the titular Green Arrow1, is a reimagining of the character into a world of nighttime dramatic action with all the tangled webs of relationships, secrets, hidden agendas, and people-who-are-not-what-they-seem.

Generally speaking, I couldn't care less about Green Arrow. He's a blatant Batman knock-off with a ridiculous (even for superheroes) gimmick who got a thin coat of relevancy in the 70s by becoming super liberal and explaining to Green Lantern that, no matter how colorblind he was to interstellar species on Oa, he was still a racist douche at home. Then GA proved it to GL with an interminable road trip in a pickup truck.

That said, there have been some enjoyable Arrows. The animated GA on Justice League Unlimited was pretty enjoyable as the cantankerous old man who wanted all these new heroes to get off his lawn. In one of the very, very few examples of Smallville doing something right, it took the lemons of not being allowed to have Batman and made lemonade out of a Green Arrow who basically acted like a smirking Batman having fun running around in his silly outfit solving the world's problems. In a more serious vein, the Mike Grell penned Longbow Hunters era was a very well written grim-and-gritty take on GA when DC was all about rolling out as many badly written grim-and-gritty takes on superheroes as they could get paper for.

And the trailers and previews for Arrow definitely looked like Mike Grell and Christopher Nolan had a bow-wielding love child. But, for me, that's a half empty glass and I was leery of wasting any more time on another DC misstep2 with a character I was already marginal about at best.

But then the pilot aired and I was hearing shockingly good things from a lot of corners. And then I heard some very negative things from other corners. I sadly found myself in a place where I was going to have to decide not to care about Arrow at all or sit down and watch the damn pilot.

Well, needless to say, a couple folks made sure I couldn't just not care, so I sat down and watched the damn pilot.

And it was pretty okay! In fact, there are seeds of real, honest enjoyment mixed in there! I'm actually looking forward to watching the second episode!

The Good News

This show is totally watchable! I typically have to make apologies for pilots, but this one did the job of setting things up (including a slightly ludicrous number of interwoven relationships, mysterious backstories, and flashbacks) while giving a viewer a satisfying A plot to chew on.

I have a big soft spot for ridiculous relationship maps on nighttime action dramas, and some of the Arrow blanks were filled in with cliches or in heavy handed ways. But in a day and age where most pilots for shows like this are two parters, Arrow does a remarkable job setting up the series.

I also really enjoyed almost all the casting, especially of Ollie. That's hard on me since I liked the Smallville Ollie so much, but the only big casting misfire I could see was in Laurel. She's pretty much a blank canvas right now with some Rachel Dawes filled in around the edges, but that may be because they haven't decided if she's going to wind up Black Canary yet. (I hope not...)

The fight scenes were well staged for an untested television show. The A Plot made sense (more or less, see below in the Bad News). There were plenty of teasers for secrets and intrigue, which are pretty much mainstays for a show like this. And Arrow did not look like a total douche while firing arrows at guys with automatic weapons. That's a tough one to make work!

And, last but not least, there's one for the ladies and 10% of the dudes. Ollie is one delicious slab of beefcake.

Plus, best of all: Arrow through a Deathstroke mask. ARROW THROUGH A DEATHSTROKE MASK, PEOPLE!

The Bad News

WiFi arrows are dumb. I mean, I laughed and enjoyed it, but that's just silly.

If they make Laurel, a knock off version of a character so uninteresting even a switch from Katie Holmes to Maggy Gyllenhall couldn't invigorate her, into Black Canary, a character that has utterly surpassed Green Arrow in depth and interesting hooks, then I will burn down their houses.

They did leave out one of Ollie's typically trademark character traits, that being his crazy, left-wing politics. That's not saying left-wing politics are crazy, but Ollie is the left version of right-wing militia members. I'm honestly not sure how you work this in without making it the point of the show, but I throw this bone to whatever a Green Arrow purist looks like.

Speedy as the younger sister and it's her nickname because she already uses drugs.3

The aforementioned melodramatic cliches and somewhat hammy introduction of same. Honestly, I consider this a good thing in small doses, which was the case for Arrow, but I put it here also for the sake of fairness.

Ollie airbrushed green over his eyes instead of wearing a domino mask. Because airbrushing over your eyes is less stupid than a domino mask. (Hint: It isn't.)

Ummmm...that's it. Really. If you like urban vigilantes, melodrama, and nighttime action dramas, then you will call this a win. Even if you hate Green Arrow.

So, the Arrow pilot didn't suck. Nobody is more surprised than I am. I'll let you know what I think of the next episode.

1 Although the chromatic nomenclature was deemed too juvenile for this representation of the character despite his predilection for verdigris garb, Starling City is apparently way more grown up and serious than Star City.

2 I'm not going to get into a big thing here unless somebody really asks nicely, but two of those Nolan Batman movies are amazing pieces of film that are terrible, terrible Batman movies. The third one is just a terrible movie. It isn't even all that pretty. Therefore, the Nolan Batman movies are missteps in terms of being Batman movies. I don't care how much money they make, I don't care how masterful an artist Nolan is, they fail as movies about the character of Batman.

3 This almost made it into the good news. I mean, it's been decades of comics fans left amused at the irony so it's definitely time to bake the irony right in. So while I'm torn, I lean toward Good News but I recognize it's cheesey enough some might put it in the Bad News. After the last footnote, I threw you a bone.

From Tabletop to Paperback – Stealing Scenes

So I accidentally lied a little bit. I said I wasn't going to do anymore From Tabletop to Paperback stuff, but I was told from a couple of different corners that I could expand my thoughts on scenes a bit. Since scenes are the fundamental building blocks of the story, that made sense to me. It also works out because of how much a couple of new-school tabletop RPGs helped me understand the concept of framing scenes around scene questions.

Once again, I'm going to suggest playing both Dogs in the Vineyard and the Smallville RPG if you want help with framing scenes. I'll be using them as examples in this post often.

Setting the Stakes

Dogs in the Vineyard was the first game that told me to consciously set the stakes of any given scene. I'd been doing it instinctively for years (which is to say, sometimes amazingly and sometimes amazingly badly), but always as a natural consequence of having to tell a story. If nothing else, "will they or won't they get their faces eaten off" worked as a default stake.

But Dogs told me to set the stakes on purpose, with specificity, to get everyone at the table to agree on them, then, and only then, roll the dice so you can play to discover the outcome. That's pretty fantastic advice for a writer also with only a little shifting of the language. Set the stakes of the scene, make sure you know what outcome each character in the scene wants, then write the scene.

The Smallville RPG has you set the scene the same way but then you have to justify which Value and Relationship you roll in that scene based on the stakes. If Clark is trying to convince Lois he loves her, then he can use his Lois d10 I think Lois is the One. If Clark is trying to convince Lex he loves him, his d12 I can never trust Lex is harder to justify. Playing Smallville can be a real help to you as a mental tool if you find it difficult to define your written character's motivations in any given scene.

(Failing to) Write Toward An Outcome

Usually as a writer, you know how the scene is going to come out and you write towards that outcome. That's obviously different than the game where you're playing to discover outcomes. But everything up until the moment of rolling dice is great advice.

I say "usually" because there's a danger mixed in there. You might hear writers say "my characters took over." I don't really put a lot of stock in that statement because what it usually means is "I didn't plan my book very well." Sometimes, and this one has happened to me, you discover that one of the characters wants a different outcome than you originally intended or one of the set outcomes much more passionately than you thought. That's exciting stuff, there, and making sure you know what each scene is about helps you tell which is a lack of planning and which is exciting, grown-up writer stuff.

How The Stakes Get Set

This is actually a lot easier than you think. Remember that Story Question that you came up with before you even started prewriting? The one whose answer drives the entire narrative to some kind of resolution? Setting the stakes is just doing the same thing you did for your Story with the Story Question for the Scene with a Scene Question. What question for this scene will drive the narrative for this scene toward some kind of resolution for this scene.

Easy, right? Well, easier than setting a Story Question, anyway. And if you can't do that, you need to take a step back from individual scenes anyway.

Breaking Down The Scene

To make it easy, here are the steps to building a scene.

What is the Scene Question? Does it pit the Antagonist directly against the Protagonist?
Which character is the Antagonist? Which character is the Protagonist?
What outcome does the Antagonist desire from the scene? What outcome does the Protagonist desire from the scene? Be specific!
Figure out what setback the Protagonist will suffer during this scene. In other words, how will the Scene Question be answered "No" or "Yes, but..."?
Write the scene.

That's it! Obviously there are a lot of sub-steps in between each of those, but they're typically figured out through your prewriting. You know the Scene Question because you're driving to a Story Question. You know what outcome each character would want because you've fleshed them all out ahead of time. You know who needs to achieve what because you've mapped out the scene

From Tabletop to Paperback – Setting Setting to Awesome

On Tuesday, I explained what exactly Setting is in terms of our previously discussed Plot, Arc, and Character. This time, as in most of the second parts, I get to connect that to the stuff gamers are already good at or the stuff that entices us into bad writerly places. Let's accentuate the positive, though, and start with the good news.

Integration: Fitting It Together

Very much in passing, I mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the last post. I mentioned it because taking a "horror story" and placing it in an American high school set in sunny California let the writers refocus the lens into a metaphor that "high school is hell." They did it with overbearing parents literally taking over their kids' lives, boyfriends that became real soulless beasts once you slept with them, and even hung a lampshade on the powerlessness a lot of teenagers feel by making the entire infrastructure of a city evil.

Each season, for the most part, also had what became known as a Big Bad. There was an obvious Big Bad Monster, but there was usually a Big Bad Situation or Emotion that tied into the Monster or mirrored it in some way. That's just good writing (note that I learned that lesson from the Smallville RPG as well). Every episode had a plot, and even when they didn't directly tie into the Plot, they still advanced things the Plot needed.

And the characters, oh my, the characters. These are characters that honestly wouldn't have worked in any other setting. Cordelia the Queen Bitch, Xander the good guy stuck in the friend zone, Willow the girl struggling to break out of other people's misconceptions, Giles the wise yet flawed father figure, Snyder the evil principal, and Buffy herself, the teenage girl who feels like the weight of the world is on her shoulders.

This is great storytelling because the Plot, Characters, and Setting are entirely interdependent while also being completely separate. They could not exist without one another, yet also can't be confused with one another. A Hellmouth creates plot, but it's a setting. Giles advances plot, but he's a character. You get what I mean.

This is the kind of thing that traditional roleplaying games do well. And they've trained us to do it well. You create or purchase a detailed setting, there's all kinds of useful information in there (often in terms of rules, see below), but all that starts morphing and changing as players pick characters and the gamemaster starts putting together plots (which usually hinge on the characters).

That's the way these three should work together. Setting always gives way to (or spotlights) interesting plot which always gives way (or spotlights) interesting characters. Remember that in the modern novel, Character is king. Actually, that's not a bad thing to remember at your table if you're the gamemaster.

The Dangers of Lonely Fun

Just to get this out of the way, this section is not a cautionary tale about...self love. Stay on point, gang!

The opposite end of this spectrum is Lonely Fun. I can't recall where I first ran into this term, but it has become a favorite of mine. If you are gamers of a certain age, you might recall your gamemaster walking around with reams of notebook and graph paper covered in pencil scratchings and lovingly stuffed into a massive three ring binder. The boy created an entire world complete with thousands of years of history, cultures, fashions, dangerous places, nobles, commoners, ecosystems, and heaven knows what else. And he did it all before you sat down at the table.

That sounds like a great setting, right? Well, it was until you realized he also already had a story all set out for you and it didn't matter what your characters were or why they did what they did, they were going to play through that story no matter what. And if you tried to go off script, you were either told a flat "no" or you were summarily executed, or he grabbed you by the metaphorical nose and led you back around the plot.

This is generally called Railroading and is generally frowned on as not always very much fun. At least when the GM doesn't hide it well.

The reason this is a problem in terms of writing is, if you are the kind of GM that has done this and still does this, then you're going to have a hard time with fiction. Your setting has become more precious than your plot or your characters. The sheer volume of detail has locked you into place. You've reached the "quagmire of detail" I mentioned in part one.

And you thought that could only happen with real world settings. Well, JRR Tolkien and Robert Jordan have bad news for you.

Rules as a Manifestation of Setting

You may have noticed that Setting has a tendency to influence tone and themes. Not only that, but how you choose to engage your Setting can often adjust the nobs on things like Realism (with attendant items such as Sexism, Racism, Military Matters, Weapon Knowledge, History, et al), Seriousness, Frivolity, and a billion other areas. For the gamer turned author, it can be helpful to think of Setting in terms of rules because in tabletop RPGs, the rules often tell you what the game is really about.

You don't run an "epic adventure" with Moldvay Dungeons & Dragons. It isn't a game of heroic adventures, it's a game of exploration and resource management.

I've refrained from playing superhero games for most of my life, not in spite of my love for comics but because of it. Only recently are superhero games interested in telling comic book style stories. But something like Heroes or Alphas, stories about people with superhuman abilities who are not superheroes, would work great in most systems.

A serious, emotionally charged Post-Apocalyptic game is better served by Apocalypse World than Gamma World. A gonzo "dungeon crawl" set after the Apocalypse is better served by GW than AW.

The fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons is a pretty amazing tactical combat simulator, but it's tougher to make it work on games of courtly intrigue. If you want to be able to do both well, you might choose The Shadow of Yesterday instead.

Nighttime drama (with superpowers) is a genre I literally couldn't imagine playing at the table until the Smallville roleplaying game came out. And now making a game about "Values" and "Relationships" is baked right into the rules, no hacking necessary.

For those of you who use a variety of systems, you understand exactly what I mean. Deciding on a rules set immediately focuses what your game will be about and how it will be about that. For those of you who adhere to a single system, you might recall a time you tried to use it to tell a very different type of story (perhaps some D&D4e lovers tried to do Game of Thrones), and realized you were ignoring and houseruling so many of the rules that you might as well have written your own game.

You single system users, I name drop a lot of different games in these posts. Go try a few of them out and see how the game you play (that is, the story you and your friends tell together) changes or refocuses itself. You'll probably see what I mean.

For those of you who already use multiple system users, it will help to think of Setting as the rules of your story. Is a gunshot wound a reason to call an ambulance or a minor annoyance? Will using drugs or having sex immediately lead to a character death? Will there be swinging from chandeliers or a lot of talking behind fans? Can you make both equally interesting.

And if it sounds like I'm saying Setting encompasses genre and category, then you're getting the point. If you've never thought of rules as suggesting or even dictating those things at your regular game night, then that sound you just heard was your mind blowing.

Scene Framing and Location Descriptions

And to end this section on a truly grand note, get ready for the thing that every gamer is already amazing at when it comes to Setting. You are, I virtually guarantee it, already spectacular at describing locations and framing scenes. You do both of these a hundred times a night at the game table. You might do it more if your the GM or depending on how your group manages narrative responsibility.

Don't believe me? Then you either don't GM much or you just haven't though of your GM responsibilities in this way. Let's start with the gamemasters. Whenever you enter a new room of a dungeon, attend the funeral of a king, walk into a dangerous copse of woods...I'm belaboring the point. Every time you act as your players' five senses, you're describing locations. That's obvious. But every time you start the action and set the stakes for it, even if those stakes are as simple as "does the monster eat their faces," you're setting scenes. It could be said that your job as GM really boils down to Location Description, Scene Setting, and Rules Knowledge. So, essentially, you do this author stuff constantly, albeit in a very specific way.

Now for the players. Describing settings is not usually a player's job in traditional RPGS. But if you've ever said something like, "I want to grab a hot pan and hit him with it and I know there's one handy because you said we were in the kitchens," then you have take a tentative step into location description by suggesting an important aspect of it. And if you haven't ever done this, try it! As for scene setting, if you've ever said along the lines of, "That's it, I'm mad at the Duke and I want to confront him about his lies in front of all these people and damn the consequences," then you've set a scene. You named the stakes, the principle players, and it's up to the playing to decide how it turns out. And again, if you've never tried this at the table, do it!

To practice setting a scene better, start trying to integrate some new information you don't usually give at the table as practice for writing. Tell the players how a place smells next time. Or describe the texture of a piece of clothing rather than telling them what it's worth. And if your players eyes tend to glaze over from the volume of information when they enter a new place, try to pare down your descriptions until each thing you tell them has immediate impact. The bonfire makes this room much brighter, penalty while your eyes adjust. The smell of the garbage chute is noxious, check for sickness. The One Ring is heavy to both body and soul, take fatigue levels.

If you want some help with scene setting, there are particular rules that will require you to do that well and more specifically. I'd suggest Dogs in the Vineyard (the first game that insisted I set the stakes for a scene by making sure the conflict was about one, very specific outcome) or Smallville (the first game I played that made Relationships and Values things you could not play the game without; every roll is something intrinsically important to your character).

And with that, we come to the end of From Tabletop to Paperback's first third.  Now you know the places where you, as a gamer, are strong and also those where you are weak when it comes to writing fiction for the first time. I may take a break and blog about other things for a bit before tackling the second part where I contrast a beginning author with no gaming experience to a gaming veteran who first turns to the tyepwriter. Thanks for reading so far and keep on the lookout for more!

From Tabletop to Paperback – Setting the Settings on the Setting

Welcome back to another installment of From Tabletop to Paperback. Today we'll be talking about Setting. Setting is definitely a double edged sword for gamers with aspirations of writing. One the one hand, a great deal of games are billed as "settings" and there are whole campaigns consisting of "just" creating a setting and letting your players run rampant in it sandbox-style. On the other hand, these kinds of labors of love can become monolithic shibboleths so detailed that they actually become useless as Settings for Stories.

Setting Defined

This is going to sound like I'm being a smart ass, but the honest definition of Setting is "the place where the story happens." This can be deceptively simple, though. Place can encompass things like "time period" or "culture." Even the obvious concept of "geographical location" can be a moving target. Are we talking about what city, state, country, planet? Or are we being specific as in "which house?" or "what floor of the building?" We've seen many stories, many of them truly amazing, with a singular setting.

Think of tv shows like "Cheers" or "The Office" where the setting is almost exclusively a particular bar or office. Think of movies like "Die Hard" where nonstop action occurs in a single office building. Or the favorite of Victorian literature that was so well loved it became a genre unto itself, the Locked Door Mystery. These are almost always set entirely in a specific house and its grounds.

So, I'm sure you all think you're very clever and know what Setting is. And, on an instinctual level, you're probably completely right. That said, after the last few chapters, it's probably worth reiterating what Setting is not.

Setting is not...

The Antagonist. Setting can generate antagonists (prison story filled with dangerous, desperate customers). Setting can make some antagonists better choices than others (nobody wants a pirate in their ninja movie...unless that's the point). Setting can even generate the Highly Visible Antagonist (systemic racism in the Deep South, for instance ..although even that should be embodied in an actual character). But the Setting is never, ever the Highly Visible Antagonist itself.
The Plot. Again, the Setting can generate plot (will he survive the lunch line on his first day in prison?). Setting will suggest plot points (the hero is inside an ancient temple, so there should be some traps and maybe even a mummy). The Plot can even dictate the Setting (samurai stories tend to happen in Japan in specific eras). But the Setting is never the Plot itself.

So while Plot, Antagonist, and Setting are all distinct things, they have obvious overlap. They aren't three separate pieces created in a vacuum from one another (usually), they influence and impact one another. Incidentally, that integration is a thing that gamers are already very good at, although we'll talk about that more in part two. Right now I want to talk about the Setting Trap.

The Setting Trap

The Setting Trap can be summed up in one word: Realism. Realism is dangerous. Realism has killed more stories than laziness, slush piles, and bad reviews combined. Realism can smother your story in the cradle.

Every time a helpful blogger writes an article entitled something like "What Every Writer Needs to Know about Guns/War/Medieval Society/Religion/Horses/Every Other Damn Thing," a puppy and a kitten die. In a cage match with each other.

Look, Setting forces you to make decisions which, in turn, forces you to have a bare minimum amount of knowledge about how some things work or don't work. Don't put silencers on revolvers and don't treat horses like motorcycles, that kind of thing. But don't ever feel like you have to be an expert on every little thing going on inside your Story. As long as you're an expert on telling a Story, and about your Story in particular, then you're in a good spot.

You should allow Setting to impact the story you want to tell at the Plot level. If you want a strong, non-Caucasian, female hero in a Victorian era story, please do that! But you have to realize that not addressing the racism and sexism of the era on some level will lose large swathes of your readership. But if the story isn't about the sexism and racism of the era, then you can feel free to treat it the same way action movies treat gunshot wounds: an inconvenience that could grow to become a real problem if the story needs it.

What I'm saying is, and what most people are really saying when they think they want realism, is you have to maintain verisimilitude. The rules you set for your story, including which parts of any given setting -- including a homebrew setting -- you choose, must remain logical in terms of themselves, must remain internally consistent, and must involve a very bare minimum of knowledge about the setting.

Just as I wrote these words, I happened to read a tweet wondering why Superman leaves contrails in the teaser trailer for next year's "Man of Steel." She insisted this was a science fail and, upon some Wikipedia reading, I found she's absolutely right. At first, I had a moment of sadness, but then I immediately decided to not give a crap. Contrails have a scientific reason, but for story purposes, they mean "this thing flies really fast." With that in mind, contrails are the best decision that trailer could have made.

Realism versus Verisimilitude. If you could only have one, which one would you choose? There's only one right answer for a maker of fiction.

But Setting Also Sets You Free

A traditional horror story becomes a metaphor for high school as hell thanks to setting. Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew becomes a tale of high school drama thanks to setting (along with some significant shifts in plot points and character along the way). A hardboiled detective story similarly becomes a whole other flavor of story when the setting becomes a southern California high school. Adding an element like magic to a Chicago outside your window creates a whole new landscape against which to tell stories. A Western, but in space.

All these ideas are Settings with a twist or multiple Settings mashed together. Each of these stylistic choices were made in order to tell stories that could not be told in any other way or to tell old stories through a fresh lens. While the realism of any given Setting can certainly trap you in a quagmire of details that drags the narrative to a halt, the unlimited nature of being able to do whatever you want with a Setting, even if it's tear a few apart to create new Settings from bits of old ones like a patchwork quilt of awesome.

Setting can set you free. Free to retell old stories, free to reimagine stories, free to filter stories until they become different stories, or so free that you start out to retell a story and, thanks to the changes imposed by the setting, your mind finds itself free to rewrite rather than retell. Probably more than characters or plot, it's Setting that forces me to think in new and different ways. And that's pretty amazing.

There are a couple other ways that Setting can trip you up, like creating a Story that serves the Setting rather than the other way around. There are a couple more ways that Setting can make your life easier, like allowing the Setting to dictate the scope of your story. While both these pinnacles and pitfalls are far from unique among novice writers, they tend to loom a bit larger (for both good and ill) over the the gamer turned writer. Which is why I'll deal with them more on Thursday. See you then!