Thoughts from the King

[subplotkudzu]

Recent discussions here brought to mind the writing philosophy of Stephen King, as discussed in his memoir "On Writing". Here's one relevant bit:

You may wonder where the plot is in all this. The answer is - my answer anyway - is nowhere. … I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible.

And another

When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Marc Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said he didn't believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believed it. And I do. Stories aren't souvenir tee-shorts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground as intact as possible.

…Plot is a far bigger tool, the writer's jackhammer. …Plot is, I think, the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice. The story that results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored.

And finally

I want to put a group of characters…in some sort of predicament and then watch then try to work their way free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety - those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot - but to watch what happens and then write it down.

The situation comes first. The characters - always flat and unfeatured to begin with - come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I being to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it's something I never expected.

He then goes on to give examples from the writing of Misery with the admission that he had intended it as a short story but the protagonist turned out to be so capable at surviving that it turned into a novel - he just kept excavating more of the story.

Now, I don’t care whether King is correct about writing or not (so please, don't start), but I think his comments have a lot to say about Game Mastering. The similarities are obvious: you put a group of undefined-at-the-start characters in a situation and watch what happens next. The characters will develop more background, more character and more ability as the situation progresses. For some things is either a formal experience process, logical extrapolation of Didn't I Mention skills, based on the granularity of the system. For others it is just the usual development of character personality under the player's direction.

The preparation for the situation can be extensive or not (King mentions how the entire unfolding back-story in Bag of Bones was developed as he wrote the central character discovering it, rather than having it developed in advance) but since the audience for any game is larger than just the GM more definition of the situation is likely required. It’s not essential - I've run whole games with no idea what was going to happen next and no stats for the opposition, but for some games the situation at the start needs to be pretty well defined. The GM might find it very handy to know the villains goals, motivations, plans, resources and so on if he doesn’t feel comfortable just making them up in play, but that's still not a Plot as King describes it.

And there we have a pretty good simulation of reality. The characters act, the situation responds (or vice versa) continue until we reach an ending.

Now is Plot really a jackhammer? I don't know. Genre fiend that I am, I see plot as being one of those ultrasound density mapping machine. My players and I all like this bit of the type of story we're excavating, and we want to make sure we get it out intact. Bang goes the plot gun, giving us an outlay of the story where it sits in the ground and we happily go after the pieces we like. Large hunks of Old Lives, Old Civilizations were developed this way, and the Star Trek game even advocates having your endgame in place at the start and leading the players to it. I don't think I went quite that far, but I did plot 1/2 to 3/4 of each session - everything that revealed the situation - and tried to have at least one workable outcome. Sometimes the players used that, but sometimes they didn't, but everyone knew the types of the problems they were likely to encounter and the types of solutions the setting preferred.

Then there are discussions of theme (which whswhs discussed recently) and imagery, but those are worthy of a separate post, I think.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

A few years ago I interviewed Vernor Vinge for Prometheus, of which I was then the editor. I asked him some questions about one of his fictional settings. As he answered them, I realized that he was speaking of them as having properties and historical events that he had not yet discovered, but that he could speculate about, as an astronomer might speculate about whether a given star has terrestrial planets; he was not speaking of them as things that he had already decided, or that he could just decide. This gave me a sense of "fictional world as discovered." I suppose that makes sense: Vinge is a mathematician, and mathematicians (a) deal entirely with fictional worlds in their working lives and (b) regard what they are doing as discovery rather than creation/invention.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting point. I have gotten a similar impression from MAR Barker's Tekumel setting, which fitting considering Barker's own scientific training as (I believe) a historian and anthropologist. The long development of Tekumel can be seen as him uncovering more about a culture has found but did not create.

Bob Dushay (the curator of the Museum of Role-Playing Games) has an ongoing struggle trying to develop a set of functional mechanics for a Tekumel game, and one of of his goals is to excavate out someone else's setting. There are consistent concerns about whether this or that mechanic, while they might be elegant, actually represents the 'truth' of Tekumel. He is of course hindered by working one step removed - a university professor working from someone else's field notes.