You Don't Need Dice: Pt.2

(Read 'Part One' here.)

Eventually I plucked up the courage to join in. I used the best typewriting I had, which mainly consisted of the correct capitalisation and an occasional comma. I made KurtCocaine walk over to one of the tougher looking characters and stare him right in the eye. And it had to be STARE HIM RIGHT IN THE EYE because, like my name, it made me sound cool and rebellious.

This other person, typing somewhere else in the world, wrote a brilliant descriptive paragraph about meeting Kurt’s gaze, giving a wry smirk and then punching him square in the face.

I wish I’d saved that paragraph somewhere because the effect it had on me was profound. To my credit, I typed back a hastily worded response about being punched in the face and falling over. I had enough sense to not try and make out I was all-powerful and untouchable. But I sat there dwelling over that response. This person, who’d never met me before and had no reason to acknowledge my ignorant intrusion on his game, had taken the time to respond to me. And it wasn’t just a ‘go away’ response. It was six or seven lines of good writing, crafted just for me to react to. I eventually sent the person a private message, asking a bunch of questions about the chat room I’d found myself in and thanking them for punching me in the face. The person responded by introducing himself as Frank, laughing about my excitement at being chinned and spent about thirty minutes explaining the general rules of the room. He also directed me to a forum which had been set up to support the game, introducing me to dozens more players.

The best part about the game was that there were very few rules at all. You couldn’t affect people without their permission, you couldn’t take the piss and create a character who was essentially God, and you couldn’t rip people off and imitate them. There was a combat system in place which did have quite a few stringent rules for the turn-based nature of it, but that was all. Anything else went. If you wanted a fire-breathing Jedi who rode a vampiric badger around, you could have one. If you wanted an undead mail-room clerk who occasionally ate a baby, you could have one. My imagination was limited so I initially made a barbarian-type character with a big sword and an even bigger beard. I remember typing the words rippling muscles a lot. I ran up that £300 pound phone bill I mentioned, but nobody ever questioned what I was doing with it.

I played and wrote in this game for about seven years.

Now think about that for a minute. Seven years. I reckon I accessed the rooms for around twenty hours a week from the ages of fourteen to sixteen, at which point I was allowed to bring the computer into my own room. Then my weekly access increased to about fifty hours. And also consider that everything was based in text. Character description. Narration. Dialogue. World building. Structure. The rules, the backgrounds and the accompanying prose. Every single thing about the game was written down and created through a keyboard. The players behind the characters became friends. Close friends. Two of them met up in real life, got married and had kids. I still know a few of the people from those days now, and have met several of them in real life. That was just in England; in America, where the majority of the players lived, people would travel hundreds of miles to meet up for lunch or hang out at each other’s places. I imagine quite a lot of us ‘roleplayed’ with each other for real... We were all teenagers, after all. I had two social lives, and I considered them equally important for a time. Those I went to school, worked and partied with – and those I knew solely through their writing.

It’s important to make a distinction there – this wasn’t a place to ‘escape reality’ or anything like that. I wrote about characters I enjoyed writing about in stories which interested me, but when I spoke to the other players I was still me. I was still Ben (Referred to as English Ben, since there were quite a few Bens involved). I purposely made sure I was truthful about what I was like in real life, so I didn’t make up a fake persona or present myself differently. I simply had to rely on my writing, which improved dramatically over those years.

So when it comes to ‘Read a lot and write a lot’, I used to believe I hadn’t written or read enough to qualify as an author. It held me back in attempting to write Queen of the World. I’d always written, but mainly in short stories or poems and the like. I’d always read, but within the genres I liked. I read fantasy by Gemmel, Eddings and Pratchett. I enjoyed horror by King, Herbert and Barker. I read a bit more here and there, but never ‘broadened my horizons’. I never read Chaucer, Austin or Hemmingway.

But then I realised that I had written and read HUGE amounts of text during those seven years. Maybe none of them were published or critically famous, but they were my age and they were of my level of competence at least. Many were better, especially in the beginning until I found my own style. Between twenty and fifty hours a week of writing for seven years to create worlds and stories with people from all across the world? I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hundreds of thousands of words I put down. We created together, became better writers together and learned from each other’s strengths and faults. We saw what was good and slipped it into our own input. We saw what looked pretty terrible or what jarred us out of our little bubbles of immersion, and we cut it from our posts.

In a nutshell: I learnt to write through applying my imagination to the ideas of others. That sounds like some kind of tagline I want to try and put into quotes, but it is a good for any self-help enthusiasts who need something inspiring. I don’t reckon anyone will look to me to teach them how to write, and my work probably won’t win any awards for technical application of the English language. But I did learn to tell a story. The only difference is that with Queen of the World I told it by myself instead of with others to guide me, but without those brilliant writers who welcomed me into that online world of text – now sadly defunct, since Yahoo decided that everyone who uses internet chatrooms is either a child or a sexual predator and closed all user created content – then I don’t think it would have ever been written.

So to anyone who ever heard of Tenaria: Thanks.

And remember that reading and writing comes from a large number of different places. Don’t limit yourself, and don’t be afraid to try something new.

You Don't Need Dice: Pt.1

Sometimes we take advice too literally.

(I was going to put a ‘literally/literary’ pun in there. -sniggers-).

One of the most regularly repeated tips when it comes to writing is ‘Read a lot and write a lot.’

This is, of course, excellent advice to any writer regardless of experience, background and raw talent. If you don’t read plenty of authors who use a range of different styles then you won’t be exposed to what’s possible. If you don’t read something that takes your breath away then it’s difficult to know when your work could do the same to others; you’ll have nothing to aspire to. Likewise, if you don’t read something that just plain sucks, then how will you understand what to avoid in your own prose?

Same goes for writing. You need the tools to write. You need to practice, just like you need to practice drawing, playing an instrument or kicking a football. You need to write to find out your vocabulary level, your ability to use tenses and the best way to apply grammar. (For the record, I really suck at grammar terms. I know the rules and the application for the most part, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what a Predicative Adjective or a Reciprocal Pronoun is precisely. Let’s just say I won’t be teaching creative writing at Oxford anytime soon.) You need to know if you can get the idea in your head down onto the page without losing any of the spark which got you excited in the first place. You must learn how much dialogue, description and introspection makes the best mix for you. All this comes from writing as much as you can.

But the endless supply of writing advice which is available on the internet and in magazines rarely specifies where you should practice these main two rules. Is it exclusively books? Fiction? How about websites? Do newspapers count? Blogs? Text messages?

How about games?

How about roleplaying games?

Ooh, got ya. See, here’s the bit where at least one person reading will say ‘Oh, Christ. This is where Ben confesses that his book is based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and it’s going to be terrible.’

But it isn’t. Queen of the World is an original idea in a world I created. Some of the character ideas I’ve used through the years have been put through a grinder and find themselves sprinkled amongst the manuscript, though. Bear with me while I tell you a little story.

Years ago, maybe around 1997-ish, my family got its first home computer. It was a gift for me, under the pretence of ‘a good idea for doing schoolwork’ which is probably what every young teenager tells their parents before getting one. However, I wasn’t allowed to have it in my room, so it went into the landing and became the family computer. I shared it with two elder brothers. Mainly we played games on it. Commandos, Championship Manager and Half-Life are the games which stick in my mind. But the main novelty was having access to the internet. This was before the days of having broadband attached to your phone line – remember kids, you’re lucky these days – and we had to use a 56k dial up which made a buzzing sound as it typed in the phone number to connect every time you turned it on. It was also before pre-pay packages, so internet time was limited. There was no Facebook or Twitter. No Reddit or Imgur. Livejournal hadn’t exploded yet, and neither had MySpace. Mainly there was Hotmail, ICQ and chat rooms. One of the biggest ones was Yahoo Chat.

Now Yahoo Chat, like many other chat rooms in those early days of the mainstream internet explosion, gave users the ability to create their own rooms. These could be public or private, and weren’t policed very heavily. Some of the names were pretty grim. In the Teen section – and I was a fourteen year old boy so I qualified – there were a lot of rooms dedicated to sex. Now despite what a lot of my friends reading this will immediately presume, I never went into these sex rooms. Mainly because I was terrified it was somehow traceable, and my parents would get an email from the phone company about how I’d racked up a £300 pound phone bill in HOT TEEN SEX CHAT 16-19s, a room created by b1gd1ckst3ve.

I also wasn’t interested in rooms about Anime / Manga, Premier League Football or Take That. I couldn’t care less about rooms dedicated to people from California, Melbourne or Glasgow (Although when I did visit the Glasgow room one time to see if they typed in their accent, I was confronted with an incredible number of uses of the word ‘Fuck’). But what I was interested in was a few rooms dedicated to roleplaying. I clicked in and had a look, using the entirely roleplay appropriate name of ‘TheRealKurtCocaine’. Yeah, I was a Nirvana fan and I thought the surname pun made me sound cool and rebellious. Nevermind.

What I found was a room of about twenty people roleplaying. When I say that, I mean using an entirely text-based platform to create their game. Roleplaying existed on forums but it was too slow, having to wait for people to come on and post huge reams of description and exposition just to say ‘My character waves and leaves the room’ because they weren’t going to be able to get back online for a week. But in this chat room it was reactive. A group of people were creating a story on the fly depending on the actions of others. There was a loose ‘Type something then wait for others to have their turn’ but it wasn’t rigid. Some wrote several times while others hung back, waiting to contribute when the time was right.

I sat there and watched for about an hour, captivated. I sipped my can of Sprite and didn’t dare ruin it. I’d never taken part in anything like this before so I was worried there would be a huge set of rules I’d have to follow, and trying to join in would get me hounded out of there and banned for life. My brothers had dabbled with roleplaying – we had a couple of D&D books and a Call of Cthulhu game manual in our house, as well as some Warhammer miniature and a big foamy sword for LARPing as evidence – but I’d never taken part personally. Besides, the internet had only been filtering into people’s homes for the last year or two, discounting corporate, enthusiast or government use. This was new. This was for me.

(Read 'Part Two' here.)

I'm flying..?

I’m sitting in Oslo Rygge airport. It’s 5.27am. I’m on my way back home for a currently undetermined length of time. It could be for a week. It could be for a month. It’s basically out of my hands at the moment. I’m cool with that, though. I’m not really in a rush to be anywhere.

I like airports. I like the routine – travel, waiting, security, waiting, boarding, waiting – and I like what an airport does to you. There’s a struggle with duty free and what you may potentially need at your next stop. There’s the common debate about whether you’re hungry enough to pay the exorbitant airport prices for a burger. There’s a lot of people watching. And then there’s what an airport represents. Often it just represents going to visit family or staying with friends. But potentially you could go to an airport and then just leave. Go somewhere else in the world you haven’t seen before. Not everyone will do that, but it’s a possibility. Nothing’s stopping you.

In the end I didn’t buy duty free, I didn’t pay for a burger (I brought my own cheese and pickle sandwich; fuck you, commerce!), and I’ve watched people. I like people watching. It gives me ideas for characters. Not whole characters, obviously. Writing a character based on someone you saw in a waiting lounge would be pretty lazy and I’m not sure you’d have a great character on your hands. But the little things people do in airports are details which can be added to a character. A person who moves their lips while they read. A person who nods their head and air-drums to their earphones. Someone will fall asleep on the shoulder of someone else, all the while dribbling happily onto their shirt. Some will travel alone and ignore everyone around them, while others will travel in groups and critique everyone who passes by. Security workers will drift between enthusiastic, apathetic and stoic. It’s the same with the people who greet you at the gate. Sometimes they like the job and sometimes they don’t.

I’ve been at this airport for about six and a half hours now. I’m only about halfway through my journey. I’ll land in Stansted around 10, then spend two hours dicking around on buses. I don’t mind too much, though. I do wish I had some headphones, but a book will suffice.

Anyway, book related... Queen of the World is currently being edited by Sara of Inspired Quill for the first time. I’m looking forward to my initial update in that regards. I think it’ll be cool to work out how the book is handled by the publisher once it’s out of my hands. Happily I’ll get the final say on things but I have no reason to believe I’ll have to put my foot down at any point. Obviously that may change if they slip a vampire in somewhere. -grins- I have a few friends working on art pieces for the main characters, which will be excellent to have. The cover art is in a queue, so I’m guessing that will have to wait before I can discuss it in more detail. I’m thinking trees will be involved, though. Everyone digs trees.

Updates have been a bit slow because there hasn’t been much book related going on recently. I’m considering just filling this with some random tripe in the meantime, but I wouldn’t want to detract from the point of this blog, which is cataloguing the process from book writing to book printing. We’ll see how it goes.

-read above update-

...Bugger.