1.11.08

Q & A 2: Writing

I feel like running another Q & A post. This time around, I'd like to direct it a little more, with a theme on writing. I'm still not terribly concerned with how it ties into writing, writing in games, my writing, whatever it's all the same to me. Just so long as it fits within the theme of writing.

3 comments:

  1. Sorry, never got the chance to write a post to this. My question is why do you write? Do you write to get publish, write to fit a lore piece to your game, or write to get that story out of your head no matter what it is and possibly no feedback you get on them. When writing are you thinking about plots within plots (dune reference :D ) or just writing the flow of your brain as it spews out. This is more of a question to myself as much to you, as I do write a lot and edit a lot but i hardly ever post it publicly.

    Agamemnon-ForceofArms

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  2. I love to create. It's a form of expression, and a form of escape. I devote my entire life to two pursuits, expression and escape. Escape to cope with the pain, and expression because of a silly girlhood dream. The dream of my knightess in shining armor saving me from this existence, and understanding me better than I even know myself. Of course it's a dream, and an exceptionally silly one at that... Some times though, it's all you've got.

    But more seriously as well, each aspect of creation, and I enjoy many, is attached to particular things. Game design for instance is my mind attempting to organize information about the world around me into working models, while singing is just a pure expression of happiness. Writing is self exploration. It's me attempting to peel back the layers of the fortress that supported my mask for 15 years. As far as I can tell, NORAD's designers could only dream of building something so impenetrable.

    All of my main characters are some amalgam of myself and some quirks I find interesting. For background characters, I may use characters from books and movies as templates. But in writing I can only work from what I know. The female lead is always a lesbian for one simple reason, I can't understand the physical and mental aspects of the love between a man and a woman. All love is the same on an emotional level, but all love is experienced differently by different people. I can't recreate that experience, from either perspective.

    Through my writing I see myself again, with new eyes. Some times it makes me happy, other times it hurts, and there are even moments of abject terror. But at the end, I've found out something. In some small way at least, I've come closer to understanding who I really am.

    Of course, all of this also allows me to write simple scenarios to escape into, or to just for fun mentally repair plots ruined through particularly bad writing.

    I don't want to be published, just read. I don't care if anyone responds, so long as I know someone read it. There may be no non-condescending way to say this, but if a person isn't going to appreciate what I wrote, I don't so much mind if they ever read it. The only thing that really concerns me is the same thing that it is with my game designs. What if the people who would really enjoy it, never got to experience it. Wouldn't that just suck!?

    Anyways, this is going long, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

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  3. Great reply, I have many of the same thoughts and expressions myself about writing. I write sometimes just to get the demons out of my head. The flashes of inspiration, the nodes of data, the formation of ideas and the twist of plots turmoil inside my bubbling electrons up there some times. Some days, I think that an investment in a voice recorder may actually do wonders for me. Maybe I just need a shrink, who knows. My brain is a jumble most days of the week, I could have 30 thoughts and ideas in a minute or sit for an hour at a speck on the wall with no thought process going on, just a speck and its minuteness. I find that I have a really strange quirk that people tell me about all the time when I'm in that mode. I whistle to myself/or sometimes hum, "If I only had a brain" from the wizard of Oz. I don't know why I do it, its all subconscious and most times I don't even know or am aware that i'm doing it, but still there it is. Many times, when this plays out my brain is spewing a myriad of ideas so fast across my nodes faster then my noggin can keep up, so I think its some sort of buffer in my subconscious. Like ram in a computer. I do like your writing and hope that you keep it up. You also have some very interesting ideas in game design and theories that I enjoy reading. Thanks and keep 'em coming.

    Agamemnon-FoA

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