Getting Back on That Horse

"[Now, there are two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse.] One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and, at leisure, figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial."

--Wilbur Wright, 1901.  From The Wright Brothers, by David McCollough, pp 67-68.

I've been thinking about what works and what doesn't work in a story lately.

(Yeah, it's gonna be one of those posts, so buckle yourself in and hold on tight.)

Normally, I'd start writing something about this, get partway through, and then shelve the post for an indeterminate amount of time. I sometimes come back to them --like this past Meme Monday-- but a lot of times they just sit there in the Draft portion of the blog, never to see the light of day again.

This is a screenshot of some of the posts still in draft form from early 2023. Some of them are musings, some are fiction with placeholder titles, and oh look, there's an RPG From the Past still in there.*

However, I've more of a mind to plow though this, since I've been in more of a contemplative mood lately.

My first contemplation, that work sucks and takes up too much of my time, is hardly a new revelation. Those people who absolutely love their job genuinely worry me, because it feels that they've got blinders on and fail to notice the reality and drama of day-to-day life working with people whose goals are different than yours.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. It's about stories and what makes them tick.

Kaylriene had a post yesterday about what worked and didn't in the story/lore for Retail WoW's Dragonflight expansion, and that got me to thinking that what ails Retail WoW isn't something that could be fixed by returning Warcraft to its "more manly" roots or any other politically charged bullshit, but rather by going out and actually stepping away from Warcraft itself.

No, I'm not talking about any bullshit such as when people who want to break into upper management go to get their MBA**, but actually going out and working on their craft the only way you truly can to improve yourself: by expanding your horizons.

As I mentioned in my comment on Kaylriene's post, my high school guidance counselor back in the 80s used to constantly tell me to go and read more. "It'll help you get into college," he added, and whenever we met*** he'd check in to see what I was reading and how much I was reading.

Did he care about the quality of the books? No, not really. I mean, he knew me well enough that I wasn't going to read middle or elementary grade material****, but he wanted me to get out and simply read. And before you ask, I could tell he had absolutely no clue as to Science Fiction and Fantasy novels that comprised the bulk of my reading habits, but that wasn't the issue for him. 

Now, my senior English teacher in high school --it would now be considered AP English, a combination of English Literature and English Composition-- did care about the quality of my reading, because it reflected in the quality of my writing. He and my other English teachers insisted I keep writing, because the more I wrote the better I wrote. This was reinforced by, of all people, one of my Physics professors. 

No, really.

He was my professor for Advanced Lab I and II, which were Junior and Senior level Physics lab courses. Unlike a lot of the Engineering labs that my friends had which were cookbook in nature, my Advanced Lab's experiments were along the lines of the professor saying "Here's some journal articles and literature, go and reproduce the Photoelectric Effect with the lab material in Room 101B."

Given that I had to write an average of 15-20 pages per lab report, my professor would push me to write better. "The only way you'll get better at it is to do it more often," he told me. I certainly didn't see how my writing improved over the course of those two semesters, but he did and told me as much.

Why bring all this up? Because from what I've seen, Blizzard's story team needs to break out of their rut and do the two things that will truly improve their writing.

***

It's far too easy to claim that Blizzard's story team as a whole was better back in the days when gaming was far more a masculine endeavor or some other politically charged bullshit*****, but my opinion is that they were better because they abided by the 'less is more' dictum. But the longer they worked on their games, the more internally focused they became and the more the writing became bloated.

Their writers need to write more, and not simply Warcraft. Or Diablo. Or whatever.

Stop abiding by the Rule of Cool.

Stop trying to shoehorn in a backstory that's simply not there.

Stop writing cutscenes that have nothing to do with the player. 

Stop writing novels and other media that end up being a requirement to understand what's going on in a game. If you can't follow along in a game without leaving the game, there's a problem with the game.

Stop trying to write cutscenes and story text with gigantic info dumps and passing it off as being normal. As one of my English teachers once told me, people don't talk like that. If they're giving a lecture, sure, but if they're just talking to people? Come on...

Info dump aside, they're freaking DRAGONS.
Why are they in, well, our form? I think we could
cut Blizz some slack if they were in their 'normal'
form for these conversations.
Pic from GameRant of a Dragonflight cutscene.

But more than anything else, they need to read more than just Blizzard material. Or other material written for video games. Break out of your rut and try different genres.

***

I can actually speak to that last one from experience.

Last April, when I posted about my experience reading a Romantic Fantasy novel written by a friend of mine, I mentioned that I'd not read very many Romance novels. I think Sharon Shinn's novels count, and I've read Jennifer Crusie as well, but beyond that, not very much. I mean, the novels I have read have had sex and romance in them --to varying degrees of authenticity-- but not nearly enough to qualify for the Romance genre. 

But I know enough to know that I need to read more to be able to write better dialogue and human interaction, and while I'm comfortable in my own skin for the most part, I have perused the Romance section of our local bookstore and... Yeah, I'm kind of lost. At least with the Literature section I know what I'm getting into with the mishmash of classics with purely literary stuff with popular novels, and I've a working knowledge of the Mystery section as well given that I do read Mysteries from time to time. But Romance?

Sorry, couldn't resist. This was all over
social media last Fall.

Well, I figured that if I was going to do this right, I ought to go back to the original Romance novelist.

Jane Austen.

My mom, the one who gets flustered by anything in a novel beyond a PG rating#, requested a Regency Romance novel for Christmas, so when I bought the novel I kind of slid on over and took a look at what Jane Austen novels were available.

From the Amazon page for the Oxford World Classics
edition of Pride and Prejudice. No pressure. None at all.

I knew going in that while Jane Austen is highly regarded, she's very much a creature of her time. To be blunt, writing has evolved mightily over the couple of centuries since Pride and Prejudice came out, so using Jane to improve my writing is kind of like taking editing lessons from Herman Melville. (Or Tom Clancy, for that matter.)

So I bit the bullet and did this:

And oh look, an excuse to pick up an issue
of BBC History Revealed. Yes, I am SUCH a nerd;
I swear Dan Snow's History Hit and PBS'
NOVA and Secrets of the Dead
were made for people like me.

***

Now, tying this back to Blizzard's writing team, if I can go out and break out of my comfort zone so I can write better, surely they can as well. 

This isn't something that can't be fixed. It really can be fixed, but you can't simply take a seminar and suddenly everything is better, despite what advertisements for LinkedIn Learning or Brilliant would have you believe. You have to put in the time to read more diverse works and write more.

But for all of those who are celebrating that Chris Metzen is back at Blizzard, I have to ask: did he learn the writing and plotting lessons that are necessary for the ship to be righted at Blizzard? Will he allow the Blizzard writing team to do the necessary work to improve their craft? Or did he merely go to CEO School just to make investors happy?##

*I ought to do something about Pendragon, since Chaosium has the new edition coming out soon and they already released the Starter Set for Pendragon last Gen Con.

**The people involved are long retired, so I can actually tell this story. This happened upwards of a decade ago. The company I contracted for --and was outsourced from, BTW-- had an all-hands meeting at 8 AM for all of us contractors. Those of us who worked near their company headquarters came into the hall, sat down, and we met with one of the Executive VPs for the company, who proceeded to give us a pep talk about how well we were doing and how much she enjoyed working with us, her "favorite account". I may have made a few whispered snarks to people around me about that, given that she was my boss two levels up when we were outsourced, and she managed to jump ship from being outsourced herself to being safe on the "mother company". But when talk turned to the new CEO, who returned to his old role to help the company regain financial footing, she described him as being a totally new person. "He'd gone to CEO School and now he knows how to lead this company like a real CEO," she enthused. Given that their "new" CEO's first two orders of business were an announcement of impending layoffs and a gigantic compensation package, I thought the entire thing was bullshit. 

***Which was about 3-4 times a year. I don't know how it worked for you, but for me he'd send an invitation to the high school's main office, and they would track me down as to what class I was in and forward the request along. As long as I didn't have a test that day, I would then inform the teacher and show them the scheduling slip and then head on out to meet with the guidance counselor. Hey, I got out of class for upwards of half an hour, so I was fine with this.

****Remember, this was before the Young Adult genre explosion of novels, so novels that today would be classified as YA --such as the five books of David Eddings' Belgariad-- fell under the fictional genre or in the generically "Adult" section. Yeah, there really wasn't even a YA SF&F subgenre, either. 

Also it needs to be said that I was exiting high school when the original Watchmen comics and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight were coming out, so if you want a delineation of when comics suddenly swerved into being "serious" and "adult", I was a teen during that time. It's all bullshit, since comics had been covering adult themes since forever, but it was in the mid-80s when some critics finally "discovered" what comics had been doing all along.

*****I'm starting to throw around "bullshit" in this post like Holden Caufield tossed around "phony" in The Catcher in the Rye. Sheesh.

#I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but one time my mom was visiting her mom --my grandmother-- and noted a novel on the table. Inquiring as to how good it is, Grandma quipped that it was good but "Oh, you wouldn't like it. It's got sex in it." And this was when Grandma was in her upper 80s. I still sometimes wonder how on earth my parents had my brother and myself, given how icky my mom is about sex, especially when compared to her own parents.

##See ** for the CEO School comment.