the secret ingredient to coming up with good ideas for a story
“Where do you come up with ideas?” might be the question people ask me the most about making games. The answer to that one is “everywhere,” but when someone asks a question like that, they’re not actually asking you where ideas come from, they’re asking you how you come up with ideas, because they wish they could come up with good ideas too.
I’ve worked with a ton of people over the years. I’ve watched the craven thieves, the talentless hacks, the ambitious youngsters, the surprising amateurs, and, yes, the best of the fuckin best, the real geniuses, at work.
And the answer to that one remains, well, “everywhere.” Which, yes, I know, isn’t satisfying, but this piece will be the satisfying answer, so stick around.
When it comes to inspiration, sometimes, I find myself arriving at an idea because of a problem; I’ve pitched games because I was annoyed with run and hide horror games or because I thought walking sims weren’t that interesting, for instance. With Adios, I also wanted to make “the smallest possible game I can make on a budget, to prove I can ship games on time and on budget.”
Other times, like with my current project, jokingly codenamed Waifu Death Squad, “I’m tired of people reviewing my games and claiming they’re too short” led to a game with a 328,000 word script, making it longer than the first Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Game of Thrones.
But that’s not the hook you sell someone on. That’s a parameter for a project, and yes, sometimes it’s annoyance or spite or something else. But the idea itself?
Well, sometimes it’s a song — maybe you just start seeing a moment play out in your head as you listen to the right tune. Other times, you’re reading a story, theorizing what might actually be going on, get the guess wrong… and then go “hang on a minute, my theory would have made for a really interesting story. I’m gonna do that.” That’s actually how I came up with a very weird fantasy project recently.
Several of my favorite ideas came about because I said “well, I can’t do this project I’d like to do because someone else is adapting the series/I can’t get the rights/the IP just doesn’t have all of the ingredients to work in the medium I’d like to build the project in, so all I can do is make something tonally similar.”
One night, my frequent collaborator Phil bemoaned that we wouldn’t be able to adapt Naoki Urasawa’s Monster to live action because Guillermo Del Toro had the rights. Alright, I told him, let’s come up with something that could convince someone that we’re the right guys to adapt Monster. So we did. And it’s one of the best ideas we’ve ever done, and if anyone actually looked at it, they’d go “this looks nothing like Monster,” and we’d go “yeah we followed the idea naturally, and now it’s its own thing.”
Another project started as “how would I do Fallout 2?” So, hey, one way to get started on an idea is to come up with a problem and attempt to solve it. Both of my examples here are “how would I make something similar to this other thing,” and above, we’ve got “come up with a theory about how a story is gonna play out, and when it’s wrong, write a story about that theory.” There are a million different problems you can solve, though. Maybe there’s a type of story you don’t like ’cause it always works out the same way, or maybe you wonder what would happen if things had gone down differently in a story you liked. Any one of these things can be a great jumping off
But solving a problem isn’t the only way.
Before we continue:
Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.
I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.
So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.
paypal.me/stompsite
ko-fi.com/stompsite
@forgetamnesia on venmo
$docseuss on cashapp
A Formula For Creativity
I’ve often found that beginners wish there was an equation of some sort — plug in this here, plug in that there — to a story. Indeed, most of the worst works of fiction you’ve ever encountered are almost certainly constructed from that by-the-numbers approach.
When we discussed genre (a few people disagreed, but, notably, most of them seemed to be channeling Upton Sinclair’s “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” in the sense that a few of them had branded themselves as Immersive Sim Likers but had an extremely limited and ahistorical understanding of the genre), we defined it as “a way to sort fiction by topic.” Then we looked into the history of genre and what it was meant to be used for; now, in that piece, we were talking about the idea of genre-as-value, and we were arguing that genre is not a qualifier of value.
In this piece, we’re looking at genre with a different lens: “genre as formula.”
Actually, scratch that, it’s better to say “some people see genre as a kind of formula, and believe you must stick to that formula in order to make something. These people are idiots.”
No, really, they are.
Genre is a way to sort a story, which means it’s only necessary at the very basic level of a thing.
Think of it like a pizza; you’ve got a crust, then you’ve got some sauce, some cheese, and some pepperoni, right? That’s a pizza, isn’t it? Of course it is. And yet, if I presented you with a pizza that had barbecue sauce and chicken instead of the pepperoni, or a sweet sauce with slices of apple and crumbled up walnuts and no cheese at all, you’d recognize them as pizzas (the apple one would be considered a dessert pizza by many).
So… what is a pizza, then?
Loosely, we could argue that a pizza is a generally round (but not always — see Detroit pizza) crust, with one layer of a sauce of some kind, and followed by toppings, which often (but, again, not always) includes cheese of some kind.
We recognize a pizza slice when someone hands it to us, even if it’s not pepperoni pizza, and we recognize when something is patterned after a pizza (like that hilarious tumblr post about the ‘fun pizza’). We know this shit ain’t a pizza, even if it’s echoing the idea of a pizza:
So, I’ve told this story before, I’m sure, but I think it’s worth telling again. I presented a writing exercise a while ago that went like this:
“Tell a zombie story, but do so without A) slavers, B) malls, C) religious people who think zombies are god’s judgment on the world, and D) biker gangs.”
The reasoning is simple: that’s all stuff you can find in George Romero zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead or the Roger Kirkman comic The Walking Dead, which have both been copied and recopied a million times over.
When people start copying and copying and copying, they make things no one really cares about, and I want to help open up people’s possibility space.
But a few people — the dumb ones — get this backwards. They hear you saying “try this, but without a crutch,” and they think “oh, you’re telling me I can’t use a crutch? You’re restricting me!” And that’s exactly what one guy did. He seemed furious with me that I would suggest telling a zombie story without things that aren’t related in any way, shape, or form, to the concept of zombies (plus, I mean, what about all the zombie stories that aren’t about that? One of the best zombie movies ever, Train to Busan, has none of the above).
His reasoning was simple; by telling him that he could not do something, he believed I was restricting him.
In reality, I was doing the opposite.
So, let’s look at the history of a genre.
At some point, someone comes up with the initial idea. Often, the initial idea is not the work that becomes famous — an example of this would be the game Kill.Switch, which had a cover system.
After that, someone polishes the idea to a sheen. In the case of cover-based shooters, we get Gears of War, which popularized the concept.
Then you get the imitators, but they all copy the polished version, and in doing so, they leave things out, usually because the people behind them misunderstand what’s going on. In the case of Gears of War, a lot of people heard “cover based shooting” and decided that meant games were largely about taking cover, then being blanked.
But if you read up on Gears of War, talk to people who worked on it, and play the damn games, you’ll notice that the series is actually about “horizontal platforming.” Epic wasn’t just making games about being flanked by enemies (or flanking enemies), they were making games about moving between platforms. That’s right: Gears of War is a sidescrolling Mario game laid down on its side.
Now, think about how freeing that is.
If you think “a platformer is a game that involves jumping and sidescrolling,” you’d never be able to go “what if we laid it on its side?” where jumping and sidescrolling would no longer be possible. If you think “a cover based shooter is about flanking enemies and getting around cover,” you likely wouldn’t be thinking about the millions of different kinds of platforming challenges you encounter in mario games.
So Gears of War has enemies designed to push you between platforms, weapons designed to encourage you to shoot from those platforms, and various scenarios where motion is heavily encouraged. Where most ‘cover based shooters’ are about not moving all that much (hence all the complaints about “waist high cover” during the 360 generation), Gears of War remains the best because it’s about moving all the damn time.
But “a game about hiding behind objects” is going to get a lot of people thinking “a game about being stationary” when it should be “a game about moving to the next object to hide behind.” So people will copy things like flanking, because that’s easy to understand, and they’ll make boring, derivative games.
“A game about flanking enemies” is a side effect of the thing. If someone applied the logic they have for zombie stories to cover shooters, you’d have someone going “you can’t make a cover shooter UNLESS you got big holes that open up in the ground that you have to clear with grenades” or “a cover shooter requires you to have beefy square men as playable characters.” Neither of these are true, they’re just things Gears of War did.
What you want to do — if you truly want to understand the form — is to strip it back to its absolute essential componets and then see what you can do from there.
The process of stripping these components is the restraint that the guy got so mad about before, but he was looking at it wrong. Where he saw this as “things I can’t do,” what I was actually doing was freeing him.
He thought “you have to do these things and these things only to make a zombie story.” He couldn’t imagine a zombie story without, say, a biker gang. Well, hey, what if you wanted to tell a western about zombies? Something in the vein of Bone Tomahawk (a movie with enemies that are very, very zombie-coded) wouldn’t have a biker gang because motorcycles didn’t really become a thing until after World War I (the first motorcycle was made in 1885, though).
If you were stuck thinking a zombie story had to be exclusively about biker gangs, you’d never be able to tell a zombie story at any other time. What about a bunch of Roman Centurions fending off zombies? What about the line from The Epic of Gilgamesh?
I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!”
What’s an ancient story about zombies look like?
…do you see the possibility space opening up? If you remove the restrictions (“a zombie story MUST include…” until you’ve pulled it all the way back to the absolute requirements (a zombie story must actually have zombies in it. that’s literally all), now you have an open canvas, now you are free to be creative. We have removed the requirements that imposed needless limitations on you, and we have opened you up to the ability to actually be creative.
We were imposing a minor restriction (don’t use a crutch) to open up the possibility space a great deal. No biker gangs means now we can go to any time period we want. Cavemen versus dinosaur zombies! Riddick versus weird zombie religious people (wait, wasn’t that just The Chronicles of Riddick?). Bone Tomahawk 2: Dead Time! Whatever the fuck you wanna do, man, now you can actually fuckin do it.
The exercise of take an idea, now strip out the common tropes until you get to the basics, now try to put the basics in another kind of setting or with a different sort of character is a great way to be creative.
You can’t be creative if you’re just copying what came before. It’s the opposite of creativity.
I think people who are new to writing feel like they’re standing at the edge of a cliff in a stiff breeze and “let’s remove the tropes that don’t actually make the genre” sounds, to them, like someone saying we should take the guardrail away. When you say “let’s pull back on the needless restrictions so we can start fresh,” they’re sitting there thinking they’re standing over a bottomless chasm. They have no idea where to go.
They’re scared because all they know how to do is derive.
But if that’s all you know how to do — if being derivative is your only creative tool — then you’re not really a storyteller, not really a writer, not really a creator. You’re a copycat. A regurgitator.
And that’s one of the big problems with a lot of amateur writers; they copy a lot, they repeat a lot, they make something predictable, and because it’s predictable, it’s forgettable. This isn’t to say you should make something confusing; the best works of fiction are both surprising and inevitable.
I’ve been watching the Penguin show with Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb, and the pilot episode is a masterclass of incredible writing. There are so many little details that happen because of who the characters are, but you never know exactly how it’s gonna play out because everyone’s doing what know they would do based on who they are. So the moments end up feeling right and feel like they only could have ever gone that way after they happen, but they still surprise you, because they’re not “generic crime drama scene #143” you know?
Doing that means doing something because of who the character is. So another way to be creative? Just sit there and put your character in a scene and think about how they would react to it. Know your character so well you know exactly how they would respond to any scenario. An interesting character is one who will respond in an interesting way.
There’s a scene in Waifu Death Squad that looks set up to show a character demonstrating his superior capabilities over a shitty subordinate, and we could have just written it as “a scene where one character shows up another.” Instead, we get the character to let loose — we take things in a darker direction. We blow it up. And we show other characters unsure how to respond to it.
And, one day, we’ll explain it.
If you make a derivative story, your audience won’t remember it, because it’ll be like all the others. It has to stand out, and to stand out, you have to be creative. The best way I personally know to be creative is to have a character react to a situation in an interesting way, or to develop a moment in a surprising way.
You’ve seen a million scenes where a bank robber guns down a bank guard who tries to get brave. Alright, what happens if the guard actually gets his gun off? What if the guard has a heart attack and our robbers don’t want to be guilty of murder? You could take it a ton of different directions, and once you do that, you’re off to the races.
When T.S. Eliot originated the idea that “great artists steal,” he kept writing, but most people forget the rest, which is too bad, because it’s essential:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
A good artist is inspired by that which exists, and then changes it to the point of being unrecognizable. It should be an improvement, but at the very least, it must be different.
A bad artist steals and defaces because they cannot do anything artistically with the material. So they’re just copying. They’re not creative; being creative means being transformative, which means you cannot just make a zombie story with a biker gang or cannibals or malls or what have you, not if you want to make anything memorable.
Amateurs will repeat things that happened before unthinkingly; a scene where a character hides that they’ve been bitten by a zombie happens because you’ve seen it before.
Okay, well, why did you see it before?
I mean, think about it: someone wrote that scene deliberately, right? The first person to ever do it had a reason for doing it that wasn’t just “uh… because other stories did it,” right? They were going “I’m doing this because the story needs…”
And, in the case of ‘someone is hiding the zombie bite,’ it’s to build tension. The problem is, now that we’ve all seen how that scene works, it no longer builds tension because we know what the conclusion will be. By knowing the conclusion, now we’re fucking bored as an audience.
So, if a character gets bitten, what can you do with it? Me, I might use it as a metaphor for discovering my grandmother’s alzheimer’s and how deeply that very traumatic night (her life was in danger and I was alone and young and had to talk to a stranger in my grandmother’s body while she waved a knife around!) scarred me. So rather than “this person hides it and eventually that ends up causing another zombie outbreak,” imagine a very different slow burn as the character has to make peace with their inevitable death, tearfully telling the person who will have to kill them “it’s not me, it’s not me, it’s just something new occupying my body. Kill it for me, would you?”
That’s different, right? Maybe there’s something interesting there, maybe it’s been done before; I dunno, I’m not the president of all zombie stories and I’m just trying to illustrate a point.
To be creative you have to be able to actually think about the mechanics of the thing you are working with. I think that’s why so many not-actual-writer types love to go “haha, us writers, huh? We don’t write.” The actual writers do. And the ones who are the most productive are the ones who actually know the craft of storytelling. They learn the craft by doing it and by studying others.
So learning how something works — finding out what parts you can break off before something ceases to be a genre, then working from the basic and crucial components only, means you’re free to do whatever you want, which can be scary to someone who’s never done it before… but the only way to stop being scared (and what’s the worst that could happen? you’re telling a story. this isn’t a life or death situation, it’s a story, and all stories are bad on the first draft anyways. you can go write fanfiction over on Archive Of Our Own right now to practice, entirely anonymously! you can just write for yourself in a notepad!) is to write.
So get to writing.
If you’re thinking “but I tend to get started and then lose momentum,” I have a very helpful trick for that: actually outline the damn thing. I used to hate outlines, but it turns out every time I write one, I actually finish a story. When I don’t, no story comes out. So write a fucking outline. Just do it.
It is so much easier when I can look at a sheet and go “wow, okay, yeah, so today, I can write any one of these scenes,” and then I sit down and do it. On Waifu Death Squad, we outlined the entire game, then we broke that down into scenes, and then we knew what the scenes needed to accomplish for the next scene to happen. In doing that, we were able to provide ourselves with a structure that empowered us to actually get the 328,000 word script written, rewritten, and edited in roughly one year.
That’s crazy fast!
So, look, you wanna be creative? Well, it might seem scary until you actually practice it enough, but the answer is: figure out what you’re writing, figure out what kind of story it is, strip away the things that don’t matter, and build up from there.
But hey, there are a lot of other ways to be creative, and I’m going to use my not-even-announced-yet game Waifu Death Squad to tell you how!
A Case Study: Waifu Death Squad
Waifu Death Squad is my next game. That’s a codename, of course.
It has multiple origins — anime fanfic roleplaying between 2006 and 2011, a game idea I pitched to some friends in 2014, co-opping Resident Evil 5 with a friend, two different superhero stories I’d worked on that kind of evolved from the first one (about a girl with metanarrative powers that was a metafictional examination of superheroes) into the second one (about a person with no powers at all going up against literal gods; it was also metatextual, but smarter about it because I’d gotten smarter about it), questions about how one might ethically overthrow a nation and have it be fun in a video game (because Ghost Recon Wildlands, the best Ghost Recon game, really pissed off the Bolivian government), how players their relationship to the player character help shape the player’s ideas about the game, Ace Combat’s over-the-top dramatics, whether it’s possible to make an ethical gacha, Evangelion, and so on.
The premise was really cool. Just a helluva pitch. So, when one of our artists reached out to ask me what the next game was (he liked working on Adios! Yes! Success!), I pitched him two games that were mechanically similar, but very, very different genre-wise. He asked if he could take it to a friend who happened to be the character designer for one of my favorite characters in a video game.
I said yes.
The two of them came back to me with not just ideas for it, but worldbuilding. Like. Art references and shit. They were hyped.
One teeny, teeny tiny problem though: it was too expensive for us to make, as a small indie studio. Sure, in Hollywood, getting $30 million to make a movie is relatively easy compared to games, where getting even $500k from people who like you is like pulling teeth. $500k might seem like a lot, but let’s say you’re paying 10 people $50,000 a year, which means you’re not gonna be able to recruit many people with AAA experience; congrats, that’s $500k and you only get ten months to make a game because it’s gonna take you 60 days to see any money from Steam or Nintendo, and that’s if you make a profit. We were asking for a few million. We weren’t gonna get that.
But I’d brought in some friends that I hoped to hire (they’d helped me write Adios 2 and the aforementioned Monster-was-the-writing-prompt project), Phil and Kevin. As we were talking, I believe Kevin said “you know, there’s a lot of room to tell stories in this universe,” so we got to talking about how I built Waifu Death Squad’s universe to do just that based on my experience doing transmedia shit and seeing all the pitfalls various clients have fallen into.
Phil followed Kevin’s response up with “yeah, like [the incident that happened several years prior to Waifu Death Squad that kicked off the whole shebang]. You could make a game about that.”
So I stepped back, and a couple weeks later hit ’em with the pitch: We’d tell a game about that event. The mechanics would be [game is not announced, so I won’t be sharing this yet] and the basic structure of the game would be like [spoiler] and, if Kevin didn’t mind, I’d like the protagonist of the game to be a character we developed together.
In fact, how we developed the character is a good way of understanding how to build interesting ideas. The problem is that doing so would be giving away some major twists from Waifu Death Squad Zero and Waifu Death Squad, which we conveniently renamed to Waifu Death Squad (the prequel is now the first game) and Waifu Death Squad 2 (the first game is now the second game).
So, in broad strokes, one time, I asked Kevin to give me an archetype. He did. I said “okay, well, here are all of the tropes usually associated with that kind of character. Let’s start throwing them out.”
An example would be “when is a reporter not a reporter?” Like, if you present a character as a reporter, and you give her a press hat and badge and a big camera and a notepad and have her following around Superman going “so can you tell me more about where you come from?” everyone goes “I know how this plays out.” If you’re a fantastic character writer, you can get a ton of mileage out of that, but when you’re sitting there in front of an unhewn chunk of marble, and you’re just trying to get the ball rolling, one of the simplest questions you can start with is this:
when is [a character role] not [that character role]?
So in our case, our character was [specific occupation], but that’s not why she’s on site. She has an ulterior motive; she’s actually trying to find out information about one of our primary characters.
Now, a character who’s tryin to find out information about another character? That could be anybody.
So I said “Kevin, hey, remember that character? We’re not doing a lot with her yet in the second game [I was thinking to myself that we didn’t actually have much for her to do after she found what she was looking for], but what if we actually made her the protagonist of the first game?” Kevin, thankfully, said sure, that seemed like a great idea.
There wasn’t much to her character at this point; I’d asked Kevin for a job, he’d given me one, I bounced some ideas off him about what she might be and eventually she became an investigator. But that’s about all we had. And now I wanted her to be the main character of Waifu Death Squad.
That’s where Phil came in. I laid out some of the basic requirements the character would need to achieve. I depicted two scenes I envisioned for the game (it’s odd that they were some of the first characters created because these two scenes, which are in the game, feature side characters who only have maybe five or six of the 300+ scenes between them). I said “here’s the general shape of the plot, so she needs to be at these points throughout the narrative.”
Phil started looking at it and working with me on refining the protagonist. He didn’t like her at first beacuse she was merely a cipher through which the real story — what happened in 2016 — was being told. So while I handled a lot of the directing and plotting duties, Phil came in and started making her more and more human. Then after we’d established a lot of her scenes, Kevin asked if he could take some of them, so he wrote a lot of her childhood flashbacks based on the team’s notes. Phil and I did a lot of her present-tense writing (I did the first draft of 7 of the game’s 8 final scenes, for instance), Kevin did a lot of her past.
But we were all working with each other throughout, bouncing ideas off each other, adding bits and pieces of spice to make it work. Now, two of my favorite moments of creation in the game came from mistakes, which sounds strange, but is another very important component of your creative process:
be open to serendipity
At one point, Kevin did something in the script. I knew it could only happen if a character had access to something very specific. But I have a rule, which is unless I have a very good reason to reject something, and unless I cannot improve it, I’m going to leave it in untouched.
I know plenty of creatives who sit there and go “well, this isn’t what I want. Change it.” On one of the most dysfunctional projects I ever been employed on, a simple email request from a publisher result in a six hour meeting where the team lead rejected every single proposal as not being good enough, went into multiple lengthy tangents on theory and philosophy while barely seeming to grasp them, and ultimately by the end of the day, the work never actually got done.
So, if you are on a project and you’ve got something and you don’t love it, if you don’t have anything better, don’t keep saying no. Say okay. Especially when it’s something you can tweak later; sometimes, it’s better to get an unsatisfactory idea in place and come back to it later with fresh eyes than it is to keep banging your head against the wall.
And buddy, did we come back to it later: because Phil did the same thing Kevin did in a later script.
We use a program called Fade In to write a lot of our first drafts, and it has an online cooperative mode, so we were sitting there watching Phil type out a draft while working on our own. He started to do the thing Kevin had done. Mid-way through, I realized exactly how it could work, and it would change everything.
I should explain that Waifu Death Squad, as a series, is an epic. I don’t mean it in the internet bro-dude way of “wow that’s epic,” I mean in the literary mode. The series has hundreds of speaking parts and takes place over a vast length of time — multiple lifetimes, in fact — and it’s meant to have at least eight installments, likely more. It was also designed to function as a large media property, using my experience helping large businesses with their media properties and avoiding their pitfalls.
A lot of the projects are planned with varying levels of detail; some have entire rough plots worked out (like Waifu Death Squad A and Waifu Death Squad C), others have some very key moments that are never changing, but have gone through radical restructuring (like Waifu Death Squad 2).
But when Phil did it, I realized what he and Kevin were doing, and I went “oh, this is why this is happening. It’s because of [secret story reasons I cannot put in this article yet because it’s a big reveal].” That got our juices flowing. It’s resulted in some fantastic scenes that you’ll see throughout the series. And, unless you figure out what it is after the game comes out, you likely won’t notice what it is because it feels so damn natural to the story. It couldn’t have actually been any other way than it was, even though it got there by accident.
Another incident, Kevin put the protagonist’s name in a scene where it should have been someone else’s. I read it and I went “wow that’s really cool,” he went “oh that’s a typo,” and I went “yeah, but… actually play it out in your head. If she’s doing that action, look at how different it is.” Everyone on the team agreed it was really fuckin’ cool (I think it’s in the opening scene for act 5, near some ringing bells. Come back and ask me what it is after the game comes out).
So, hey, serendipity is good. Mistakes can be fantastic. In other words, always be aware of how individual, subtle details can do something to your narrative. Get inventive with ’em, repurpose ’em, think about their impact on the audience, because, hey, that’s ultimately where the narrative is going, right?
I know I talk a lot about “don’t worry about what the audience thinks” and that is important — if you try to impress the audience, they’ll know you’re trying to impress them, and they won’t be impressed — but you do have to remember you’re communicating an idea to someone.
Some of the most frustrating interactions I have (and I’ve been guilty of them myself at times) are when someone starts talking through something and I have no idea what they are talking about. “Oh did you hear that NightTimeVideoMan89’s beef with RadioLogicDJFucksmith spilled over into XFreelettermanX’s stream? It’s crazy how — “ shut the fuck up, what are you talking about and why the fuck would I care?
When you’re writing you gotta think about how the audience will care. Not about you, but about the story. If you write a scene where, say, a father has to tell his son goodbye for the final time but cannot tell his son that he’s going to die, you need to make sure the audience is fully aware of the emotional weight of that scene. Don’t fuck it up by putting yourself in it and going “look at me! look at me! look at me!” ’cause people will leave the story to look at you, and then the story seems fake, and everyone but the absolute stupidest morons will realize you’re a fraud, a trained squirrel doing tricks hoping for treats.
If you want the acclaim, just do really good work, and people will check it out and go ‘wow, damn, that was extremely good. I wonder who made it. Oh, wow, I’ll check out more of their stuff.’ You know, the way any actual fucking great artist achieves fame.
So there’s some lessons you can learn from Waifu Death Squad, which should be announced pretty soon.
In Conclusion
In conclusion — look, essays written by LLMs all seem to end this way, and I was talking to someone on bsky recently who was noting this, and I jokingly said I’d put that in this essay, so now I have, but not at the beginning like I hoped because I didn’t find a place for it — being creative is super fucking easy just like any other skill that requires practice.
The easiest way to be creative is to recognize that every idea you’ve ever had comes from somewhere, and that creativity is finding inventiveness within the mundanity. There are a million stories about revenge; if you want to stand out, you should do something within it that you’ve never seen before. By breaking away from the expectations, thinking through the logical consequences of the actions in your plot, and thinking through the people and the choices they would make.
“What is this person like? What would they do in this situation?” will help you avoid just repeating a scene you’ve seen before.
So! In the first section of the piece, I gave you ideas for how to come up with a premise; trying to solve problems is a great way to build a premise no one else has gotten before, even if that problem is “I wonder what the writer is doing with their story,” realizing that they’re not doing what you theorized, and deciding your theory is good enough to be its own story.
In the second section, we moved into The Big One, the idea that creativity begins by understanding what you are doing and being smart enough to understand what ideas you’ve merely seen before and which ideas are actually you building on your inspirations. Rather than inspiration being a bolt of creativity from the heavens to your brain, it’s usually just a small thing — a character, a moment, a gesture — and it’s by working on it, by building out from that inspiration, that you create the story. The inspiration is not a story that is fully formed — and if you want to experience that rush of “oh wow, I know what this needs!” well, you gotta practice the craft by writing a lot.
And then, hey, the third section is about various methods of creativity — including just being open to serendipity — that we have employed as we work on our next game. Sometimes I’m chasing a feeling, other times I’m fascinated by an idea (like watching a video of a child trying to eat a birthday candle, the parents freaking out, the child not knowing why and starting to freak out) and go “huh, so people can experience fear based on other people’s fear of an object. In a way, fear can function as a contagion” and go from there.
Trying to understand people is the real core of creativity, because stories are — and must be about — people in the end.
The worst writer I ever knew — just an absolutely oblivious hack — once told me he wanted to write a story entirely about aliens. He would simply write something that doesn’t think like people do. I told him that no matter what, he’d be writing from a human perspective because he is a human, and he’d only ever be able to write aliens-from-the-perspective-of-a-human, and never truly from the aliens’ perspective.
But it wasn’t just that; if you write a story that is about something utterly alien to the human experience, who would care? We make stories to help process our emotions — even Bambi is about human feelings, even if the characters themselves are deer. It’s designed to be entertaining to the human mind; the deer aren’t really deer at all, you know?
So when you’re writing a story, be cognizant of the fact that you’re writing it about and for people (and this includes you). A lot of the rules aren’t necessary; the big ones are to remember who the story is for, to make it interesting, and not to simply copy what you already know.
There is one other piece of advice I can give you: consume more stuff, especially stuff you aren’t familiar with. It’s not enough just to watch the top 25 films on imdb or whatever game is up for the game of the year awards on a given year.
Here’s an easy way to do it: find a game or a movie you like, and then go find interviews about it with the director or the writer, since they’re the ones that will be the most hands-on when it comes to the story. Once you’ve done that, you’ve likely found some of the specific influences on the story you liked, but that’s not the full picture.
So, step two, find other interviews with the same people. Find out what else inspires them. Because humans are both their fleshy meat computers and all of the experiences they’ve ever had wrapped into a single package, an easy way to learn from the people who inspire you is to find out the things they’re interested in.
Let them be your tastemakers, rather than the marketing department. For instance, the comic Mr. X inspired everyone from Tim Burton to Terry Gilliam. Dark City, Batman, The Matrix, all of that is ultimately down to the comic written by Dean Motter. If you go check out Mr. X, you’ll find a remarkable comic on its own, but then you can look into what Motter found influential too! It’s a really fun rabbit hole.
Doing this, you can start to get more influences, and pretty soon, two or more of those influences are going to converge in your brain, and boom, there’s a new idea!
Creativity is chemistry, so the more chemicals you have to experiment with, the more chemical reactions you can discover. That’s real inspiration.
So yeah: be literate, understand the mechanics, give a shit about the audience, and know your characters. As long as you — and it does have to be you — practice, you’ll get there. I know you can.
Look, I’ll be honest, my health is very poor right now, and I’m behind on my bills. I’m struggling pretty hard without access to adequate medical care, and it’s already been too long since I posted an article. I wish this was bigger, beefier, and full of a lot more advice, but this covers what you’ll need to know to get started. Thank you for reading.
Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.
I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.
So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.
paypal.me/stompsite
ko-fi.com/stompsite
@forgetamnesia on venmo
$docseuss on cashapp
