Author Janine Southard is a science fiction writer who has funded more than one of her books on Kickstarter, she’s a freelance editor, and she writes story and dialogue for videogames. In this episode, Southard shares what a writer can add to a videogame, how writing games has helped her write fiction, and–if you’re thinking about putting your book on Kickstarter–why you may want to learn how to bake cookies.
Q&A: JANINE SOUTHARD
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Your dialogue has to be as condensed as it possibly can while still showing interesting things are going on and keeping the person who’s reading it enticed. Because if you make it too long, no one’s going to read that. They start to scroll and it becomes TLDR–“too long, didn’t read.” If you keep it short and concise, you can get a lot of information across.
Author Janine Southard writes science fiction, edits fiction, writes for corporate clients, writes video games, and has used crowdfunding to fund her novels. Her unique experiences and skills make her a great resource for knowledge and learning.
Chris and Janine start the conversation unpacking the background behind her propensity for stories and how, as a child, she delighted in writing the beginnings of many stories just for the joy of creating new worlds and characters. That led her into editing as an adult, and finally into the realm of writing her own science fiction novels. You’ll want to listen to hear how her editing experience has impacted and helped her own writing.
She loves science fiction as a genre because it’s so hopeful. No matter how dystopian the world a particular science fiction book may contain, the hope is found in that humanity is still there, still growing and learning, still fighting for survival. She finds it to be the one genre where it’s easy to be forward-thinking rather than bleak and writes with that in mind.
Many authors have used Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites to finance their writing and Janine has done a handful of campaigns on Kickstarter. In this episode she shares her experience, the pros and cons of using a crowdfunding site, and her “dos and don’ts” of using crowdfunding for a book project.
Chris and Janine wrap up the conversation talking about her experiences as a video game writer. She’s the one who puts together the plot and dialogue and intricate relationships behind various video games. She’s learned how to make dialogue snappy and how to keep the flow of interest going in short snippets of interactions that are indicative of video games. You won’t want to miss her description of the “fun” it is to write for video games contrasted to the hard work.
WHAT YOU’LL HEAR IN THIS EPISODE
Janine’s first memories of stories.
The fun she had as a child writing the beginnings of so many stories.
Janine’s first brush with editing as an adult.
Why science fiction has alway been Janine’s hopeful genre of choice.
Janine’s editing specialties and preferences.
What an editor does – developmental, line editing, and copy editing.
Essential things for authors need to know about editing.
How Janine’s editing work has impacted her own writing.
Janine’s experience raising funds through Kickstarter.
The tactics Janine has dropped from her Kickstarter campaigns.
Janine’s experience writing video games.
How game writing helps Janine be a better writer overall.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Your FREE “Promo Rocket Media Campaign Blueprint”
Kickstarter – KickStarter.com
Janine’s website – JanineSouthard.com
TWEETS YOU CAN USE TO SHARE THIS GREAT INFORMATION
Essential things every writer needs to know about editing.
How video game writing helps write science fiction.
Science fiction as the genre of hope. Find out more on this episode of DIY Author
Did you know video games have hidden plots? Find out more in this episode of DIY Author
How a professional editor’s work has impacted her own writing
TRANSCRIPT FOR DIY AUTHOR EPISODE 24
PART 1: BEGINNING STORIES
Chris: You write a lot of different kinds of things—you write fiction, you edit fiction for other people, you write games, and you also write for corporate clients. Let’s start at the beginning, before you got into all of these various things. What are your earliest memories of stories?
Janine: I really can’t remember a time that stories were not a part of my life. Not only did I have pages upon pages where I had written my own choose-your-own-adventure novel by hand, but I was a kid in the ’80s where we did not all always have computers. My dad had this work laptop, which I swear weighed as much as I did.
I would write the starts of novels on that all the time. I don’t think I bothered to save any of them, which is good because as a child I had that quintessential writer’s problem where you never finish anything. I wrote first chapters of so many brilliant pieces when I was 6, 7, 8 years old and didn’t stop.
Chris: That’s really interesting that it’s all the beginnings of stories.
Janine: Doesn’t everybody do that?
Chris: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody do that as a strategy. A lot of people abandon things in a casual way, but the way you described it the strategy was, “I’m going to write the beginnings of all of these novels.”
Janine: I was a kid, but that was the fun part of me then. Now, the fun part for me is all the outlining and figuring out how things go together. Then the fun part was, “Who are my characters? What are they going to do? What are they like?” I didn’t care at all about inciting incidents or plots. I just wanted to make them exist. It was very fun.
Chris: When did you start to edit as a separate thing?
Janine: My first real brush with professional editing was, when I was in college, I did an internship with Tor Books. They’re a science fiction and fantasy publisher in New York. It was totally unpaid. Basically, me and the other interns all read whatever manuscript people had sent in and decided if we liked them or not, and whether we were going to pass them on to someone.
If we had gotten a full manuscript because an editor had requested it, we wrote up these four-page-long letters about what we liked, what we didn’t like, what worked, what didn’t work, that kind of thing. That was my first real experience of what editing was like. It was great and wonderful and I loved reading everyone’s things.
Tor is special in that, at least at the time–I don’t keep up now–they accepted un-agented submissions. We got all sorts of things. It was very broad in terms of what we would get to read as interns, and what we would get to see, and mistakes we would get to see people make, and things that we could say, “Oh, that’s how to fix this” because we saw so much of it.
Then I foolishly decided that I didn’t want to live in New York. I thought, There’s the end of my editing career, as much as I loved it. I would just edit for friends. Writers always know other writers. I was editing for an anthology and I was editing all these short stories for a friend out of Australia and so on and so forth.
Then for a while I was doing freelance manuscript reading for Tor. Then with the whole internet fiction, people doing their own thing and all the small publishing houses boom that’s come up in the last couple of years, it didn’t matter that I didn’t want to live in New York. I still know how to put a story together, and vaguely know what’s going on with the industry. It’s great, I get to do it now.
Chris: The part where you were at Tor, I can see that as a clear part of the chain of why you do science fiction and fantasy now. Had you already chosen that path prior to being at Tor, or was that a part of how you ended up choosing?
Janine: I had definitely chosen that way, way back. Science fiction has always been the thing that I love reading as well as writing. It’s so hopeful. No matter what horrible, dystopia things might be happening in your terrible world, we’re still there. Our culture has continued on, we’ve made this new technology. Sure, it’s turned back on us–Skynet has been terrible, but we made Skynet. I love the hope to that. All of the excitement that comes from figuring out where are we going to go next, what’s the next leap of progress?
I already read that all the time, it was a large part of what I was writing. In the bookstores, fantasy goes hand in hand with science fiction, so I did some of that. Yeah, that made the most sense to me.
Like most people in the world, I guess, I also read romance novels, so that made it really easy to segue over. I’ve edited for some romance places.
Chris: So, you don’t just edit science fiction, you edit other kinds of things?
Janine: Once you get past science fiction, fantasy, and romance/romantic erotica, I know that I would not hire me for money for those other things. There are people out there who are better than I am.
When it comes to mystery novels, sure I can go through, I can look at your writing, I can give you my opinion, but I don’t read mystery novels. I cannot tell you what a cozy mystery is and how to make it different from a detective mystery. I don’t know what people are reading in that, so I wouldn’t trust me with a mystery.
If you have something with spaceships in it or with interesting elvish magical systems, that’s my thing, man. Bring it to me, bring it to me.
PART 2: THE THREE LEVELS OF EDITING
Chris: What do you do as an editor?
Janine: There’s three different levels of editing. The first one is developmental, which is about structure, and storytelling, and pacing. Do you need these two characters, or can you combine them into one person? If there’s something missing from your plot.
What I usually do for that is I’ll read someone’s manuscript twice through before taking any notes, just to figure out who all the characters are and what it reads like as an experience. Then I’ll write up a long letter of what’s working for me and what isn’t from that really big, overall point of view. Sometimes I won’t be able to help myself and I’ll also make a lot of notes in whatever the word document is.
Second level of editing is line editing which is about the structure of your sentences and about pacing. Do you really want everything be the “blank of blank,” or seeing things that you do very often, and is that part of your voice or is that just repetition that you don’t need. Making things flow more smoothly.
The third kind of editing is the copy editing, proof reading, putting your commas in all the right places, etc.
Honestly I farm out my own copy editing. I’m good at it, but I don’t really tell people that I will do their copy editing for them on a professional level. I’ll do it for friends if they want it.
That’s all three of them. Mostly, I really love the developmental part, where I get to say, “Oh, here’s where your story needs some more oomph,” or “Maybe your story really starts here.”
Chris: You had mentioned editing for houses, can independent authors approach you directly about hiring you as an editor?
Janine: Yeah, they definitely can. That’s mostly what I’ve been doing for the last couple years, has been independently for people that I’ve met or that know that I have this editing background. I haven’t really done lot of publicizing, I guess, that I’m available for it, but I am.
I actually prefer working with indie authors who are going to be putting books out themselves, because it’s really easy to see what’s important to them. They only have two customers: The customer is either the person who’s going to buy their book, or themselves, and what’s really important to them.
When you work for a big house, which I also love, there are a lot of internal clients where different people expect different things from each book, and they might not have told you that in advance. It’s great to work for an author who knows what they want.
Chris: What would you consider the essential thing for an author to remember about editing?
Janine: If you’re going to do your own editing, the first and most essential thing is to put away your manuscript before you start editing it. You just finished it, you’re super excited, good, great–go out, run in the park, wait a couple of weeks. I think Stephen King suggests six weeks, and Stephen King is smarter than I am, so six weeks, way to go.
Then you’ll have enough space from that draft that you can go back and say, “What was I thinking with chapter five?” It’s a lot easier.
I actually really noticed this recently. I picked up an old project of mine–seriously old, started it in 2002. And I’m going back to those first chapters, which I have not looked at in 12 years, and it’s so easy to see these huge things that I would not have noticed then. Now I can say, “I need so much more description here,” or “This character is totally pointless,” which is really great and helpful.
Other things that I would suggest to authors who are editing either their own work or having somebody help them–a couple of opinions from your writing group, because different people see different things, and think different things are important.
Remember that editing is a process. Your book is not perfect in its first draft form. That can be freeing that you don’t have to write a perfect first draft. Your first draft can be terrible, but by the end it will be beautiful and wonderful and everybody will love it.
Chris: How has your work as an editor effected your own fiction as a writer?
Janine: It’s definitely helped me to see things that are pretty common. I wrote a post about first pages, and all of the things that should go on first page, and what shouldn’t go on first page, and use of clichés and so on. You already know all the stuff about writing that shows up like this.
It really brings it home for you when you see a number of manuscripts coming through over your desk and you’re like, “That really does happen a lot.” For one you can forgive it, but when you read 20 first pages in a row that are all clichéd dialogue, or all have the same one style of character you say, “Ah, maybe that’s not what I need.”
It’s also great practice editing other peoples work for the things that I know I am really not as good at. My own description is the worst thing that I do in my own manuscript, and I always have to go back and add it in later. It’s not something that comes to me naturally.
When I’m going through and doing other peoples manuscripts I see, “Here’s a great place for description,” or “Right, that workshop that I took recently, I learned about doing this description in this kind of location and that’ll go great in this person’s manuscript.”
Then I’ve seen it in practice–both in terms of how it could be written in organically, and how it could be edited in. Then I can go back to my own work and do the same thing, and vice versa. It’s all about practice, I guess.
PART 3: CROWFUNDING BOOKS ON KICKSTARTER
Chris: You funded your fiction on Kickstarter. Had you published book prior to Kickstarter or was Kickstarter you publishing your first fiction?
Janine: It’s my first fiction not using a pen name. I think all of my non-pen name books now, I have done using Kickstarter. It has been a really different experience and I really like it. I like how it opens up that whole, “How much money do you need to publish something? Do you need a publishing house to do all of the little bits for you?” It’s very DIY.
Chris: What was the best thing you did to make the Kickstarter project work?
Janine Southard funded Cracked: A Magic iPhone Novel on Kickstarter
Janine: Okay, this is going to sound totally ridiculous, but especially for your first Kickstarter projects as a single author that pretty much no one has heard of, the majority of people who back your project are going to be people that you know in real life. If not that you know in real life, then people that you’re one degree of separation away from.
The thing that brought me the most money–I guess there’s two ends of this: what action, and what giveaway reward. The action, bizarrely, that brought in the most money was baking cookies and bringing them around to people that I know and giving a giant plate of them to my significant other to take to work and telling people, “Hey I have a project, you can look at it on Kickstarter, here have a cookie.” Not, “Back my project or else you can’t have a cookie,” but letting people know that you’re out there and then giving them something that they want. Because, yeah, those first projects–no one’s going to find you on that first one.
When it comes to what reward I had that was the most useful and really the most interesting, the biggest grossing reward has always been giving away naming rights to a character in whatever book that I am writing. I will warn anybody who is going to do that, however, the pitfalls if you haven’t planned in advance. You should let people know what gender this character is going to be, and how wildly out there the names could be.
I’ve had characters that have to be male or female for story plot reasons, and somebody wants to give it a different name or an opposite gender name, and I had to figure out where can I actually put this, can I change names around? I’m much more careful about that now.
The thing that’s most popular as a reward is getting into the acknowledgments. Actually, I really feel like anything that’s between the $15 and $25 mark is going to be the most popular reward regardless. Make sure you have cools stuff in that spot.
Chris: The thing about the cookie–that’s brilliant. They’re not going to forget that. They are way more likely to remember to go look.
Janine: Thanks.
Chris: If you’ve done several Kickstarters, you are fine tuning this process as you go. What are the things that you’ve tried that didn’t work, so now you’ve dropped it?
Janine: Really big, awesome-sounding rewards that nobody ever picks up. It’s great to have one of those, but if the bottom of your page is littered with a kagillion awards that nobody wants–it just looks really barren to me, so I’ve cut those. It hasn’t made any difference.
I think I had one on my first project that said something like, “If you give me $5,000 toward doing is novel, I will fly out to wherever you live and hand deliver you a first-run copy and take you to dinner” or something. Nobody took me up on that.
It might have been fun if that was the only one, but I think I also had, “For $500 I’ll send you as many eBooks you want for your book club and Skype in.” There’s comes point where you have so many of them that—really, the level that I’m at–nobody wants.
The most practical advice that I can give is don’t ask for too much money. You see a lot of people asking for $10,000, $15,000, one million dollars–I don’t know about you, but I am not going to be the next Veronica Mars movie. You can look at one of my projects versus Veronica Mars and it’s whole different ballparks.
My first project, if I hadn’t had a friend who owed me $500 and decided to give it back to me via my Kickstarter project, I might not have made it. Kickstarter is different from some of the other crowd funding engines–if you don’t fund your project completely, you don’t get any of the money. Versus, for instance, Indiegogo–where, if you don’t fund your project completely, you still get whatever has been donated to you or venture capitalized to you.
With Kickstarter, I’ve gotten to this point where I ask for pretty much exactly how much I need. Not how much I need to make the book and do all of the marketing and go out and drink coffee in the coffee shops while I do my editing or whatever, but how much I can’t fund myself.
I think for my last book I asked for, it wasn’t a lot, it was like $1,500 maybe, which would cover the editing and my cover and that was it. I had to buy my own ISBNs; I bought them in bulk–1000 ISBNs for $1,000. I have lot of ISBNs now, but they’re only one dollar a piece.
Yeah, definitely [figuring out] in advance how much it is really going to cost me, and then how much can I put of my own personal funding into this before I won’t do it anymore, and only asking for that much. People can still keep donating after that. They can still keep giving you money and asking for rewards and supporting your project. Nothing stops them. If you don’t get to that minimum level, it will stop you.
Chris: When that crazy potato salad thing happened on Kickstarter where the guy got $50,000–not even for potato salad, but to make potato salad. You as a Kickstarter-using person, do you see that and think, “Why didn’t I offer potato salad?” How do you look at something like that?
Janine: I really look at that and I laugh because it’s cute and it’s funny. I also see it as one of these lucky outliers. People are making wacky projects on Kickstarter every day. Some of them are wacky in good ways, some of them are wacky in bad ways, some of them are the guy making potato salad in his kitchen saying, “I’ll take a photo of it for you.”
It’s this luck of the draw, who sees it, who thinks it’s funny. It’s like a viral video–there’s only so many things you can do to make your video go viral, and after that it’s if you happen to have gotten it right.
I try to just laugh at it. I did not back the potato salad, I will admit. I didn’t really need a photo of someone else’s potato salad.
Chris: As you think about the psychology of why people donate on something like his, I wonder if his thing has been “Crazy idea—and, by the way, I have a book and your money will go toward a book,” I wonder if that would have taken just enough of the edge off the joke that it would have failed. Versus maybe even secretly he has a book, but he’s not going to tell people because he knows that “If I just mention the potato salad, the novelty factor makes it work.”
Janine: Yeah, maybe. I get the feeling that it’s like when you’re looking for someone to date, the moment that you don’t care about dating someone anymore and you’ve given up on dating you see lots of people, but while you’re desperate you can’t get anywhere. I feel like it’s got that edge to it. He’s all, “I’m going to make a potato salad, let me start a Kickstarter project for it.” So it works out.
PART 4: WRITING VIDEO GAMES
Chris: One of the facets of your writing career is that you write games. When you say “games,” what do you mean?
Janine: My experience is with MMO—massive, multi-player, online role-playing games–and writing the dialogue. Famously, this is you come across five people in the same town and they all send you on basically the same quest of “Go out and get me ten rabbits,” “Go out and get me 11 rabbits.”
You want to make that interesting for the people that actually read the dialogue. The first one wants rabbits to save his daughter’s life, the second one wants rabbits because they taste good or whatever, and the third one wants the rabbits because they’ve been killing travelers, who knows. That sort of thing.
Also getting to do a lot of the in-game story books. You pick up something and it’s the special mystical dagger of whatever, and there will be a book about it somewhere in the game that’s between one and ten screens long about where this awesome dagger came from and who created it. Sometimes in that book, there will also be really useful information for the player later. I’ve also done a little bit of that peripheral stuff, how it works, and what’s coming out in the new release. The in-game stuff, mostly.
Chris: To gamers, it would seem like being a “professional” game writer is almost like working at a candy factory. Is it as cool as it sounds?
Janine: It is actually pretty cool. You get to see a lot of the stuff that’s coming out before it comes out. You get to help decide which way the game is going, and what’s going to happen with all of the plots and characters and so on.
There is also an aspect that I think a lot of gamers don’t realize–it is grinding nonstop. If you think you get bored now with the “Go out and kill me 11 rabbits,” “Go out and kill me five more rabbits,” “This quest is repeatable 100 times”–imagine if you have to do that once to see what the quest looks like, and then once more to get all of your stuff into it.
And then what happens on the 100th time–I know that the developers have programmed in something really cool, and I have to know so that I can write the cool dialogue that the giant big boss of the day is going to spout at me when it kills me and then when it doesn’t kill me. I’ve got to play it at least twice to the 100th iteration before I can get killed or not killed. There is a lot of just playing it and playing it and playing it.
It’s funny, the game that I’ve worked on the most is Aion Online and I cannot play that at home anymore. It just frustrates me, because I know what’s going to happen. Oh my goodness, I’ve played this quest so many times, and I really miss having all of my godlike powers that I have when I’m on the internal servers and I’m working there that say, “You can just teleport to wherever.” Which, of course, as an actual player you can’t do. There’s a lot more to it than just, “Let’s go and play.”
I saw a lot of the people I worked with who had started out being really super more about playing the game than about direct scoring and directing the game. They would get really into playing it the first couple times through and they would be like, “Oh, the play is really fun.” Then it would also be like the writing was less fun for them.
Being in that mindspace where you want to write everyone is definitely the most fun part. If you agree with me that there’s a new zone and you are going to write the one line of dialogue for every NPC [Non Player Character] in the zone and that that is going to be fun, then you will love it.
Seriously, I have two people on the sides of a different village that are arguing with each other, and there’s probably about two-percent of people that have even noticed that they might know each other and have talked to both of them and remembered this. Yeah, there’s a lot more to it than just, “Yay, it’s play time!” There’s actual work to be done.
Chris: Wait, I’m confused about the thing with the two villagers. You’re saying that the people playing the game don’t notice the two villagers?
Janine: Honestly I don’t know how much people pay attention. First off, you’d have to talk to every single person in this village. Not just to every person who gives you a quest in the village, but to people who are just there to be scenery and they might give you quest in later expansions. I gave them all personalities to begin with anyway, then made a giant spreadsheet of what their personalities are so that we can refer back to it later in the next iteration of the game if it’s important.
There’s a couple of hundred people in this village. If you come into the village and you talk to the guy at the guard tower I guess and he says something to you, and then five playing days later you make it to the other side of the village and you bother to talk to the girl who’s kicking her heels sitting on the city wall, you’ll find out that they’re having an argument with each other. If you don’t bother to talk to them both–because what’s the point, they’re not going to give you a quest–and you don’t remember what the first person said to you, you might not notice that.
If you go through this village a number of times you’ll realize that everybody in it has their own life and that that life that they have is interconnected with everybody else inside of the village. That’s thrilled me to pieces and I loved doing it.
Chris: So, you’ve created almost a secret narrative that the game designers didn’t know about, or intend, or may even never find out about.
Janine: Exactly. But the writer made it up, so it’s true.
PART 5: HOW WRITING GAMES HELPS YOU WRITE TIGHTER FICTION
Chris: When you look at writing fiction and then creating these character profiles and things for the games, is there any sense that writing one helps you write the other?
Janine: Definitely yes. The two things that I have learned from writing games that have truly helped my fiction were one, how to be a hack, and two, dialogue.
Let’s talk about dialogue first, because it’s much better sounding. Basically, for these games the majority of what I’m writing is dialogue. I was writing dialogue somewhere between 2000 words a day–which doesn’t sound like a lot to a writer, but it is when you realize that it has to follow a certain story arc, and has to be super short.
Your dialogue has to be as condensed as it possibly can, while still showing interesting things are going on, and keeping the person who is reading it enticed. If you make it too long, no one’s going to read that. They start to scroll and it becomes TLDR—“too long, didn’t read.” If you keep it short and concise, you can get a lot of information across.
You’re spending all day writing the tightest, most character-driven storyline-forwarding dialogue you possibly can. You only get to write the character’s words, you don’t get to write, “he said daintily, and then he twirls his hair.” You don’t get any of that. You just get what comes out of their mouths.
You don’t get to say how it should sound, either. I remember for a while I was trying to write this one character as though they were the Car Talk guys, and the words worked really well, but in my head they had these brilliant Boston accents and that definitely does not come across in the game. Which is good, because it’s a medieval fantasy bit, and Boston accents would be weird.
Yeah, my dialogue now is super tight and super easy. When I get stalled writing a scene these days, what I will do is I will just write the dialogue for the scene. I will write whatever the argument that people are having or whatever, and I will write the dialogue for the scene and then I can fill in all the bits around it, because I know what’s going to happen. It just goes so much more smoothly.
I’ve been told that my dialogue is really snappy, which is great. It’s good to have a thing that you’re good at. It’s so much practice over and over, just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.
That was the second thing. The first thing was how to be a hack, which is brilliant. You know how we’re writers, you write when you can, you write when you’re in the mood, whatever. Even if you’re the kind of person who does the butt in chair everyday and writes something, you write and you get to certain point.
That does not happen when you’re in that gaming, corporate atmosphere because they have already pushed out a release date and told all of the fans, “This is when this game is coming out, this is when this expansion pack is coming out.” You only have that much time and you must finish by then.
When I said I was writing 2,000 words a day of dialogue, that was my minimum–because I had to get through at least 10,000 words a week in order to hit our date to be done. It did not matter the same way that it does to me with a finished novel. It did not matter if those words were great, they only really have to be good enough and done.
If you have time later, go back and make them great, go back and make this the most excellent quest that could possibly be, go back and make this chain of events really awesome. If you don’t have time, you have to say, “I have made this interesting enough to move on, because if I don’t move on the game will not come out on time and that is not acceptable.”
Shipping the title is just a huge thing. You get into this mindset after that of, “I have to get this done. Here’s my deadline.”
Now, when I sit down to write a novel, even if I’m feeling “It takes however long it takes,” I’m still in this mindset of I’m just going to get through this, and I’m going to keep going. Sure, I’m going to stop and check my RSS feeds and see what’s exciting for 20 minutes, but it is straight back to work after that. It’s a very different less lackadaisical style of work.
Chris: You have multiple jobs that are writing related, where you are creating content. When it comes to writing your own fiction, how often do you find that you’ve used it up–you were working on a game, and now you can’t work on your novel because there’s nothing left inside?
Janine: If you’re talking about ideas, that doesn’t happen. I actually really worried about that when I first started off–if I make an entire village of 400 really interesting characters, how am I ever going to make a character of my own again? How will I ever have a cool idea? The answer is yes, you always have another cool idea.
You could even write the exact same characters as you put into the game, but you have to put them in a different context—otherwise, you’d be writing fan fiction, and that’s great but you can’t get paid for it. Once you give them new wants and new desires and new things around them, you’ve changed so much already that, it’s not really that character anymore.
I don’t find that you tap out the creative well. In fact, you get more fluent at making things happen faster.
If you’re talking about, however, getting exhausted—yes, that does happen. During the months that I will be working on a video game, I will almost definitely not be writing my own fiction on the side.
Mostly because I get home and I do not want to look at a computer anymore. I get home and I will read a book or I will watch TV or I will Rollerblade around the lake, and just be like, “No, no, I don’t want to write anything. I’ve been doing this all day.”
The moment it ends, I’ve had all these background processes going on in the back of my head. I know what my next project is–I’ve been thinking about it on the bus, or while I’m driving, or while I’m grinding these 11 rabbits for the 100th time, and then I’m ready to go.
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The post 024: How writing video games can help you write fiction – with Janine Southard appeared first on DIY Author.