Complications Ensue: The Crafty Writing Blog

A civilian friend sent me  an opinion piece about video games  from the New York Times. It covers the move to live, free-to-play games over ...

As I discussed in my first book (and maybe my second?) I think that the best way to develop a story, any story, is to tell it over and over...

  Odysseus is a comic hero: It's Odysseus's fault he doesn't go straight home, because he just HAS to tell Polyphemus his name A...

 Another interesting thing about immersive, experiental theatre:  it is local. So much of the world is now global. There is no proper city i...

  I'm listening to Reality Escape Pod , a podcast about escape rooms. They interview Elan Lee , who co-invented Exploding Kittens, the c...

 I am coming around to the notion that immersive experiences are the Wild West frontier of narrative. Video games have been telling stories ...

  Here is a fine list of clams , that is, turns of phrase that were once clever and now, not so much. (Not sure if "not so much" c...

Executives have been trying to get rid of writers ever since moving pictures were a thing. Samuel Goldwyn allegedly threw a writer out of hi...

I'm watching GODZILLA MINUS ONE. You might think it is a movie about a giant undersea monster with nuclear abilities. But it is actually...

I’ve talked about how to use feedback: listen to the criticism, be wary of solutions other people offer. Until your game comes out, fan fee...

At some point, you may be called upon to propose a title for a game. This generally won’t happen on a AAA game, where the title is the provi...

We're looking for a principal writer for an online shooter. You *must* know from online PvP games. Also, be legally able to work in Mon...

Here are some terms I've heard thrown around while we were talking about game narrative. Some are entirely idiosyncratic to me and my cr...

 We saw the Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Fascinating to watch how his style changed -- how he found it, an...

(This is an adaptation of a talk I've given a few times, at companies I've worked for, and at the East Coast Game Convention. I wrot...

There is a lovely scene in The Witcher  tv series, Season 3 episode 4, where Geralt and Yennefer get back together after some time. They hav...

 I've been hearing a lot of about the use of AI -- large language models, or LLMs -- like ChatGPT -- in writing. For example, game writi...

Human beings are perfectly capable of absorbing stories non-linearly. Very often we meet a person and only later find out about their past. ...

There's backstory that's in the game, and backstory that is in the game bible. I am all for backstory that makes its way into the ga...

One of the folks I'm working with here in Hangzhou started playing the Rocky Horror Show soundtrack on the taxi's speakers (which is...

Many years ago, I was asked to fly down to Cape Town as the Head Writer on a strange sf tv show called CHARLIE JADE, along with two fellow C...