Tell, Don't Show

One of the classic bits of advice for writers in different media is "show, don't tell." Don't say the guy's rich and generous; have him flip a $20 to the delivery guy.

It is often good advice; I've given it lots of times as feedback.

It's not always good advice. Sometimes it is far more effective to tell than to show.

For example, in JAWS, Quint tells the story of the sinking of the Indianapolis:

... Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, chief? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know... was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it's... kinda like ol' squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he'd start poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got...lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin' and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin' they all come in and rip you to pieces.
Y'know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! I don't know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin' chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson's mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended. He'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us. He's a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

There are a bunch of reasons why you wouldn't want to, and couldn't, show this.

For one thing, sheer scope. JAWS was shot on a budget. Shooting a couple hundred guys in the water would be a massive endeavor.

Second, passage of time. Part of the horror of this story is imagining being stuck in the water for days and nights and days, not knowing if help was coming, not knowing if you were next. Film, in particular, is rubbish at communicating things changing over a period of time. You can show shadows moving. You can show seasons. You can show pages flying off a calendar (but who still has a calendar?). But how do you fast-forward on hundreds of guys in the water for a couple of days? A series of dissolves? Ugh.

Third, number. Stalin said, "One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic." (He murdered millions of people.) If you tried to show hundreds of deaths, all you'd do is inoculate the audience against feeling anything about the next person to die.

Fourth, extreme graphic violence. Except in a gore horror film, the audience generally does not want to see someone bitten in half. Rather than being horrified, a lot of people would feel nauseous.

Fifth, attitude. The point of the story is not that sharks eat people. We knew that. The point of the story is that Quint fucking hates sharks.

So, Spielberg and writers Benchley and Gottlieb have Quint tell the story. It's a hell of a speech.

So, yeah, sure, it is often much better to show than to tell. It's fair to say that before you give a character a big ole chunk of exposition to tell, you should consider how to show the same information. Expository dialog, like readables in games, can become a crutch.

But don't be afraid to have a character tell a story: if it's too big, or takes place over too much time, or is something so over the top the audience would really rather you didn't show them. Or if the point of the story is what it means to the story teller.

Satisfying Mysteries

I had a dream last night in which I had an epiphany about what makes a mystery satisfying. It has to do with cognitive science.

There are two kinds of satisfying mysteries in fiction. One is the mystery which is meant to be completely revealed. This is often a whodunnit, à la KNIVES OUT, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, CSI, etc., in which the revealing is an actual scene where someone explains. It could also be a story in which it is pretty clear by the end what the storyteller means to be the truth, whether the hero figures it out or not. E.g. "Is Deckard a replicant?" in the director's cut of BLADE RUNNER (but not, thankfully, in the theatrical cut). 

Then there are mysteries meant to be enjoyed as mysteries. At the end of a story, we're left with a question that is meant to be left unanswered. It could be something as simple as "what happened to the blonde?" in L'AVVENTURA or "what happened to the missing girls?" in PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. Or, "did Quaid ever go to Mars at all?" in TOTAL RECALL.

What makes a mystery satisfying? And what does it have to do with cognitive science?

The human brain is a powerful pattern-matching computer, so powerful that the biggest computers are only now nibbling around at the edges of human capacity. People can identify a dog by eye in dappled shade, no matter the breed, no matter the haircut. I remember going to a dog park in Venice Beach, seeing a dog for about five seconds, and realizing, "that's not a dog, that's a wolf." There was just a wildness in how it moved. Just a whiff of danger. (It was indeed a wolf.)

We could train a computer to distinguish a dog from a wolf these days, but it would still tell you half the time that you're looking at a hat.

Meanwhile, the brain is identifying patterns constantly, everywhere, trying to questions from "is that dress silk?" to "does she really love me, or does she just love having a boyfriend?"

The brain tries to make stories out of things that happen. Stories are how we make sense of the world. When we are trying to figure out what we need to do next, we try to figure out what story we're in. Should I flee to the country to avoid the plague? Well, it depends. Would I be in The Decameron, in which case, yeah, go!, or would I find myself in The Masque of the Red Death?

The brain is so hungry to match make stories out of things that happen around it that it is driven to make stories even when the events are completely random or have nothing to do with each other.
A large part of the gambling industry lives off people who see patterns in the random roll of the dice.

Overmatching is why cops will pick up a suspect, and then ignore evidence that they're not the perpetrator: they'd rather have a story than no story.

Overmatching is what scientists fight against every day, trying to make sure they're not seeing a pattern that isn't there.

Paranoia is what we call it when someone thinks that everything around them is about them. That guy isn't just walking in the same direction I am -- he's following me!

The brain evolved to over-interpret clues in the environment because it was adaptative. If you over-interpret some movement in the tall grass, or a sudden cessation of the birds calling, as a possible tiger, the penalty for being wrong is a few minutes. If you do that twenty times, it's still just a little bit of going out of your way. If you under-interpret a tiger to be just the wind on the grass even once, you're dinner.

What does this have to do with satisfying mysteries?

Most fiction tells us explicitly what we are meant to know.  If you are fortunate enough to have an editor for your novel, many of her comments will be, "this is confusing, please make clearer." Video game development involves a great deal of making as clear as possible to the player how they are meant to interpret the world. We highlight interactable objects. We put health bars over enemies.

But sometimes we put a mystery in there. We carefully build story events that raise a question for the audience to answer for themselves.

These could be philosophical questions. Is Don Quixote a delusional idiot, or is his struggle against a world lacking romance a meaningful one? In FRANKENSTEIN, who is the monster?

They could be questions of what to make of someone. The unreliable narrator, staple of 20th century novels, gives you an interpretation of events that you, the audience or player, are free to interpret another way. Humbert Humbert does not make himself out to be Lolita's rapist, but read the book now, and that's how you'll see him. What made the novel so outrageous at the time was that it does not explicitly condemn him. SPEC OPS: THE LINE has a main character who fails to understand until the end that they are not the hero, they are [redacted].

(Sometimes you only realize the narrator is unreliable with wisdom. Watch TOP GUN as an adult and see if you don't agree with Iceman 100%. Also, Ferris Bueller is a monster.)

The mystery might be a moral question. In WITCHER 2, the player can choose to regard the Scoia'tael as righteous guerrillas defending the rights of non-humans, or murderous bandits.

(Yes, I know I'm using "mystery" here, in my own tendentious way, to mean "an important question left unanswered by the storyteller.")

What makes a mystery satisfying is when the work of art throws out enough clues that the brain understands that there is a mystery to be solved, and then enough more clues that the brain engages with them, analyzing insufficient data to come up with a tentative conclusion that may change as more information comes in.

What makes a satisfying mystery is when the storyteller gives the audience enough hints that their brains engage with the mystery. If there is going to be a conclusion, the storyteller lets the audience come to that conclusion before the story does. If there isn't going to be one, the storyteller gives the audience enough to chew on that they can argue with each other over dinner.

Oddly, many whodunnits don't do this. The Sherlock Holmes stories aren't written so that the reader can draw conclusions; most of the evidence isn't even mentioned until Sherlock calls it out and interprets it.

That's okay. What makes a mystery story satisfying isn't necessarily the mystery. A lot of stories termed mysteries are really about the extraordinary characters. A lot are thrillers, and the fun is rooting for the hero to solve the mystery. We can't solve the conspiracy before Cary Grant does in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, but we're enjoying the suspense. The question isn't so much "what is the conspiracy?" The answer is kinda silly, anyway. The question is, "will Cary Grant uncover the conspiracy, and will he and his aplomb survive doing it?

Agatha Christie novels do give the clues before they're interpreted, but they tend to be arcane clues that only the cleverest and most careful of readers will put together before the detective does.
Nonetheless the characters are rich and fun, and we can interpret their behavior and guess who done it.

If you want your mystery to be satisfying as a mystery, then give your audience or player enough clues to chew on before it is (or isn't) resolved.

The Encyclopedia Brown books for kids, for example, give you all the clues you need to solve the mystery before Encyclopedia Brown announces the solution; they encourage you to read the stories verrrry carefully, because you know, for sure, the answer is in there.

Horror movies often have satisfying mysteries, at least until they break into thriller at the end. The protagonist is often clueless, or willfully blind, that they are dealing with a monster. In the classic werewolf story, the protagonist is all, "Every full moon, I have bad dreams, and also people in town are savaged by a large wild animal, what a world, huh?" In the classic poltergeist story, we guess that these aren't accidents, and the house is haunted, before the main characters come to terms with it. Part of the fun is yelling at the teenagers that going into the basement is a terrible idea. CABIN IN THE WOODS makes much of the tropes. There has to be a Harbinger, who warns the main characters not to do a thing, and we can guess that bad things will come of ignoring the warning of the crazy old man at the gas station. If only they knew they were in a horror movie, eh?

A key part of all storytelling is tracking what the audience knows, what they suspect, and what they expect. Without that, how can you make the ending surprising yet inevitable? To create a satisfying mystery, I think we have to make it clear that there is a mystery and it's important, and then give the player enough clues that they can attempt to solve it. There don't have to be many clues; your audience's brains are raring to make up a story behind the story. They just have to be compelling, salient, juicy clues.

Then the audience or players can say, "I knew it!" when the big reveal comes. Or, "how did I not see that???"

In our WE HAPPY FEW dlc, LIGHTBEARER, our hero, Nick, and the player, are confronted with quite a bit of evidence that he's murdering people during his drug blackouts. But maybe he isn't, and there are clues that point another way. 

I've noticed that game developers are fond of surprising the player. I sometimes bring up famous director and infamous sexual harasser Alfred Hitchcock's famous parable about surprise and suspense:

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

That's why it's important to make sure the audience or players know that there are clues. By now I hope everybody knows that THE SIXTH SENSE has a surprise twist at the end. All the clues are there, right in front of your face. But the movie does not call attention to them. So for all but the most clever audience members (i.e. not me), the ending was a surprise. Likewise, it's pretty obvious who Darth Vader is in the original Star Wars movie: for heaven's sake, what does the German word "vater" mean? But at no point does the movie really kick up the question, "who is Darth Vader exactly in relationship to Obi Wan Kenobi, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker?" So back in the day, that revelation came as something of a surprise in the next movie. In fact, it was a surprise to the cast during the shoot; they found out at the cast screening.

(I'm not saying there's anything wrong with these movies, which made a ton of simoleons, and became iconic. I'm saying that they were not satisfying as mysteries.)

So there you have it: my epiphany last night. You can use your audience's, or players', drive to interpret patterns to draw them into a compelling mystery. You just have to give them some juicy clues and make sure they know that they are clues and there is a mystery.

People love making up stories. They can't help doing it; their brains are on fire trying to make up stories all the time. That's why we talk about "push vs. pull" story telling. As much as possible, get the player or audience member or reader to ask a question before you answer it. As much as possible, get them rooting for something to happen or not happen before you make it happen. At the broadest possible level, all this is, is creating satisfying mysteries. 

Brilliantly Dumb Decisions

As you get older, you often get wiser, if you're paying attention. You've seen this happening before, or something like it. You know what's coming down the pike.

You start to find a lot of drama unsatisfying, because it's written by writers who haven't been around the block, who are making characters do things they really wouldn't do.

The flip side of this is that you start to understand not just how foolish people can be, but in what ways they tend to be foolish. You get to know what sort of blind spots people have.

For example, we're in the middle of a slow-motion train wreck that anyone reading the papers knew was coming, but most people did nothing about. I mean, I knew intellectually it was coming, but I did not e.g. make a killing on the stock market. (Though we did self-isolate a bit early.) We didn't act because other people weren't acting. We didn't act because we have never lived through a serious pandemic, so it all seemed a bit unreal. The last polio epidemic was in the 1950s. The last mass measles epidemic in North America was in the 1960s.

Writing screenplays, you will often need to have characters do something less than logical. Where would horror movies be if at the first sign of horror the main characters immediately left? Where would cops stories be if the cops waited for backup?

(Though one of the things I like about the unnecessarily well-written TREMORS is that the heroes spend no time at all trying to find out why people have disappeared; they immediately try to get out of the valley.)

So what's the difference between annoyingly dumb and brilliantly dumb decisions?

Character decisions are annoyingly dumb when it's obvious they happen because the writers need them to. They are driven by the plot. Hank Azaria calls it the "idiot ball": "who's carrying the idiot ball this week?"

Character decisions are brilliantly dumb when they happen because the characters are human. They make the kinds of dumb mistakes people make. Ideally they make dumb decisions that reveal what sort of people they are.

For JAWS to work, Peter Benchley needs Quint, Hooper and Brody to be isolated on the water. If they can call for help, then the drama is just "will they survive till the chopper arrives?" If they can't, it's "will they survive?"

So Quint smashes the radio. That's illogical, right? But his pride is at stake. He's got his back up against the smart-ass scientist and the bossy police chief. He does not want them to call for help; he's taking it as an insult that they want to call for help. If they get a bigger boat, which would obviously be the sensible thing to do, it won't be his boat. It will be someone else's.

So he smashes the radio. It's a great character moment. It is a brilliantly dumb thing for him to do.

If you've been following politics for the last three years, you've seen a lot of people making dumb decisions out of cowardice, or greed, or pride. You've seen people do things that no sensible, decent adult would do. But adults aren't sensible by virtue of being over 18 years old. Common sense is not common at all.

Tragedy starts with a tragic flaw. It's Odysseus's pride that leads him to tell the Cyclops who he really is after he's beaten him; when complications ensue, he spends twenty years trying to get home.

Hamlet is too smart for his own good. He spends the play trying to find out for sure if his uncle really murdered his father. Put Othello in that role, and he'd just up and kill Claudius on Day One, and take the throne for himself. Done.

Almost every romcom is about how adorable people who are obviously meant for each other fail to get together until they've exhausted all the other options.

In the past twenty years there's been a lot of cognitive science about our blind spots. We see patterns where there are none; hence all the gambler's fallacies. That's because in the wild, 95% of the time that odd thing in the grass is nothing, but 5% of the time it's a sabertooth, and the humans who see patterns where there are none survive, and the people who are too skeptic only have to be wrong once and it's all over.

Read the cognitive science. It's handy both as a writer and as a person to know all the different ways our human brains can screw us up.

So keep that in mind when you're making up your story. You totally can and should have your characters do dumb things. The best drama is about people who can't or won't do the smart, logical thing for human reasons.

Mistakes are what drama's all about; just make them convincing, compelling mistakes that reveal character.

On the merits of jumping out of a burning airplane

There's a lot of "don't worry, stick at it, your dream will come true" on Twitter. That's not wisdom. Not everyone's dream will come true. You absolutely should ask yourself if you're barking up the wrong tree. You absolutely should ask if you could be happy doing something else.

Those of us who made it can truthfully say that it took a lot of perseverance. That getting knocked down doesn't matter, what matters is that you get back up again. But there are also people who persevered, maybe as good as us, who didn't make it. Those are the breaks.

You are not a weak person if you decide, after getting kicked in the shins a thousand times, that you've had it with getting kicked in the shins. This is your life, and there are costs to fighting for your dream. The cheery advice givers will not bear those costs. You will.

I was not terribly successful in LA. I moved to Montreal. I was supposed to become a film director. People didn't think my short films were all that. I wrote Canadian film and tv until our little pond dried up. I went into games. And that's a successful trajectory.

I had a first marriage. Didn't work out. Second marriage is amazing. And that's a success story.

One of the worst relationships I ever had was after I did a "U can make anything happen if you rly mean it!!!" type life seminar. Oh, my God, were we bad for each other. I don't think she even liked me. At one point she told me she didn't like how I drank water.

But we stuck at it because we could make anything happen. Until we came to our senses.

Sticking to this notion of perseverance at all costs made us stay with a relationship that was fundamentally no good.

I knew an actress in Hollywood who was really terrific. She had a transparent quality; her emotions just popped. But it never happened for her. Maybe she didn't audition well?

She quit to go into raising money for playgrounds that are accessible for disabled kids. That is awesome. I know another good actress who quit to become a pastry chef. That is also awesome.

Point is: if your aircraft is burning, bail. Don't kick yourself for jumping out of a burning plane. If your only legacy is the kind things you do for other people, and the joy you took in sunsets and fresh bread, you will have lived a good life.

Video Game Writing vs. Screenwriting

Q. How is video game writing different from film and television writing?

A. Wow. Lots of ways.

First of all, film and television are mature media.

There have been all sorts of experiments in both media, but most tv series tell stories about a family (whether of blood or choice) in some sort of venue (a place of work or a home). Ideally, problems walk in the door every week. People in TV don’t change much over time, because the tv audience wants consistency. After ten years of Friends, Ross was still hoping that Rachel would think he was cool, and Rachel was still hoping that one day Ross would think she was smart and worthy of respect.

Most films are about someone we find compelling, who has an opportunity or a problem, who faces obstacles, an antagonist and/or their own personal flaw. They have something to lose and something to gain. In other words, it’s a single story. The hero starts out haunts by something in their past, is crippled by some fear; in the course of the story they overcome their fear and lay their ghost to rest. (Or, in French movies, they fail to, because la vie est comme ça.)

There is blurring around the edges, of course. The Avengers movies are basically tv episodes that you go into a movie theater to see. “It’s not TV, it’s HBO,” because on pay cable shows, characters can change. By the end of Game of Thrones, Jon Snow still knows nothing, but Theon Greyjoy has turned from traitor to victim to hero, while Daenarys has gone mad. Bingewatching Netflix shows break even more rules.

But still, fundamentally, TV is a mature medium. So is film. You can write a book about how to write for film and you can write one about how to write for television. (Obviously; I did.) It’s possible to describe how you get a TV writing job and how you sell a spec script.

Video games, well. A video game can have a single story about a single, well-drawn protagonist with flaws and a past. Or it can tell the same events from different perspectives. Or it can tell a branching story about a single protagonist that has 28 endings. Or it can provide hundreds of mini adventures that are slightly different depending on hundreds of choices the player has made, starting with defining the blank slate player character’s stats (intelligent or strong? fast or wise?). It can tell no hero story at all, and only create a world and its backstory. I could write a book about how to write the flavor of video games that I write, but I’d be crazy to mouth off about what makes a good story for World of Warcraft, or Stardew Valley.

That much, probably everyone knows. There are a bunch of other important ways that video game writing is different.

The most important thing about a video game is that the player is playing it. If I write a novel (did that too), I am telling you what my protagonist did. If I write a video game, even though I have told a story that could be turned into the novel, it is still you moving the character around. While I might define the major plot twists, how the player gets from one event to another is the player’s choice, within the bounds of the game.

The player inhabits the player character. I can identify with, say, Tyrion Lannister; but I don’t inhabit his character. If I played Tyrion Lannister in a video game, then I would “be” him at a much more visceral level than if I just root for him on TV.

This generates on of the big challenges in video game writing. In a film, tv episode or novel, I can easily have the hero make a mistake, or a morally questionable decision.

But in a game, it’s not easy. If I put the player in a situation where they will likely make a mistake, many players will feel cheated; and some will spot the trap and not make the mistake. If I flat out force the player to make the mistake, the player will normally resent it. Hey, don’t make me do something stupid that I don’t want to do!

Even more so a morally questionable decision. If you force me, as a player, to murder my own dog, I might just stop playing the game altogether, and go write a nasty review. It’s not the player character killing the dog; it’s me, and I don’t want to!

So a lot of effort goes into aligning player motivation with the player character’s motivation. If you’re going to make my character murder his own dog, then you bloody well have to give me such a good reason that I agree with the player character. (The dog has the Black Plague, for example.)

Note, however, that you don’t need to give me the same reason to murder my fictional in-game dog as my player character has. I can have an entirely different motivation. (I know the dog has Plague; player character thinks it’s possessed by a devil.)

Meanwhile, your story is usually a skeleton to hang quests on. The quests ought to progress the story emotionally. But the story is there so that we care about the gameplay. Think of an opera, or a kung fu movie. The opera plot is there to motivate singing. People are not going to the opera for the story. They are going to the opera to hear great singing. Some of the great world operas have absolute rubbish plots. People are going to kung fu movies to see kung fu action sequences.

Of course, there are games that are 90% story and 10% gameplay, and some of them are quite satisfying. 80 Days is close to a choose-your-own adventure story (i.e. not a game); there is just enough gameplay to justify calling it a game. No one is playing 80 Days for the gameplay, they are playing it for Meg Jayanth’s amazing writing. But the vast majority of video games are north of 50% about the gameplay.

The video game writing process is quite different, too. At the beginning, the entire project is just a screenwriter, or possibly a producer and the screenwriter they’ve hired. At the beginning of a video game project, in our studio, the story grows out of any number of discussions between the narrative people, the studio head, the creative director, the art director, the design director, the tech director, maybe the music director, maybe some marketing people.

And those discussions are ongoing. The art director might sketch a character, and the narrative people figure out how to use that character. Or the narrative people sketch a character, and the artists figure out what s/he looks like. Films are written, then shot, then edited, then released, in that order. Video games are made by iteration. There’s a round of creation and design; then we evaluate what we’ve done; discuss how to make it better; and start another round.

That’s a little like a TV show in that you can decide to make a minor character into a major character, or cut a character that you don’t like. But even on TV, you can’t go back and rework all the episodes. So long as you haven’t run out of time or money on your video game, you can rework the game.

Meanwhile, at another studio, all those other people might work on the project for years before anyone evening talks to a writer; rather than providing the backbone of how the player character progresses through the game, the story might be just some feathers or fur that the narrative people stick on after all the muscles have been filled in.

Personally, I experience more respect in video games than I did in film. Maybe I’m just a better video game writer, who knows. But in film you have this perception among producers and directors and actors that they can all write scripts and they don’t really need writers. This might have been a perception in games a generation ago, when the writer was whoever wasn’t busy that week. But I feel like game studios are coming to understand that writing is a skill just like programming/level design/environmental art/ etc.

In video games, we are still learning things that any pro writer knows in film and television. The idea that apparently Good aligned characters can lie, or contradict each other, or even have personality flaws, seems to be newish to game writing. There are games that do, but they’re still thin on the ground.

To be a successful American film and TV writer, you really need to be in LA. New York is a distant second. There are major video game studios in at least a dozen North American cities. In video games, a resume and portfolio can legit get you recruited. In film & TV, it’s your credits, your agent, and whose party you went to last week

Film writing is terribly lonely most of the time, like novel writing. TV writing once the show is greenlit is more like game making: you go into an office and get to play in the sandbox with the other kids.

Lastly, of course, to write great film or tv, you have to watch a lot of great film and tv — and think about what you’ve seen, and analyze what worked and what didn’t, and argue about it with your film and TV friends. To write great games, you have to play great games. (And not just narrative games.)

Those are some key differences in writing in the two media. What have I missed?

Q. I am currently reading “Crafty Screenwriting” and was curious about the hook aspect. For movies that are in the same realm as M. Night Shyamalan, where there’s is a reveal or twist at the end, do you reveal that in the hook? I realize that Shyamalan’s plots usually include other elements than just the reveal; but would a writer who is in that genre submit the hook based on the reveal or the other (perhaps less interesting) plot elements?

A. I wouldn’t reveal what the hook is. The story needs to stand on its own without the surprise; otherwise you lose your audience before you get to the hook. Sixth Sense works by itself without the surprise; the surprise just makes it better. That’s why The Village didn’t work for me. It’s just super boring until you find out the surprise.

So for a query, I’d stick to what people are going to experience before the reveal.

Attempting to read Robert Jordan

Wagner's music is better than it sounds. - Mark Twain

A colleague recommended I look at Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I am finding it strangely difficult to read. Overall, there is a lot here that feels heavily inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons: what I've heard called "generic fantasy." I.e. a world patterned on Medieval Europe plus monsters and sorcery, longing for a lost golden age, with some sort of generic Big Bad behind all the shenanigans.

But what stops me dead are the names. I stopped reading after I ran across a character named Mordeth who was promising to help the heroes. What are the odds that someone named "more death" is really bad? And so he was.

This is the Cruella Deville school of character naming, where if you listen carefully, you can guess who's evil.

Then there are the names that are just misspelled versions of names from the mythologies of Europe and the MidEast. The Big Bad is called Shaitan (Arabic for Satan). There are magical objects called "sa'angreal," which is a variation on "sangreal," the Old French for the Holy Grail. There is a servant of the Big Bad called Sammael, which is one of Lucifer's names (Samael, "Venom of God") with another "m" stuck in there for kicks. There's another servant of the Big Bad called something based on Asmodeus.

This is the Draco Malfoy school, which requires knowing another language. (Draco Malfoy is Latin/French for Dragon BadFaith.)

(Full disclosure: we have a character in We Happy Few called Nick Lightbearer. Lightbearer is of course "Lucifer" in English. The Devil is also known as Old Nick. So he's "Devil Devil." But in my defense it's the stage name of a rock singer who's trying to be bad. His real name is Norbert Pickles)

Like a lot of writers, I spend way too much time thinking about their character's names. I find it difficult to write a character without a name; searching for the name kicks up ideas about the character. If Sally Boyle had been called "Edith Finch," for example, she could not have been the same woman. Arthur Hastings could not have had the last name of Shepherd. So Jordan poaching names with old power, without necessarily using them to mean the thing those names refer to, bugs me. (There are also "angreals" and "ter'angreals" -- Jordan loves random apostrophes as much as metal bands like umlauts.)

Tolkien put a lot of writers on a dangerous track with his names. Sauron sounds a lot like it means a big lizard. Morgoth sounds like "more Goth." But he got to some of those names via legit old languages. "Gandalf" is literally Old Norse for "Wand-Elf."

Other names are from the languages he invented, complete with vocabularies and grammars. Elvish is based on, and sounds a bit like, Finnish. Galadriel means something like "Radiant Crown Daughter" (in Sindarin, "galad"=radiance, "rî" = crown, "iell" = daughter).

I like to say that "The audience doesn't know, but it knows." It knows when you get it wrong, or don't do your homework. A name built legitimately, by the processes that make names in real languages, sounds more convincing than a name made up by using scary sounds, or when you just poach words that you hope the audience sort of vaguely knows but doesn't really know.

But then, Tolkien was a linguist. His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight out of 14th C Middle English is still a classic. If he puts an apostrophe somewhere, you can bet it's an actual glottal stop (as in "Hawai'i").

None of this is to say that Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books are "objectively" bad. Who am I to judge? Obviously people love them, including my colleague. I am just trying to break down what bugs me about them, personally.

Fuzzy Dialog

In dialog, characters don't have to respond literally.

Bob: "Do we need cauliflower?"
Alice: "We're busy tonight, aren't we?" (Alice is assuming that Bob is thinking of going to the supermarket tonight.)

Player direction lines generally need to be straightforward. But I like to leave logical jumps between lines intended as drama.

Likewise, people often fail to process what the other person said immediately, or respond only to the surface level, and then catch up a few lines later.

Bob: "Red or white?"
Alice: "I'll just have soda water."
Bob: "Red would go with the steak."
Alice: "I'll go get the plates."
Bob: "Wait. Really?"

... which might be an overhead conversation between minor characters or NPCs, which the player may get the hidden meaning of, or not. If it's important for the audience or player to get the meaning, then wait a few lines for the people who got it to feel smart, then:

Bob: "Oh my God!"
Alice: "I peed on the stick this morning while you were asleep."

Likewise, people often respond to what they think they heard, or were scared of hearing, or wanted to hear, rather than what was actually said.

Dramatic dialog with these "flaws" feels human. It does demand a bit more attention. But that's a feature, not a bug. If you can get the audience or player to work a bit to process what they're hearing, they pull themselves emotionally into the scene.