Richard Dansky

By itself, an object tells you nothing. It is the context that tells you everything, the description and motion that lets that object become part of the story.

Take, for instance, an ambulance. By itself, it isn’t much. But put it on a busy freeway, lights flashing and moving a hundred miles an hour, and you have a story. Life and death, the skill of the driver, the race to the victim or the emergency room. The simple object full of possibility – for rescue, for tension, for a thousand things – has become part of a story.

Or, conversely put it somewhere else. Put it on the road, coming around the corner from the place you’re desperately trying to reach in time. Turn the sirens off, and the lights, too. Set it at normal driving speed, not the frantic plunge of a lifesaving sprint to the hospital.

Make sure it’s going in the wrong direction. Watch it go the other way.

That told me a story, too.

###

I don’t think my grandmother ever read any of my books. By the time I started getting published, her eyes weren’t the best any more. Besides, ghosts and vampires and magic swords weren’t really her speed. There were other books on the shelves of her house. Chaim Potok. James Herriot. Things like that, Some were hers, some were my grandfather’s. I never did ask who preferred which.

She had all of my books, though. They were displayed prominently, tiny paperbacks with purple werewolves on the cover tucked into a towering bookshelf in between the coffee table-sized monsters that discussed American Cut Glass and The History of Israel.

They meant a lot to her. And that meant a lot.

###

My mother wanted to write. She was good at it, won lots of awards in school. Once she told me about the time she accidentally walked out on stage to receive someone else’s writing award, simply because she and these other girls had won awards in the same order for so long (first, second, third) that it had become rote. When the order got switched up, just this once, she was already on autopilot and out on the stage.

If you know my mother, it’s hilarious. Trust me.

Mom stopped writing in college. She ran into a professor who didn’t like her work. He slammed it. It stopped her cold. To my knowledge, she hasn’t written since.

It means a lot to her that I write, even if it’s not necessarily the sort of thing she would prefer me to be writing. “When are you going to write something nice?” she’s asked me a few times. The fairy tale that I did as the intro to the second edition of a game called Changeling, lavishly illustrated by Rebecca Guay, remains her favorite thing that I’ve written. But what matters is that I write. I think she’s glad I didn’t give up on that dream, that when I ran into my own professor who critiqued my work with “We have nothing to say to one another,” I kept going. Or maybe she’s just happy I found something I genuinely love doing.

We found some of her writing, back when we were packing up the family house in Philadelphia in preparation for my parents’ move south. It was well preserved and hand-written, neatly scribed on a sheaf of lined paper.

I read it. It was good. Maybe if she’d ignored that professor, if she hadn’t stopped, things would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten the encouragement to write that I got from her. Maybe I would have gotten more, and found that particular calling sooner.

I don’t know.

It is what it is. But her writing’s still here, and it’s not too late for her to start again.

###

At a certain point after the death of a loved one, the stories blur. You become hesitant to tell them, because you’re not sure if they really happened that way or if that’s the way you wanted them to have happened. You pause before beginning the telling, afraid that you might not get it right, that you might accidentally offend through misremembering or dramatic license.

You worry that your memories of the one who’s gone fit with everyone else’s, and you become afraid. Afraid to share them. Afraid to risk adjustment to the cherished recall through someone else’s recollection that, no, that’s not what happened. Afraid that the discussion or disagreement will take precedence over the memory itself, and somehow subtly replace it, attach itself in association.

I have memories of my grandmother. Memories of her catching me stealing an extra piece of candy out of the bowl on her glass-top coffee table, and telling me I could have it but there’d no candy next time. Memories of asking her for her chicken soup recipe for the first time, and of her clueing me in to the true and sacred secret of the light and fluffy matzahball. Of asking her if it was OK to change the recipe, because my friend Ed had suggested – sacrilege! – adding shitakes to the mix. Memories of Thanksgivings and weekend visits. Memories of sitting quietly with her in the TV room, telling her what I’d been up to in the months since the last time I’d been able to get up to see her, and all the while her cat rubbed against my feet in hopes that I’d be the sort of sucker who knew where the cat treats were kept.

These memories may not be accurate. But they are mine, and they are true.

###

There are things in my house that came from my grandparents. Some are valuable. Some are not, at least not in the sort of way the marketplace values. Some I was told to take; a few tools, my grandfather’s whisky collection, things like that. A few were given to me, things it was decided I should have because I was the right one to have them.

And at the last, before my grandmother came south on what would be her final journey, I asked for one last thing. It was a tourist gewgaw, a bit of memorabilia that my grandparents had picked up on a trip to Spain. It was a stand, and a series of cocktail skewers done up to look like swords. Swept hilt, basket hilt, mock-gold and steel and inlay every color of the rainbow – all that, and maybe two inches long. Sharp enough to hurt if you jabbed someone with one with intent, tiny enough that a mock duel fought with them looked ludicrous, even when the hands clutching them belonged to children.

That’s what I asked for. My mother, who was helping my grandmother get ready for the trip, seemed surprised. She asked me why.

I told her it was because when I was a kid, all of us grandchildren would take those swords and pretend to duel, which wasn’t strictly true. Mainly, we poked one particular younger cousin with them, but that’s not why I asked for them. He’s bigger than me now, and in better shape, and if he remembers and decides he finally wants payback, I’m going to need more than cocktail skewers to protect me.

But really, that’s not it, either. The real reason is that they are indelibly fixed in my mind as being perfectly and utterly of that house, of that time, of my grandparents. Because every time I walked into that house, child or adolescent or man, I found myself reaching for them as I walked past the shelf where they stood, to reassure myself I was really there. Because I want that stories – all those stories, really – with me.

An object, imbued with time and place. Description, too, I hope. No motion, though. Not now. Maybe someday, and for someone else. But not now.

1-Where do you get your ideas?

Various famous author-types have tackled this one with answers as diverse as Schenectady (upstate New York), Utica (upstate New York) and “the world around me”, which can be boiled down to “everywhere, including upstate New York”. The correct answer, then, is “Upstate New York.” If you wish to become a serious writer, you should immediately sell all of your possessions, buy a charming bed-and-breakfast in the Finger Lakes region, and acquire a taste for Gennesee Cream Ale.

Either that, or find your own source of inspiration. I’m told it can be done as far south as Maryland.

2-I have a great idea for a novel. If I tell it to you, will you write it so we can share the profits?

No.

3-Could you write me into your next book?

With the exception of one specific former coworker, who asked to be included in one of my novels in the guise of a water nymph (and a less nymph-like fellow you cannot possibly imagine), the answer to this is almost invariably “No.” This is for one simple reason: if I do it, you will get mad at me over the results. I mainly write A)horror novels and B)video games wherein lots and lots of people get shot. If I write you into anything, odds are that the fictional version of you is going to die. Horribly. And then you’ll be mad.

4-Do you know what you should have done with your last book?

Two things. One, written it faster. Two, added more llamas. Llamas are a clear sign of quality. Anything else?

5-Can you get me a copy of [insert name of highly anticipated best-selling book] in advance, because you’re a writer? I know all of you writers hang out together.

Sadly, it’s true. J.K. Rowling actually lives around the corner, and frequently admonishes me to keep my cat out of her carefully tended begonias. We regularly go bowling with Mitch Albom, Clive Cussler, and P.G. Wodehouse (remarkably good English on his ball, especially for a dead guy) because all writers do in fact know each other by virtue of being in the same profession. As such, we are more than happy to randomly fling copies of books by any and every author out there around as requested, in a sort of Pacman Jones “making it rain hardbacks” scenario.

But, since reciprocity is only fair, I asked a friend of mine who’s an orthodontist if he could get me some free veneers from a cosmetic dentist in LA. Because, after all, they’re in the same business so they must know each other.

6-Seriously. Why don’t you want to write this awesome book I had the idea for?

Because my time is, sadly, finite, and I don’t have enough of it to write half of my own ideas.

Because your idea may or may not be that good, and if I tell you it isn’t, you’re going to get mad.

Because writing “your” idea means that you are invariably going to meddle in my writing process, which is going to make the writing process less enjoyable for both of us.

Because I like my ideas better.

Because I am a selfish jerk and unwilling to devote my time to your vision.

Take your pick.

7-I want to be a writer. What should I do?

Scientific studies have shown that roughly 86.4% of all people who ask questions about “how do I become a writer?” actually mean “How do I become a best-selling author without actually taking the time to sit down and write?” The answer, of course, is “make a sex tape and release it on the internet.” Unwanted side effects include the possibility of having multiple reality shows on E!, so consider yourself warned.

Actually sitting down and writing has proven to be a far less effective and far more time-intensive approach, but there are those who still insist on following it.

We have names for those sorts of people, but I’m not going to print them in a family blog.

8-Why do you write?

Because I’m lousy at math.

There are a couple of different types of people who don’t like the recent film adaptation of the graphic novel Watchmen. Some just don’t like it, either for its over-the-top violence or comic books-gone-wild subject matter. Some are hardcore graphic novel fanboys, who would only have found a movie satisfactory if it had consisted of loving close-ups of each panel in the book itself, narrated by Alan Moore as scantily-clad waitresses fed them skinless grapes and ambrosia.

(I’ll give you a minute to let that image dissipate. Terrifying, isn’t it?)

And then there’s the ones who just Don’t Get It. They don’t understand why the heroes aren’t heroic. They don’t understand how the superest of superheroes can’t actually manage to save the day, effortlessly. And they’re the ones who open pretty much every critique with a factoid from the film’s setting that they absolutely cannot get past: it’s 1985, and Richard Nixon is President. How can this be, they ask. It’s wrong! It’s not what happened (an amusing commentary about a narrative that asks one to accept the possibility of a nearly omniscient, blue, omnipotent nudist)! And so on and so forth, and they hang their dislike off of that first, initial peg. If the film got that wrong, goeth the logic, then the rest of it must be disregarded. Start on a bad foot and never find your way, or something to that effect.

Why does this seemingly minor detail of setting matter so much? It’s because it’s a signifier, and it means much more to the narrative than it would seem. The Nixon presidency, trumpeted early and often, signifies that this is not our world. It tells the viewer that this is a place where the crooked are in power, where power has been kept in the same hands for too long, where Tricky Dick got away with Watergate.

(Those who wish to dive deeper into the murky waters of literary criticism and postulate that the four-term Nixon administration posited in the graphic novel is also a subtle commentary on the implicit fascist motif inherent in the superhero narrative are welcome to do so. Just not right now.)

Why that signifier? There are lots of reasons. It’s because it’s a powerful one – Nixon is one of the most polarizing figures in American political history, one whose mere presence is enough to evoke a strong emotional response. It’s because it instantly contravenes the rules we all instinctively know and observe – Presidents get two terms, not four; Nixon is dead, not the President – and that simultaneously gets our attention while pointing out that things are indeed sub-optimal.

In short, it uses a variety of techniques to go straight to the literary equivalent of the lizard brain, where it jacks up an immediate response with no exposition necessary. In other words, it acts as a highly effective signifier.

Signifiers are shortcuts. They’re instantly recognizable symbols that tell the audience something big in quick shorthand. For example, the movie Taken opens with a scene of Liam Neeson’s character hanging out in his living room with some empty Chinese food cartons on the table. These are, of course, the standard Hollywood signifier for “sad and lonely single man” because, you know, sad and lonely single men can’t cook. And through this quick visual shorthand, the audience instantly understands that Neeson’s character doesn’t really care about himself, doesn’t really worry about keeping things up, and so forth – in other words, that he’s a divorced middle-aged dude who isn’t terribly happy. That preps us for all the exposition that follows, wherein we learn that he’s divorced, has a daughter he’s trying to reconnect with, retired from his job and doesn’t do much with himself, etc. – all summed up in those lonely, empty cartons.

And of course, it works for books, too. Think back to every steampunk novel you’ve ever read. What’s the first thing on the page? The zeppelin. Why? Because it’s a potent symbol of a time that isn’t now and never quite was, an easy signifier for the time before technology took off in its current direction, and most of all it’s big.

Not just physically big, either. It’s a statement about transportation, about technology, about the politics and culture and world necessary to support commercially viable zeppelins. All of that is bundled into that solitary image of the giant gasbag soaring over the skyline, which says “this world is not yours.”

When used properly, signifiers are a tremendous help. They take away the need for a great deal of lengthy up-front exposition by hauling out a bulk set of reader expectations. This in turn allows the writer to get to the important stuff, like where the zeppelin is going, or why precisely Liam Neeson is now a shiftless slob of an ex-secret agent.

Then again, they’re not always used properly. Signifiers can and often do go really wrong, in which case they engender far more work than they eliminate. The first is the choice of a signifier that doesn’t resonate well. If your choice of signifier doesn’t mean what you think it means to your audience, doesn’t immediately call up everything you want it to stand for, then you’re in trouble. Here’s where it makes sense to channel your inner Carly Simon and remember that it’s not all about you. It doesn’t matter that two of the shiftless middle-aged slobs you know share the trait of leaving DVDs out of their packages on the coffee table. That’s not something that’s perceived as a universal character trait, one that helps define a class of character (except, perhaps, “people who hate DVDs”). It’s something that defines the specific people you know, and the people outside of your immediate circle – who, ideally, will make up the bulk of your audience, unless you know a lot of people – won’t view it as anything other than one particular character’s quirkiness. The signifier must stand for something that is accessible, not just to you, but to anyone who might pick up the book. Individuate it too much in the quest to dodge cliché, and you wind up with something that isn’t a signifier at all.

And that brings us back to Watchmen, and its initial declaration of unreality in the form of the extended Nixon Presidency. In the graphic novel, it was largely left out there by itself, a “wait-a-minute” spit-take inducer for those reading the text carefully. The film, however, doesn’t trust the signifier to stand on its own, instead offering up an extended montage of the movie world’s alternate history over the opening credits, the better to gently prepare the audience for what comes next. It lacks the all-or-nothing wager on the image that the iconic signifier contains, but then again, in theory it leaves far less room for wiggle and misinterpretation and misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise, of the fact that this is indeed a corrupted alternate history. Ultimately, it’s a lesson in the power of strong signifying images to establish the terrain for a work, both for good and for ill. It’s also a cautionary tale for the would-be signifying writer to choose signifying moments and images carefully, and with good reason. A good signifier saves the writer a lot of less-interesting up-front work. A bad one runs the risk of poisoning the well for the rest of the project . And that’s all the more reason to be careful and sure when unleashing one.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go order some Chinese food to my hotel room. With luck, they’ll clean out the empty cartons in the morning.

Earlier this week, Gamasutra – the closest thing to an online industry bible that video game development possesses – listed me as one of the top twenty game writers in the world.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what “top” means, as opposed to “best”, “most notable”, or “most aggressively coiffured”, but I am aware that this is a signal honor, and one that I am both grateful and humble to have received.

There are names on the list who have created the stories for some of the most popular and most highly regarded games ever created. There are names on the list of people who made the games that inspired me when I first got into the industry, the folks whose shipped titles where the required reading of my education in game writing. I’m talking names like Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Psychonauts) and Marc Laidlaw (Half-Life), and I am not ashamed to say that I learned more about how to write for games from playing their work than from any other source. To be listed among them means a great deal.

A look through the list reveals an interesting mélange of writerly types. There are freelancers and in-house types. There are folks who’ve been the sole creative force behind projects and people who orchestrated teams. There are people who take projects from A to Z, and one surprised-looking scribbler who is best known “as being something of a professional ‘fixer’.” In short, no two people on the list have the same job. In many cases, they’re not even close, and that begs the question: what is a game writer, anyway?

Ask me what a game writer is and I honestly can’t tell you. Despite nine years in the business and having worked on more titles than I can generally recall, I don’t have a straight up-and-down definition of “game writer”, and neither, I think, does anyone else. The role varies from studio to studio, project to project, and team to team.

And no, this is not some “pity the poor game writer” elegy. The simple truth is that the nature of the job is fluid. This is in part because the nature of making games is fluid – compare the process used to create a Final Fantasy title with the one behind, say, Diner Dash – and in part because the role of writing within games is evolving as rapidly as it has since the days of text-only adventures and players regularly getting eaten by grues.

What I can tell you, though, is what a game writer does, and that’s write games. More specifically, it’s to do whatever writing a game needs, alone or with other writers and always in conjunction with the rest of the development team, to provide all of the writing the game needs. That can be dialog. That can be story. That can be in-game artifacts or scripts for pre-rendered cinematics or help text or manuals or God knows what else. I’ve written everything on that list and more besides, depending on project requirements.

The other thing I can tell you is that we’ve finally gotten to a point where you can say that you’re a game writer, and people will have a vague idea of what you’re talking about. They won’t assume you’re actually the designer. They’re aware that a game – even a game that doesn’t have twenty thousand lines of dialog – does in fact require writing, and that writing is a real and integral part of a game.

God help me, it almost feels like a real job.

Which, ultimately, brings me back to the Gamasutra list. Having read it back to front, and front to back again, I finally figured out what I liked best about it. No, not the fact that I was on it, though that certainly didn’t hurt. Recognition for the work one has done, when it comes from a source you respect and places you in the company of a great many people whose work you admire, means a great deal.

But what I liked best – and you can call me a Pollyanna, or a sap, or whatever the hell you want to – was the fact that in the debate below the article, there were a whole mess of other names that got proposed as folks whose work made them worthy of consideration for a list like this. (Whether they belong on it or not is not for me to say; I will merely note that I have enjoyed and admired the work of many folks who were not on the list, as well as the writers who were on it.)

That is what the political blogs like to call “having a deep bench”. More specifically, it means that there are a lot of game writers out there whom folks are aware of by name (as opposed to “that guy that wrote the game with the guns”). It means that there are a lot of game writers whose work people think is worthy of being held up for praise, and who by extension are considered praiseworthy practitioners of their craft. In plain English, there’s a lot of us out there. There’s more every day, and we’re getting better at what we do.

A couple of years ago, I did a Storytellers piece on the inaugural Game Writers Conference, now subsumed into the Austin Game Developers’ Conference. I talked about how it was exciting being there at the moment when we all walked into the big room and saw a bunch of other game writers there, how it was a stunningly good feeling to know that we weren’t alone, to find a community. I believe I even said something suitably gloopy about how it felt like the beginning of something that would only get bigger.

Well, it was. It has. Next month, the IGDA Game Writers’ Special Interest Group releases its third collaborative book on game writing, something that would have been unimaginable just a couple of years ago – not because of the concept of a third book on game writing, but rather because there are now more than enough qualified contributors to fill out a book like that. Competition for a spot on the next iteration of that list is just going to get tougher. As someone who selfishly likes seeing his name in lights, I could potentially see that as a bad thing. But as someone who cares about the development of his craft, I can’t help but look forward to it.

The last time I wrote about reviews, one of the discussions that felt out of it (both here and elsewhere) was the easy confusion between negative reviews and bad ones. There’s a reason for that; most negative reviews are also bad reviews, in the sense that a “bad” review is one that doesn’t do a very good job of being a review. Bad reviews generally fill one of two functions. If they’re positive, they reinforce the reviewer’s fannish appreciation of the book in question; if they’re negative, they’re about the reviewer being clever. In neither case are they actually about the merits or lack thereof of the book in question, and thus as such they fail as reviews. At best, they’re opinions, but since they don’t touch on the material in a real, interesting, or serious way, they’re not really reviews.

Of the two, bad negative reviews are more common and more interesting to talk about. In part, this is because it’s a lot harder to write a negative review well than it is a positive one. After all, if a book is good, then there’s lots of evidence for the thesis of the review stating that – good characterization, elegant language, really racy sex scenes, whatever. It’s not easy, but it’s certainly achievable to do a credible job of writing a positive, useful review simply by putting together the evidence and capping it off with “this is why it’s good. Now go read it.”

A well-written negative review, however, is tougher. It’s fun and easy to go kamikaze and show off – something I freely confess to having been guilty of on occasion, when I was young and foolish and untrammeled by pangs of conscience – as detailed in the last piece in this occasional series. What’s hard to do is to lay out, as a reviewer, a well-reasoned, informative argument as to why a book deserves a negative rating in such a way that the reading audience is served.

After all, that is the purpose of a review, to educate the audience as to whether a particular book is worthy of purchase. It’s not to make up their minds for them. It is, however, to provide them with a solid framework to base a key decision on: to read or not to read, to buy or not to buy. That means that even a negative review – indeed, especially a negative review – has to provide that framework, that context that allows the reader of the review to decide whether or not they want to become the reader of the book.

The framework in question consists of three parts: judgment, evidence, and counterarguments. This is not to say that every negative review needs to be or should be structured in a cookie-cutter fashion, hitting those three in turn. It just means that’s what I’ve come to consider the important stuff, the things I try to get into pretty much every negative review I write so as to ensure it is fair, useful, and in-depth.

Read more…

Most of my best writing teachers have been books.

Since graduating high school, I have taken precisely one formal full-length writing course. It was entitled “Writing For the Stage”, an undergraduate seminar at Wesleyan taught by an irascible Mancunian poet named Tony Connor. I learned a great many things from Professor Connor, not the least of which was what it sounds like when you try to get Harold Pinter out to the pub for a pint. What I didn’t learn in this, the last extended writing instruction I’d ever receive, was much about the writing of prose. (Drama, yes. Prose, no. And the less said about the discussion in English 201 about “Alien Death Fleet”, the better.)

What that meant, ultimately, that most of what I learned about writing came from other teachers, ones who didn’t dwell in classrooms. It came from editors like Ed Hall at White Wolf, who was the first one to make me think about word choice as it related to character motivation. It came from writers like Storytellers’ own Janet Berliner and Jim Moore, who took me under their respective wings, poked and prodded at the writing I showed them, and lovingly eviscerated my work in a way that helped make it – and me – better.

But mostly, it came from books. It came from reading endlessly and finding things on the page that I could learn from, that I wanted to achieve and knew that I couldn’t, at least not yet. It came from finding authors who were no-doubt-about-it better than I was and reading them twice; once for pleasure, and once to dissect what they did in hopes of getting a glimmer of how they did it.

Then I’d try it, and fail, and try again. Mind you, I suspect that in most cases, I’m failing still. Now, though, I know enough to try, and that means a great deal.

And so, on this Thanksgiving, here’s a list of ten authors whose work I am thankful for, for they have been my teachers. They are not the only writers I have learned from or enjoyed or admired; indeed, far from it. But they are, however, the ones whose writing set off singular lightning bolts of what I devoutly hope is understanding, and for that, I can only express my appreciation.

• Charles L. Grant, whose descriptions could only be called impressionistic, and who could gracefully paint a scene in a handful of words without losing a single detail.
• John Myers Myers, whose Silverlock serves as a constant reminder of the joy of telling stories, and how those stories can resonate and mingle.
• Julian May, whose juggling of immense dramatis personae provided the key to infusing even minor characters with distinct personalities and memorable roles.
• H.P. Lovecraft, for demonstrating the art of describing without description, the definition of what something is not being much more effective than a clinical recitation of what something is.
• Raymond Chandler, whose Simple Art of Murder is a masterclass of calling bullshit on all the writerly tricks that are so tempting to use and abuse.
• Thomas Ligotti, whose phrasing drove me to commit attempted euphony, and with malice aforethought.
• Manly Wade Wellman, for providing an object lesson on how regional dialect and color can be much more than mere window dressing – and harsh reminders on the importance of getting it right.
• T.E.D. Klein, for inducting me, all unknowing, into the cult of the well-meaning nebbish protagonist. I remain a faithful devotee to this day.
• Tim Powers, whose lesson to me was that you don’t have to make it all up, not when the real world has already provided such astonishingly rich source material. Obvious in hindsight, yes, but earth-shattering to someone raised on the graph-paper-and-funny-name school of epic fantasy novels the size of cinderblocks.
• Stephen King, for the constant reminder that in amidst the blood and thunder, what actually matters in a horror novel is not the monster, nor the gore, nor the hypothetical special effects budget, but instead the people.

For all these, and for many others, I am thankful. But most of all, I am thankful that class is still in session and always will be; that there are still authors out there to be discovered whose works I can learn from, and new works from authors I know that I have not yet explored.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some homework to do. And yes, I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve talked about writing reviews before in this space, but, upon further (ahem) review, I realized that my work in that regard was not quite finished. Sure, I’d talked about what I thought was important in a review, and John B. Rosenman had posted an excellent essay about his reviewing techniques, but I realized I’d left out the most important thing.

I’d forgotten to talk about how to write a bad review. Not an unfavorable one, mind you – a bad one. A book review that completely and utterly fails to do the most basic job of a book review, which is to talk about whether or not the book is worth your (the reader’s) while.

Now I’m not talking about critique here. That’s a whole other kettle of fish, and not at all what I’m interested in here. Bad critique, I’ve found, often has the twin drawbacks of being simultaneously boring and incomprehensible, and thus is rarely read by anyone not in the critic’s or author’s immediate families.

But reviews, well, those are out there – especially the bad ones. And so, in the interests of saving future bad reviewers everywhere the effort of re-re-re-inventing the twin-belted radial tire, I humbly present what, in my opinion, are the keys to getting it done.

(Not that I’ve ever done any of these. Nope. Never.)

1-Make sure the review is all about you.

Focus on any connection you might have to the work, no matter how slight. Discuss where you were when you read it, as well as how you felt, what you were wearing, what Arcade Fire song you were listening to at the time, and which particular mutant subset of “coffee” you were drinking as you skipped to the end and read the last chapter. After all, a book review should not be about the book. It should be about the reviewer.

2-Expound extensively on what you would have done if you’d written the book instead

This is key. What the author did is really just a starting point for people who are much, much smarter – say, reviewers, or slash fanfic writers eager to insert Jean-Luc Picard into any situation imaginable – to show what the book should have been. It’s particularly important to get this out there in a review, because odds are the review’s going to be the first thing someone reads about the book, and you get to stake your claim to it before anyone else.

3-Be clever. Be really, really clever.

Everyone knows the real reason to write book reviews is to get one of your lines quoted and used on a dust jacket. So, dig deep and find your wittiest witticisms. Torture your syntax. Bring your most obscure metaphors out of cryogenic storage and gene-splice them to obscure references worthy of peak-period Dennis Miller. And above all, make sure that you drop as many as you can into one-sentence paragraphs, so they can stand out.

Like this.

Or this.

Shorter and sweeter than a sample-size mandarin orange crème brulee made by angels in the pastry kitchen of heaven.

You get the idea.

4-Dogpile on the rabbit

If you don’t like a book, don’t bother with analysis as to why you don’t feel it’s worthwhile. Certainly don’t take the time to explore what might be positive in the book, or what other readers might enjoy. Accentuating the positive, and what might be worthwhile in future works from the author is a mug’s game. Get out your junior-grade Wolverine strap-on claws and start ripping. The wordier and more verbose you are, the better. The more savage and cutting your slams, the more likely you are to get quoted on message boards, and to have your cleverness reaffirmed by the patrons thereof.

This is particularly important if someone else has slammed the book, or if someone you don’t like has praised it. The former starts the always-popular game of “Who can get in the nastiest one-liner”, while the latter demonstrates your superior taste in a way that taking your toys and going home can no longer quite accomplish.

5-Let the concept take you higher

Writing a precise yet detailed description of what a book is like can be hard work, often requiring multiple attempts. Instead, it’s a lot easier to describe it as “X meets Y”. If you’re feeling particularly energetic, you can go as far as to say “X meets Y in Z”, where Z is the setting from a third property you’ve read recently. It doesn’t really matter if the signifiers you’ve picked to establish your high concept are appropriate or not. What matters is that they’re popular, and that they’re a sufficiently incongruous that mixing the two engages the review-reader’s curiosity. So, for example, you can call Tim Powers’ Last Call “The Golden Bough meets Season 2 of C.S.I.”, which is about as appropriate as calling Jaws a movie about summer in Long Island, and produce a sufficiently unique mental image to consider your job well done.

The key, of course, is adding these references without providing a single bit of supporting evidence as to why they might appropriate. It’s far better to leave them dangling out there like anglerfish lures for the unwary, and besides, supporting evidence can mess up your sentence flow.

6-Cliches for the win!

Certain phrases, in addition to saving you valuable thinking time, are guaranteed winners. These include:

• “On steroids”
• “On acid”
• “Goes up to eleven”
• “The new Stephen King”
• “Like a video game”

If you can combine more than one in a phrase such as “like a video game on steroids, with elements that go up to eleven”, you get bonus points. And possibly a souvenir t-shirt.

7-Review something besides what you’re reviewing

Let’s face it, you don’t always get to review what you want. You may be jonesing for the chance to unleash your critical eye on the latest Stephanie Meyer or Lewis Shiner, but instead, what lands in your lap might be Book 6 of the Hootenanniad, an epic fantasy of basketball-playing elves waging eternal war against the restless evil of orcish tax accountants. Despair not, however – there’s a way out. All that it takes is a link, no matter how tenuous, from the book you are reviewing to the one you want to review, and presto, you’re on preferred ground.

It’s simple, really. Pick a transition like, “Contrast this to how this author I like much better did it in this book I like much better”, and you’re off and running. Or, there’s always, “this character brings to mind comparisons with this other character I like more, who has all these really cool attributes”, and away you go.

8-Write incredibly flattering reviews of anthologies by editors whose future anthologies you want to get invited into.

Because they never, ever, ever notice when you do that.

9-Facts are for wimps, and grammar is for commies

I’m sure there are places out there where facts matter, but book reviews aren’t one of them. Or any of them. Or some of them.

Feel free to plow straight through to your point without bothering to check whether you’ve gotten minor details right, like, say, character names, the title of the book, or what actually happens along the way. If someone’s reading the review, they know what you’re talking about anyway.

The same goes for grammar. You’re telling someone about a book here, damnit, and what’s important is that you get across your feelings. If the rules of syntax and grammar can’t contain the gushing wells of literary passion that this particular read has inspired in you, then the hell with them! Publish, or at least blog, and be damned!

10-Write long

After all, a review that isn’t a significant fraction of the length of the book itself can’t possibly give you an in-depth analysis of what’s going on there. The purpose of a review isn’t to discuss whether something’s good or bad, or worth the reader’s time. It’s to provide a detailed version of “and then this happened.” Think of it as liveblogging Jane Eyre, and you’re on the right track.

11-It’s not a spoiler, it’s a scoop

You have a responsibility to your readers to protect them from any surprises that the book might offer. That’s why you regard it as your duty to unleash and any all major spoilers the book might contain in the first paragraph of your review, the better to cushion readers against the shock that comes later. Dumbledore dies? The cute boy is really a vampire? Drizz’t Do’Urden is actually the grandson of Oberon of Amber? That’s the sort of news that people can’t wait for! By getting that information out there, you’re doing your readers a service, and they will love you for it.

And so will the authors.

12-Leave ‘em guessing

Do that, and they’ll come back for more, or a least that’s the theory. It’s not important to actually let the reader know what you thought about the book. It’s not even important to state whether or not you think it’s worth reading. All of that brings your writing back down to a merely commercial level, and besides, it pins you down. It’s far better to offer random bits of observation without wrapping them in the straightjacket of an actual opinion.

Then again, it might not be.

The most important lesson I learned while working in a bookstore was taught to me by smut-loving nuns. In so many words, they taught me that people enjoy reading what they enjoy, and that trying to “elevate” them to your particular taste was a foolhardy and condescending endeavor.

The second most important lesson I learned had to do with betting against a sure thing, particularly where a waiter at a downtown bar and a lovely undergrad majoring in massage therapy are involved, but that’s another story.

The third most important lesson, though, is one that is pertinent to being a writer, and is in several senses a corollary to Lesson #1. Specifically, it’s the idea that it’s a lot easier to get people to expand their reading habits one step at a time than it is to change them, and that people are in fact genuinely interested in having someone else give them a reason to read a book.

Sound strange? It seemed strange to me, too, until I realized that the first part of that could be summed as “if you like X, then you’ll like Y”. Amazon.com, among others, use this to great effect, but it’s most important at the personal, and thus interpersonal level. After all, Amazon’s approach is an algorithm spit out of a faceless supercomputer buried somewhere beneath the Martian North Pole and guarded by an army of zombie space wombats[1], while a recommendation from a bookstore clerk comes from someone you theoretically stand a chance of having at least a conversational relationship with.

In practical terms, what this meant for me back in the day was waiting for my regular customers to plow through all of a particular author they liked, and then recommending someone else in a similar vein. If they were Stephen King readers who’d at long last come to the end of our immense King collection, I suggested Brian Lumley or Dan Simmons (and I’d specifically recommend Simmons’ Summer of Night, which in my humble opinion is about as King-like a book as one might find in his oeuvre). Why? Because it was a relatively safe bet to extrapolate their tastes in that direction once I’d been observing their purchases for a while, because they were genuinely good books I thought they’d like, and because they were both authors whom we stocked fairly extensively, so the readers could work up a good head of steam and get excited about their new author without needing to find another one too soon.

And it worked. Even if those same readers had pulled a Necroscope book off the shelf, looked at it, and put it back, once I talked to them and made the connection to what they already liked, they went back and picked it up. Nine times out of ten, they liked it, told me they liked it, and kept reading that author.

All of which was great, of course. It made my manager happy, because we were selling books. It made my regulars happy, because I was finding them new authors and keeping them fed with new books. And it made me happy, because, well, it was fun playing bookshelf alchemy, mixing and matching and generally coming up with gold.

I did realize, however, that what I was doing and what they were getting were two different things. What I was doing was extending their reading and purchasing habits through observation and extrapolation, relying on their trust of my taste and the fact that I “knew” them as readers. What they were getting was, in many cases, something that could only be called a benediction, someone else’s blessing to check out the book and a second opinion when they didn’t entirely trust their own.

Digression: While working in that bookstore, the other clerks and I observed what we jokingly called the Pattern of Picking Purchase

1. If the book was face-out and the cover was appealing, the reader might pick it up.
2. If they picked it up, they might scan the front cover for the title, the author, and any blurbs that might have made it to that side of the spine.
3. If they liked the cover, they might flip it over to read the back-of-book blurb.
4. If they liked the back-of-book blurb, then they might be interested enough to crack the book open and read a few pages.
5. And if they liked those few pages, they might then buy the book.

Five steps, each of which required time, each of which had attrition along the way. It was much easier, then, and more effective, to talk to the customer[2], get a sense of what they were after and provide, as needed, a summary and a recommendation. In other words, we jumped to the end, gave them the condensed version of what they were in many cases looking for.

On one level, it was a hard sell. On another, it was a genuine attempt to connect people with books they would enjoy. And on a third, it was a basic recognition of the fact that a lot of our customers simply didn’t know where to go next with their reading, and appreciated guidance from folks who were presumably experts.

There’s nothing new there, of course. After all, that’s why they put blurbs on the cover; it’s advice from experts. If you like what I write, it stands to reason that you’ll probably like what I blurb, or so goes the theory. Again, though, there’s something much more immediate and telling when the recommendation comes from a bookseller the reader knows. Book buyers tend to be regulars, and that means that they potentially form at least nodding acquaintances with the folks at the stores they frequent[3]. They trust those booksellers to know their tastes and to know what’s on their shelves, and to be able to put those two things together. Tap into that as a reader, and you have a reliable, personal source for good books. Tap into it as a bookseller, and you have happy repeat customers who keep coming around, because you rarely steer them wrong. And if you can tap into it as an author, you’re doing something very smart and potentially expanding your voice in a thousand different places where you can’t be.

Because if the booksellers know and like your work, they’re that much more likely to recommend it to their regular and valued customers. And from where the customers are sitting, if their trusted booksellers are recommending a book, it’s because it’s damn well worth the read.

So mock the lowly bookstore clerk at your peril, would-be authors near and far. For all the whiz-bangery at online booksellers’ disposal, it is still the individual bookseller – one who is not lowly at all – who has the direct and trusted line to the reader, one that has been slowly and carefully established in a million different cases. It is far better to go to as many stores as you can, to talk to the booksellers there as the respected professionals who will in fact be purveying your book to the public, and to get them interested in what you are doing.

After all, if they’re good at their jobs, they’re going to be asked by their loyalists, “What should I read next?” There’s no reason the answer can’t, or shouldn’t – when appropriate – be you.

Memory hits in the damndest places.

Halfway across the Atlantic, for example. It’s the day after a business trip to Paris, and I’m bone-weary. The flight is full; no empty seats for stretching out this time, and the woman in front of me had reclined her seat into my lap even before takeoff. A coworker’s got the seat next to mine, intent on her portable DVD player and hoping vaguely that nobody’s seated a kid where they can see the gory vampire shenanigans unfolding onscreen. The in-flight movie’s a non-starter, not with the back-of-seat screen shoved down roughly to the level of the oddly shaped pizza that passes for an in-flight meal.

So I doze. A baseball podcast I’ve heard five or six times before loops on my headphones, lulling me to sleep with promises of slugging third basemen who’ve reported to camp in the best shape of their life. Outside, it’s a grey airplane wing keeping me from seeing grey clouds over grey water. I close my eyes and try to sleep, wearily aware that the 5AM wakeup call I’d set for myself was midnight back home, that the trip had been too short for anything but wallowing in jet lag, and that I normally don’t go to bed until two hours, body clock time, after the damnable French alarm clock had gotten me up.

(A note to the curious traveler: French hotel rooms almost never feature clocks, alarm or otherwise. They have television sets with clocks and alarms built into their bases, and said television is generally plugged into the one available wall socket near whatever passes for a desk and thus serves as an appropriate spot for a laptop. If you’re going to use your laptop, you must first unplug the television/clock/alarm. This leads to untold quiet panic when you finish, plug the TV back in, and attempt to reset the clock manually so as to avoid the possibility of setting it wrongly, oversleeping, missing your plane, and being stranded in France without  any clean socks as a result. This somehow never ends up being a problem, however, as the sheer worry over the possibility of a possibly incorrect clock translates nicely to a night full of panic-stricken awakenings every fifteen minutes until the sun comes up. But I digress.)

And so I doze, and I remember a night, fifteen years gone. It’s nothing special, I’m afraid, just a memory of driving around a part of Boston called Allston on a rainy fall night, trying to find a parking space near a friend’s house.

Then I wake up, and I think about what had just crawled out of my subconscious. There was no particular reason for this memory to emerge, nothing on the trip that would invoke it. There was nothing coming up that would summon it, either – no trips to Boston, no visits to the friend’s house I was seeking in memory. Hell, it wasn’t even the right time of year.

So I thought about it for a while, and eventually dozed back off, right back into that same memory. Back into the bare black tree trunks along the narrow streets, slick with rain as water dripped off the branches. Back into the long straight drive along the cemetery wall that marked the edge of the neighborhood, with the distant sound of the Commonwealth Avenue traffic whispering on through. Back to shining, cold streets twisting and turning past too-tall, too-thin houses squeezed in against one another like an overcrowded bookshelf. Back to a moment and a time long gone, one that hadn’t seemed particularly significant when it happened.

At that point I shook myself awake again at that point, a bit confused, a bit restive. There was a bit of brow-furrowing as I tried to figure out why this particular memory had chosen this particular moment. Nothing about it stood out; I seemed to recall that at the time, I was mostly more irritated than anything else over the complete and utter lack of parking to be had. I was late, or at least I remembered being late, and being irritated with myself for precisely that reason. And being late, and being on the hunt for parking, I spent those moments staring at the serried rows of cars that wrapped up both sides of those Allston streets. I didn’t look at those trees. I didn’t look at that cemetery wall.

Or at least, I didn’t think I did. Yet here they were, vivid in memory, in imagination.

I stayed up for a while, played for a little while on my Nintendo DS, read a bit of one of the books I’d brought with me. Put on my iPod, too, with fancy noise-reduction headphones and a whole lot of writing music on the hard drive. All of that bought me an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and then I was out again, back in Allston, a passenger in memory.

Truth be told, I was no closer to figuring out why that memory had emerged. As I write this, I must confess, I still don’t know. What I do know is that all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that memory was there for the taking. White streetlamps reflected off the road, purple clouds scudding overhead, sidewalks humping up at odd angles because of over-aggressive tree roots – all of them were available. I didn’t remember seeing any of this at the time, but clearly I did, clearly I had, because now it was all there for the taking. Yes, the memory of annoyance lingered, along with hints of panic and urgency and oh-Jesus-I’m-late-again-and-they’re-gonna-kill-me. But that’s not what matters now. What I see, what I remember are those black branches, twisted in the thin bits of moonlight. It’s the solitary man walking his dog, seeing me cruise by and turning away. It’s the hiss of tape in the cassette deck and water under the tires,  the creak of worn-out windshield wipers and the thunk of a suspension that was never made for Boston potholes.

And all of that is now available, waiting to be summoned up again. It’s a memory I didn’t know I had, of things I didn’t realize I’d seen. But they were there, surely enough, real enough to be picked up out of the corner of my eye and kept against the day when they were needed, or wanted, or perhaps just worth taking a look at once again. I’m sure I’ll find a use for those trees sooner or later. Maybe not in the book I’m working on now, maybe not for a while, but they’re in the inventory, there to be called upon when I need them. The same goes for the sounds of that night, and for the wet stone wall with its locked cemetery gates and array of empty beer bottles standing sentinel up top, and for every other bit of that evening that’s told me it was important enough to stay with me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

I’m sure there are other memories like that, waiting for their moment to emerge, using their own inscrutable logic to decide when they’re needed. I’ll welcome them, and look forward to revisiting what they have to show me. I’ll look forward to seeing what they can give me for the next story, or the one after, the found gems of memory that I didn’t know I needed at the time. The readers need never know where those pinched, angular houses came from, or how that cemetery gate was just a flash in a rearview. They don’t need to know, and they never will. It’s enough that I do, and that for whatever reason, at whatever time, I remembered where to look for them.

Imagine, if you will, a movie.

A really dreadful movie.

A movie wherein no cut in the trailer lasts more than three seconds, wherein explosions and car chases and wirework kung fu abound. A movie that doesn’t go more than five minutes in between action sequences, in part to hide the fact that you could fit the plot summary in that apocryphal fly’s navel next to a producer’s heart, all the sincerity in Hollywood, and three medium-sized caroway seeds.

Got a mental picture of that movie? Good. Now take a mental picture of the reviews of that movie, at least the ones that don’t include the word “AWSUM!!!” Five bucks says somewhere in there, you find the following phrase evoked as a perjorative:

“Video game”.

And man, that pisses me off.

“Written like a video game” has become the lazy movie reviewer’s shorthand for “bad and full of things that explode.” If it’s fast, loud, and primarily action-driven, it gets slapped with the “video game” label, generally by a reviewer whose most recent interaction with video games came when he accidentally wrapped the cord on his Intellivision controller around his kid brother’s neck.

OK, maybe that’s being a bit unkind, but the underlying truth is there. Games, and in many cases specifically game writing, are constantly being compared to movies and in every instance dismissed as inferior. As a working game writer, I find this infuriating. Not because I think every line of dialogue I’ve written, every “arrgh” and “yargh” and “He’s up on the roof!” is pure unvarnished gold, but because when I do game writing, I do game writing, and having my work and the work of all of my peers dismissed out of hand on a false premise really gets the old Hulk muscles working.

What’s that, you say? False premise? But surely it’s not a false premise. Games are just…games. Their storylines, characters, and writing can’t hold a candle to movies like The Godfather and The Seventh Seal[1].

Well, no, not when you put it that way, and that’s part of the problem.

As Roger Ebert so famously noted, games aren’t great movies. To this, I can only say “no kidding” (hey, it’s a family blog, or I’d be saying something a hell of a lot more emphatic). Furthermore, I’d like to point out that Copelia makes a lousy NFL highlight film, The Faerie Queene is a piss-poor haiku, and, in the words of Bioware Austin lead writer Daniel Erickson, Citizen Kane is a craptacular ballet. Video games make lousy movies for one very simple reason: They Are Not Movies. Dismissing them for what they are not is illogical, nonsensical, and lazy.

Unconvinced? Let’s look at the basics. Movies generally run between ninety minutes and two and a half hours. They are a passive media, wherein the only audience participation you’re likely to see involves someone drunkenly throwing toast at Tim Curry’s cinematic avatar and doing the Timewarp on cue. They are also rigid in their presentation; what’s filmed and on the reel is what the movie is. For all that the audience at a slasher flick might yell “Don’t go down in the basement!”, if that’s the way it’s filmed, the nubile young babysitter is still going to wander down into the root cellar for her messy appointment in her own personal Samara, and that’s just the way that it goes.

Standard console or PC video games, on the other hand, get pillaged in reviews if they come in under eight hours of gameplay. They are immersive and interactive, with player choice being absolutely meaningful every step of the way. That, after all, is what makes it a game – players making difficult and meaningful choices, and dealing with or being rewarded for having made those choices.

In game design, we call this “hunting the unknown fun,” but that’s neither here nor there. What does matter is that even the most cursory examination reveals that movies are games are two entirely different beasts. Why, then, are games constantly pilloried for not being movies?

Part of it is that movies are seen as being the closest thing to video games, which is, of course, hooey. Part of it is cinema’s cultural dominance as a media form, where by dint of omnipresence, box office and ease of use, it’s become the default media for discussion, the prism through which everything else gets viewed. As a result, everything else suffers by contrast, because movies automatically have the home-field advantage in any comparative discussion.

What that means, though, is that when you’re looking at game writing in that way, you’re trying to fix a busted carburetor with an oil gauge and a cheese grater. Game writing, by definition, needs to take into account the player and his actions. It needs to allow the player to be the protagonist, and to support the immersive experience of play. And it needs to be understood in that context, as part of the gameplay experience, and not as a movie where the player occasionally waggles the joystick once in a while. This has to be understood, otherwise, you’re shortchanging yourself and the game, and neither of you deserves that kind of treatment.

Now bear in mind that I’m not saying that all game writing is brilliant and misunderstood, the fourteen year old emo kid of the artistic world just waiting in the corner for someone to give it a hug. Hell, I’m not even saying most of it is; Sturgeon’s Law holds for game writing as well. God knows I’m sick unto death of hard-bitten space marines and gruff unshaven ex-mercenaries and the third-act reverse where the bad guy captures you and takes away all your hard-earned inventory. Then again, one of the reasons I’m sick of that stuff is because they were movie clichés before they got transplanted into games without any adaptation to the new medium. Or, to put it another way, when the bad guys capture Indiana Jones and go through his pockets onscreen, it doesn’t provoke an angry response from me because I haven’t invested hours and hours of time filling those pockets with stuff that I can on some level consider to be mine. That’s my stuff you’re taking, not Indy’s, without letting me do anything about, and you’re doing it in a medium that’s all about what I can in fact do. That’s where the cracks start to show, the seams in the movie narrative model pasted over immersive gameplay.

Give us your poor and hungry, movies, but your tired we can do without; we’re still in the process of inventing our own tropes and conceits and language of storytelling, and the pure cinema elements plunked down reflexively can sometimes be stumbling blocks in that necessary and ongoing process.

Ultimately, what I am saying is that there’s no way we’re ever going to be able to have a useful discussion about what is good game writing and what isn’t if the default definition of “good game writing” is “like a movie” and the default description for “bad movie” is “like a video game.” You might as well constantly downgrade a burger joint for its failure to serve sushi.

Instead, we need to get to a place where we understand storytelling in games well enough to discuss intelligently and well. We need to figure out what good game writing is within the context of games, and not simply try to cram them into a movie-shaped box. Movies are great…at being movies. Video games aren’t, nor should they be. Deep down, you knew that already.

And that movie we were talking about up top? It’s a movie, and by all accounts, it sounds like it would make a lousy game.

 

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[1] Whether they can hold a candle to Godfather 3 is a question that gets asked a lot less frequently. The logic behind this argument is that video games haven’t matched the crème de la crème of movies in providing a suitably Aristotelian experience, with the comparison then made between the best film has to offer and the middle-to-bottom of gaming’s barrel. I suppose it could be turned on its head easily enough; if anyone wants to compare the writing in Glitter and Good Luck Chuck with, say, that of Grim Fandango or BioShock, I’ll take that action in a heartbeat.