A Second Opinion

I’m one of the West Coast’s least active science fiction/fantasy writers. Four years ago, after a very long hiatus, I did sit down and write some new stories. Three of them I sold, to the usual magazines (Asimov’s, F&SF). The others, disappointingly, didn’t sell. I went on to other things.

This week, for reasons too convoluted and not interesting enough to dwell on, I pulled out one of the unsold stories from 2008 and did a thorough rewrite. I could see immediately (as I had not seen at the time) why it didn’t sell. I have a tendency to pull my punches, emotionally. The resolution of the story was just too easy. The main characters didn’t have to work very hard to overcome their difficulties.

I think the rewrite is probably a lot better. It also grew from 7,000 to 12,000 words, which is an inconvenient length. It probably won’t sell at that length, no matter how much improvement I’ve wrought. That doesn’t concern me too greatly, because I certainly don’t plan to try to whittle it down to 5,000 words. What does concern me is that I don’t quite know how to get feedback from knowledgeable writers that would help me gauge whether the new version has succeeded.

One of my friends is an unpublished writer of what I guess you could call serious mainstream fiction. She has attended a couple of the summer writing workshops at the University of Iowa, and says she got a lot out of them. But I have also heard her voice frustration that the participants in the workshops didn’t always grasp

Look Through Telescope

Yesterday I summarized the problem: The existing delivery systems for interactive fiction (a.k.a. text adventure games) are mired in the 1980s. The early 1980s. Today I’d like to toss out a few ideas about what, ideally, ought to happen in order to bring the presentation of IF forward into the 21st century.

Broadly, there are two ways to move forward: either a massive extension of an existing authoring system, or an entirely new system. Both courses are fraught with difficulties; neither is a stroll in the park.

Let’s take a brief look at the characteristics such an authoring system would, ideally, have. The list below is not intended to be exhaustive — I may have left something out. It’s intended to serve as a starting point for discussion.

1. The games produced using the new system should be playable, and with an essentially identical appearance and functionality, in MacOS, Windows, Linux, and mobile platforms.
2. Convenience for the end user should be emphasized. The user should not have to download and install separate interpreter software or a self-contained app.
3. The authoring system itself should be available on all three desktop platforms, and without too great compromises in terms of utility. (No use of a command-line compiler should be required in one OS, for instance, if it’s not required in another.)
4. The author should have

It’s a Big, Wide, Wonderful World

Recently a couple of threads have popped up on the interactive fiction forum proposing that interested parties write games set in shared worlds. The worlds to be shared were set forth in some detail. As it happens, I found one of the proposed scenarios rather evocative, the other less so. But that hardly matters; I already have a few ideas of my own that I’d like to develop.

What struck me was how easy it is to spin out phantasmagorical ideas for a shared world — and how much more difficult it is to craft an engaging story.

When she wrote an introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley described the little contest that gave rise to the novel. Lord Byron had proposed that he, Percy Shelley, Mary, and a certain Dr. Polidori, who were cooped up in a house in Switzerland owing to an incessant and altogether fortuitous siege of summer rain, each write a ghost story. “Poor Polidori,” she tells us, “had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was punished for peeping through a key-hole — what to see I forget: something very shocking and wrong of course … The illustrious poets, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.”

And then she says, “I busied myself to think of a story.” (The italics are hers.) That sentence has been a touchstone for me for a very long time.

Storytelling is surely one of the oldest of art forms — and unlike painting and music, its essentials probably haven’t changed much, if at all, in the last hundred thousand years. The most exotic and elaborately imagined world will fall flat if it isn’t animated by a compelling story.

Abstract vs. Concrete

Yesterday I was reading up on the Javascript programming language. Then after supper I resubscribed to Netflix and watched the first four episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, back to back. Both activities were fun, but the contrast was noticeable.

Why Javascript? Because I’ve been looking into the possibility of presenting interactive stories in a web browser. Ian Millington’s Undum system makes this possible — but Undum uses Javascript quite intensively, so I would need to know it a lot better than I do in order to create a story with Undum.

The goal is clear: I’d like to write stories and make them available for people to read. The stories themselves would be concrete experiences — just words on a page or screen, it’s true, but words stimulate the brain to imagine that real events are transpiring.

Same deal with Buffy: The reality (cameras, scripts, lighting, makeup, paychecks to the actors, carefully designed special effects) is an abstract apparatus, but the viewer has, in the end, a concrete experience. Mentally constructed, to be sure, but it’s an experience of “real” events, not an experience of the syntax of computer code, nor of camera angles and all the rest. If we notice camera angles and lighting while watching a movie or TV show,

Undum & Vorple, Part III

What will interactive storytelling look like in the 21st century? Oops, we’re already 12 years into the 21st century. And yet the main authoring systems for interactive fiction still produce stories that rely on a computer user interface that was common and well understood in 1980.

Maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift. Do you suppose?

In the last couple of days I’ve glanced at a variety of new software tools designed for interactive storytelling, and/or stories created using said tools. Verdict, first, evidence afterward: Undum with Vorple is the clear winner.

Twine has a nice editing environment (it’s a bit like Quest), but Twine stories seem to want to clear the main display area and toss up entirely new text every time you click a link. Continuity of narrative in such a system is essentially zilch. Bad psychology — in essence, it’s even worse than what you get with an old-school command line interface.

The two ChoiceScript stories that I looked at were stunningly bad. It appears ChoiceScript is set up to collect the player’s characteristics based on what radio button the player clicks on in various menus of choices. Player characteristics — a relic of Dungeons & Dragons. Radio buttons — ugly.

Ren’Py might be a reasonable system if I were a graphic artist. I’m not. BloomEngine may be capable of delivering an effective browser-based story experience, but the game written by its creator neither looks attractive nor reads well; plus, the engine apparently relies on HTML 5 tags with a minimum of Javascript code, which seems a somewhat artificial limitation to me. If you’re going to build a race car, you don’t start with a bicycle frame.

John Ingold wrote a clickable story called “A Colder Light” using Inform 7 with some extensions. That development system may have some promise, but “A Colder Light” reads exactly like a 1980-era command line game (because that’s what it is). The sugar sprinkled on top is

Undum & Vorple, Part II

No matter how attractive a technology may look, if it doesn’t do what you need it to do, it’s a doorstop.

After looking at Undum for a couple of days, I’ve concluded that it’s a doorstop. [Edit: Probably not true.] This saddens me, because it looks very enticing. As I detailed in my previous post, Undum is a way of delivering interactive stories in a web browser. It’s visually beautiful, requires no special knowledge of the reader, and can deliver stories to users on any platform that supports a modern browser — iPad, Linux, an old PC running Windows XP, whatever.

Using Undum, you create your story using Javascript and HTML 5. This is not precisely an author-friendly way of developing stories, but it’s manageable. These technologies are well understood and very powerful. If you want not only to create an interactive story but have it look good … folks, I hate to break it to you, but Inform, TADS, Quest, and the other authoring systems used for the past decade or so by authors of IF just ain’t gonna cut it. All of them display their stories in app interfaces that are, frankly, ugly. And not very user-configurable, either. So Undum would appear to be a super, super choice for the author who cares about giving the reader a gratifying experience.

But between the dream and the reality falls the shadow.

Web browsers are, very sensibly, designed in such a way that web pages can’t read files on your hard drive or write files to your hard drive. If such activities were allowed, the whole world of modern computing would collapse. Your personal computer would quickly become a hornet’s nest of malicious stuff. A web page can store a small piece of data (called a cookie) in a special folder, but only that page can read the cookie. Other restrictions quite likely apply.

As a result, Undum has no way to allow readers to store their progress through a story. Okay, technically it has one store point, which you can create using the Save button. The next time you load that Undum story, it will automatically fast-forward to the point where you saved the cookie. But you can’t save multiple store points within your story. [Edit: It turns out HTML 5 provides a facility called localStorage, which is plenty big enough to store lots of save points. Undum just hasn't implemented a full save/restore feature, that's all.]

This is a problem because Undum is designed specifically to produce interactive stories. In an interactive story, the reader

Bewitched

For weeks I’ve been strolling through Gregory Maguire’s four-volume fantasy about Oz. These are wonderful books — and yet, at the end of the saga, I find myself curiously dissatisfied.

What was wonderful about the first book, Wicked, was that Maguire took the events from Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and, while keeping the framework of the story, transformed Oz into a real place and the characters into real people. They’re filled with uncertainty. They sometimes make wrong choices.

In the ensuing three volumes (Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz), that sense of aimlessness infects most of the characters. They blunder across the landscape of Oz, hiding from trouble and failing to grapple with their adversaries. It’s no accident that the Cowardly Lion emerges as a central character while the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman slide offstage and are never heard from again. The Lion’s angst, his retreats and self-recriminations, and the ups and downs of his checkered life interest Maguire far more deeply than

Surprise Ending

I stopped reading science fiction years ago because none of the scenarios actually made a lick of logical sense, if you thought about them for more than five seconds. Sadly, I’m starting to feel the same way about mystery novels.

Last night I read Michael Connelly’s The Fifth Witness. All the way through, I was thinking, “Wow, this is great! This is real courtroom drama — the kind Erle Stanley Gardner tried to write, and had not the talent to succeed at.” But then, at the very end, the logic of the story teeters and slips and falls sideways into a heap. Be warned: the rest of this post will contain a complete spoiler for the book. If you don’t want it spoiled, please stop reading!

As we near the end of the book, Connelly’s lawyer hero, Mickey Haller, is struggling to

Nothing Ventured

This week I thought I’d try a new mystery novelist. Anne Perry has written a lot of mysteries set in 19th century England, and historical settings and historical research interest me. So let’s give her a shot.

After 40 pages of The Sins of the Wolf, I’m bored. Elmore Leonard, who has also written a lot of mysteries, once said, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” Leonard would have left out the entire beginning of this book.

Hester, who is a nurse, takes a train to Scotland. She has been hired to escort an elderly lady on a train trip from Edinburgh down to London and then back. The elderly lady has a large and varied family. The family is, of course, rich; they could hardly have hired a nurse otherwise. After 40 pages, nothing much has happened. Hester has met the family and eaten luncheon and dinner with them. She and the old lady are now on the train.

The old lady requires, of course, medicines, which have been packed in little bottles from which Hester is going to administer daily doses. It’s not hard to guess that one of the little bottles may

Padding

The crime novels of the 1930s and 1940s were tightly focused on the crime itself, and the detective’s efforts to solve it. In Raymond Chandler’s books we learn almost nothing about his sleuth, Philip Marlowe.

But as the years rolled on, the crime novel stealthily cross-bred with the soap opera. Writers started giving their detectives more elaborate personalities and a supporting cast that didn’t change from book to book. To be sure, Conan Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes a distinct personality and a supporting cast, but the we never hear a peep about Mrs. Hudson’s personal life. She wasn’t important. A few decades later, Rex Stout gave Nero Wolfe a wisecracking assistant (Archie Goodwin), a cook (Fritz Brenner), four occasional freelance operatives (led by Saul Panzer), Archie’s occasional girlfriend (Lily Rowan), and even a seldom-seen orchid tender (Theodore Horstmann). Not to mention the reliable newspaper man (Lon Cohen) and no less than three heavy-handed policemen (Lieutenant Cramer, Sergeant Stebbins, and Sergeant Rowcliff).

Still, the crime stories in most of Stout’s books were at least passable, and some were quite good. I got to thinking about this last night after re-reading Lawrence Block’s The Devil Knows You’re Dead. I had read it years ago, but had forgotten the plot. I now realize it was the book that made me lose interest in Block.

The book is heavily laden with soap opera. The detective, Matt Scudder, goes to a lot of AA meetings, and we learn bits about what the speakers said at those meetings. Scudder also meets with his AA sponsor, so we get nuggets of AA wisdom and even a couple of AA jokes. You could do worse in the cracker-barrel wisdom department. I’m not knocking it, I’m just saying it has nothing to do with the crime story.

He starts cheating on his girlfriend, for no very clear reason other than that he can. He has a friend who is dying of pancreatic cancer and wants