An exercise in knowing more story than you tell.
I invite the viewer to fantasize about what might happen before and after the exact moment frozen in the picture.
- Kilian Eng
One of my authorial aspirations is to always know more story than I tell.
This seems patently obvious – indeed, how could anything else be true? – but it can actually be very hard to live up to. There is a great temptation, particularly in works that have involved a substantial amount of world building, to "waste" nothing, to put every created thought, one way or another, in front of the audience.
It is, like most temptations, ultimately self-destructive.
"Even if an image is shown as a single piece and not part of a series," says Swedish artist Kilian Eng, "Both I and the viewer need to be able to fantasize about what might happen before and after the exact moment frozen in the picture. This creative engagement helps to give substance to the worlds my pictures depict and lets me create new scenarios."
Looking at his art, it is hard not to feel such things...
(That, and a dangerous desire to listen to YES.)
Whilst working on the long and anguished (and, for me, ultimately ill-fated) development of Defender's Quest II, I read through a bunch of screenwriting books. I figured they would be the closest thing that I could find to game writing – surely much of the advice would carryover.
I read a lot of interesting things (some of which were even useful!), but out of all of them, one of the most straightforward and immediately employable was this:
Always see how late you can start a scene.
Make it a game with yourself. How much of the beginning can you cut off?
I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I just read Red Rising, which was such a strange experience that I may actually have to break down and write a review of it.
It is… dystopian young adult revenge power fantasy stuff, but on Mars this time.
It has all of the problems that you would expect of a popular dystopian young adult revenge power fantasy – so much so that I had to force myself to keep reading through the beginning. However, an interesting (and terrible) thing happened to me at about the one third point: I started enjoying it.
The first chunk of the book had been what we might call "cartoonish misery porn," in which we are treated to a cavalcade of societal injustices so inflaming of righteous indignation that they seem to serve little other societal purpose, coupled with some of the most forced and annoying sci-fi terminology that I have ever encountered. (The author is a huge fan of un-hyphenated compound words with mid-word capitalization: slingBlade, .357Grav, drillBoy, hellDiver, clawDrill, lowRed, lowDraft, etc. etc. It felt like our obligatory first person narrator thought in trademarked product names.)
Then, our hero's righteous outrage and motivation for revenge firmly established, the book transitions into what I can only describe as ENDER'S HUNGER GAME OF THRONES IN NAZI SPACE HOGWARTS.
All of the other annoyances are still present*, but the plot rockets off, veering into all sorts of strange surprises and unexpected reversals as it suddenly finds itself driven by characters' actions and reactions, rather than a plodding obligation to set up what is to follow.
(*Although, to be fair, the compWords do become a little thinner.)
In other words, the story had finally reached the story.
Having (with some chagrin) finished the book, I couldn't help but wonder:
Why didn't it just, you know, start with the story it wanted to tell? Why make us eat moldy vegetables first?
But how will readers know what motivates the character if we don't spend a third of the book explicitely showing it to them?!
Maybe, they'll read to find out.
In the case of Red Rising, there are certainly more than enough references to the events of the book's first third that readers would piece together a good picture of what happened.
This is actually fun for audiences to do. (At least, for me, anyways. I absolutely love the "Catch-up, dummy" school of storytelling, where things just start at 60 miles an hour, and I get to piece together what's happening and why on the fly.)
Storytelling is – in any medium – an act of co-creation between the author and the co-authorial audience. Leaving space for the audience's minds and imaginations to also do work is what makes something engaging, whether it's item descriptions or character sprites. If there's no work to do, no questions to ask, and no empty spaces to fill in, what is there to engage with? An entirely passive audience is an unengaged audience. (I fear that this is only going to become a self-reinforcing death spiral as streaming "second screen friendly" stories expect audiences to show up unengaged, phone in hand, and respond by delivering blunt, repetitive scripts that leave no blanks and reiterate the stakes and goals every 5 minutes because everyone watching is only watching half the time with half their brain, which only serves to make audiences more unengaged, sparking even blunter, more repetitive scripts, and on and on, until the entire world only asks us to use a fraction of our minds, and even cave paintings require too much effort to consume.)
...
Furthermore, the things that the audience's imagination will cook up off the edges of the map are always going to be bigger and grander than what you can nail down and set in front of them, if for no other reason than that they aren't fully nailed down and defined. (The unknowable, innumerable battles and wounds and horrors that swirled in my six-year-old mind when I heard Sir Alec Guinness call Darth Vader "now more machine than man" seized my imagination because they were unknowable. It was pretty disappointing to see that it was actually just one bad gymnastics accident.)
...In the instance of Red Rising, I can guarantee you that whatever tragic history you construct in your mind based off of the character's (incredibly frequent) references will be 10,000 times more interesting than the first third of the book.
Anyways!
All of these things were swirling around in my mind when I remembered that I had recently written the start of a strange little garbage fountain story. So, I thought, "Why not practice what I'm preaching here?"
I hid the opening that I had written a few weeks ago (by which I mean I just didn't look for it in the bottomless paper pit that is my office), and jumped ahead. After all, the point of the opening was to send a character off on strange and terrible adventures. Why not just start with the story I wanted to tell?
So, here you go: Quillion, and some strange and terrible adventures.
The rock
The rock was smooth, or looked smooth – Quillion could not bring himself to touch it. The glassy surface made him think, somehow, of the slippery joints beneath a creature's muscle, when they tore their own flesh to leave it at his feet.
The shape was like a man. Although, how he knew this, he was not certain. Father was just a voice and a burning on the back of his scalp. He had met no other since.
He left the rock, backing away so that he always faced it.
Crossing the dead stream
It had gone all at once, Quillion decided, for there are a thousand bones and more that he knew for fishes'. They had never come to him in his house, not of their own, but birds and sometimes weasels brought them, when they came to die themselves.
Now, their fine bones lay tangled all across the bottom of the stream, like swords on the battlefields that he had been forbidden to imagine. Perhaps, this was the last place to dry, and they had come from many other waters, although the slope made that seem quite unlikely.
A slant, Quillion knew, would hold no water, even a subtle one as this.
It had been some time since he had seen dead things.
The bear and the tree
Quillion made a fire on the spot with the last of the house's matches, for he knew that he was now too weak to move so large a creature, though he had before, despite his size, when they had come into the garden.
He had never killed a thing before.
The edges of the cleft were very dry, just at the point where his hand had fallen, when he thought that he would die, as he had always known but never believed was possible, on the teeth of a beast.
It seemed some terrible betrayal, but he dare not leave the dark unchecked, not now that he had been given fear.
So, the tree's flesh smoked beside the bear's, spitting sparks into the leaf-blocked stars.
The sword
There were shapes Quillion had not spied before: letters like the books in father's study, before he had burned them.
Quillion tried to recall the secrets he had glimpsed, in the times when he was wicked and unobserved. Shapes made sounds, sounds made words. Words, father had said, made lies.
Etched into the blood-filled, shallow trench that ran from hilt to foible, there were words.
"I have waited," said one side.
"Fellow Traveler," said the other.
Quillion cleaned the blood off on the deer's red pelt, and shivered by the fire.
"It is good to have a friend," said Quillion, "Even if he is a liar, and a killer."
The deer said nothing.
The conversation
The stars seemed close, although all that Quillion could see above him were thick, red leaves, and the swirling moths that jostled one another in the smoke above his fire.
Fellow Traveler lay propped against the stone across from him.
"You have been a good companion to me," said Quillion to the sword, "Since the day I drew you from the tree, when I had thought my end was come."
The sword said nothing.
But it seemed to Quillion, as the night wind spattered smoke into his tired, tear stained eyes, that the sable scabbard slowly, slightly bent, and his friend and savior gently nodded.
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