A quick bit of advice for creating memorable intro quotes for chapters and acts, fantasy scripture verses, and other text snippets that actually feel like words taken from a larger world.
Nothing simultaneously strikes the tone for what is to follow and sets the audience's mind afire with images of a larger world like a good imaginary quote.
"Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars – Nemedia, Ophir, Brythnia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose writers wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the earth under his sandaled feet."
– The Nemedian Chronicles
The imaginary quote which opened the very first Conan the Barbarian story. (The filmmakers found it so iconic that they used a version of it for the surprisingly excellent 1982 film adaptation.)
I'm a huge fan of flavor text in general – it's a tragically underutilized place to make your world feel bigger. (The fact that it is frequently thrown away on "Something goes here… Here's something. Job done!" filler completely devoid of any purpose other than to take up space rustles my jimmies something fierce, but I've already talked about that in a previous article.)
Of all the various kinds of flavor text, a great imaginary quote hits the hardest… when used properly.
How to write imaginary quotes properly
In this instance, properly means:
- Sparingly
- Foreshadowing coming events or emotions WITHOUT bluntly being about the exact same thing
- Touching on things outside of the main story
- Written in a way that actually feels like they are plucked from a larger context that's left to the audience's imagination
- AND sounds like a piece taken from a larger body of text, rather than a one-liner
Sparingly
There's a reason why these things are just used as chapter openings in Conan: If you throw these things everywhere, they lack punch and gravitas.
Foreshadowing coming events WITHOUT being about the exact same thing
"Fire! FIRE EVERYWHERE! AAAAAAAHHH!"
– A completely pointless waste of space at the bottom of a fireball spell card in some forgotten card game that I have never played since.
The key here is to build anticipation rather than spoiling what is to follow. Anticipation means leaving room for the audience's imagination. "You're about to get X!" does not build anticipation – what is there left for the audience to think about? In fact, it undercuts everything to follow by making it boring vegetables that we have to eat on our way to the explicitly promised reward.
"What could it be?" is the question that kept us awake the night before Christmas as kids, and it's what keeps us turning the next page, clicking the next mission, and watching the next episode as adults.
(The dark side of this is the "mystery box" storytelling technique, but that's a rant for another time.)
To point to my perennial example Defender Quest: Valley of the Forgotten, there is a section of the game where the player, having journeyed underground into the guts of a fallen city, meets and recruits a dragon as a party member. We didn't open with something like this:
"Of all the beasts which I have faced upon and within this earth, none has sunk the fangs of fear into my belly deeper than the creatures of flame and scale."
– Derrpal Drashti, Huntsman to his Majesty
Regardless of how cool or flavorful a piece of text is, its purpose is to tell the audience something. In this instance, all it says is "Dragons are scary. Boy howdy, I wonder what the next thing you're going to meet is?"
So, instead of some blunt force trauma to the anticipation, we went with this:
I cannot tell how long I was in that place below the earth-
weeks, months perhaps, without the sun,
living each moment in fear of the writhing blackness,
and the things that moved within it.
-from the collected tales of Klest Kada, Nomad adventurer
I wonder what could be next?
(Interesting side note: the first submitted draft of the original Conan story had a much more something-goes-here opening quote:
"My songs are torches for a king's pyre!"
There's not even an attribution. The following scene starts with the line "At midnight the king dies!" and features a bunch of conspirators – including a mad bard famous for his songs – plotting to overthrow a king. Recognizing a pointless redundancy, R. E. Howard wisely replaced it with the now famous quote above.)
Touching on things outside the main story
OR
Hook 'em with the power of the unknown
AKA
STOP BEATING US OVER THE HEAD WITH WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW
______
I went on a whole rant about this in that previous article, but here's the short version: If a piece of flavor text is about the events that already make up the story, it is a pointless redundancy.
This is your place to make the world feel bigger than what the player already sees. That means hinting at people, places, things, and events that they haven't already encountered.
(There's a reason why so many fantastic imaginary quotes happen at the very start of something. When the first ever Conan story opens with that incredible imaginary quote, NO ONE READING IT HAD ANY IDEA WHO OR WHAT CONAN WAS. It would not have hit nearly the same if it came at the start of chapter 2, when we had already met Conan.)
My favorite snippets of flavor text (and the ones which inspired my eternal love of using them as act intros) come from the opening cinematic of Thief: The Dark Project.
Ye shall not rob from the house I have built, or commit any theft or un-righteousness, lest ye be struck down and driven into the earth forthwith, and the land of the heathen consume you.
– The Book of the Stone
That sets up the major struggle running through the game's entire world and the factions engaged in it before you have encountered anything – it sets the imagination on fire because the player is an entirely blank canvas. (Will Hindmarch has an entire article about this quote and Thief's use of religion, if your curiosity is piqued.)
Unfortunately, you only have one beginning.
Fortunately, the solution is really simple: When it comes time to write imaginary quotes for a later point in your story, don't write about anything that the audience already has a clear image of.
Have they seen the stuff this is about yet? Have they seen it pretty clearly? If so, it's not a good quote for this point in the story.
Plucked from a larger context and body of text
Words that hope or expect to be quoted tend to feel forced.
Discourse does not happen in one liners, and if you want your quotes to ring true, they need to sound like they are part of an argument or story.
Now, we are in fact writing a single sentence (or two) to be a standalone quote. How can we make it feel like it isn't an awkward, rehearsed soundbite desperately hoping to go viral?
Well, think about it like the beginning of a story. Or the final line of an argument. Momentum in either direction lends it that perfect "tip of the iceberg" feeling.
In fact, you can just write something larger and pluck out the best part of it. You can use the attribution at the bottom to give context (or hint just enough to leave it up to the audience).
An example imaginary quote
I'm currently working on Dead Kosmonaut, and I plan on having each major segment of the game open with an act intro quote, just like Defender's Quest.
I don't want to get too deep into Dead Kosmonaut for this article, but suffice it to say that:
The player will be a mostly-deceased star pilot resurrected from botched cryo sleep with a scrambled mind and no understanding of the centuries-later world they find themselves in. Said world is going to have been torn apart by a war between two factions that are also two rival philosophies of trans-humanism, each claiming logic and reason: mechanically inclined "I'll upload my mind to the cloud" technologists and "We can remake organic life to be what we want" biomancers.
Or, in super simplistic terms:
Mechanical engineering vs. Biological engineering
On a visual level, this gives us two iconic flavors of mad science: Machines vs. Monsters.
...On a story level, they are simply two differing attempts to solve the problem of mortality, and ultimately arrive at the same place: we cease being human.
(No one said that the great struggle of the world has to have a right side.)
So, what interesting imaginary quote can tap into all of this, hint at things to come, and all the rest whilst feeling like it was plucked from a larger context left mostly to our imagination?
Well, here's something that popped into my head while I was taking a shower today:
"The man who took not up fire perished in the flames of him that did."
– Stellarch I
What does this thing tell us, and how can we make it better?
It has a nice quasi-archaicness or formality to it that I always like to capture with these things. Weighty ideas do not have to be written in a weighty voice, but I feel that it captures the... self-importance of our factions.
That said, I feel that we can polish this up a little bit.
It's clearly inspired by a lot of things. The logic that justified the British Empire's colonialism argued that history was the natural cycle of the more advanced overtaking the less advanced, and Britain was merely the last in a long line. (I remember this specifically because there is a small island of New Zealanders who are entirely pacifist, and Britain argued that they were the original inhabitants of New Zealand and displaced by the more warlike mainlanders. Even back then, it felt better invading a place knowing that someone else had done it first. Unfortunately, anthropology has not supported these ideas. Anyways! You never know what will come burbling backup when you start writing.)
Technically speaking, I should be using "who" instead of "that," since "him" is a person rather than a thing. I like the variation.
I think that the language is probably inspired by this excerpt from T.S. Eliot's The Rock, which has always stuck in my head:
“They constantly try to escape /
From the darkness outside and within /
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. /
But the man that is will shadow /
The man that pretends to be.”
I briefly considered swapping the "who" and "that" in the sentence:
"The man that took not up fire perished in the flames of him who did."
I thought that it would be fitting to dehumanize the man who perished – somehow the man who picked up fire is more human than the man that didn't. On the other hand, I like the flow of the original. AND, if our factions are, ultimately, about leaving their humanity behind, perhaps the subtle use of "who" for the inferior victim and "that" for the advancing conqueror is not a bad thing…
"Perished" is a nice word, in the active voice that we are always told to use. The man who perished did his own perishing, which gives us a nice "blame the victim" sort of feel.
But why are we told to always use the active voice? Not every action has an actor. Some things just happen. ...Especially when we don't necessarily want to take credit for them.
What about some nice passive voice in there?
"The man who took not up fire was burned in the flames of him that did."
"Was burned" gives us both a "it just happened" feel while also keeping the self-inflicted implications. "I got burned by a choice I made" is a regular turn of phrase (at least in the part of America where I am.)
...Arguing simultaneously that it just happened and also that the victim did it to themselves is a piece of rhetoric that is also quite regular where I am.
If it's not obvious from my rambling insanity here, thinking about word choice is an important thing to me. It's also something that comes naturally when you read things and have them lodge in your head.
So, we come to the final, secret lesson at the end of all of this:
If you want to write good imaginary quotes, you should read good real ones.
Better yet, read good things in their whole form and obsessively write down the tiny snippets that jump out to you. (I collect these things obsessively.)
...As with all other areas of creative endeavor, it's hard to make a fake something if you don't know what a real one looks like.
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