This blog post contains mild spoilers for Outsider. Galantrix nonetheless believes that this content enhances the Outsider experience, even if not required for thoroughly enjoying the game. If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read this post. Also, please make sure to read the Outsider Disclaimer before moving forward.
Let me get the report out of the way so I can talk about other fun stuff. This week was so-so in terms of productivity due to the major distractions from the weather-related school suspensions in Georgia and other random life and company-related responsibilities. I finished the first story review pass for Chapters 2-4, which is great, and completed the engine code and art for Outsider’s early-game puzzles. I wanted to have done more, but that wasn’t so bad. I’m still on track for the Steam demo in the near future!
With that said, I wanted to talk more about why I keep saying that writing is so difficult, although I probably don’t need to convince you if you are a writer yourself!
A little-known fact about me is that I wrote a good deal in my life. I’m not claiming to be good at it, but I have done it quite a bit. I started writing as a kid with a 10-page science fiction short story. The story hasn’t survived, but I remember it being about a boy who discovers he has superpowers when he feels no pain after being physically punished by a schoolteacher for bad behavior. The story was set in a dystopian future where students were laser-shot by teachers if they were talking too much in class! Oh, the mind of a 10-year old.
Coincidentally, at that time, I broke my school’s longstanding record of parental notifications for bad behavior (14 written notifications in one year, with two formal parent interviews). The previous record holder (13 notifications) had been expelled, but I didn’t because I happened to have good grades. Fortunately, kids weren’t shot by teachers for bad behavior back then!
After a few similar short stories, I discovered I was inclined to “stream of consciousness” short-form writing and went on to write hundreds of poems over the years. Again, I don’t claim they were any good… But write I did. I continued with occasional writing, leading to the original Outsider novella a few years ago.
I wrote the original Outsider through the same “stream of consciousness”, “freeform” technique after reading Nando’s logs a couple of times. The result did work but was full of stuff that came straight from my mind… 70% of it or so, LOL. Understanding the logs was tedious and time-consuming; as the father of a 5-year old and full-time manager in Corporate America, I had competing priorities preventing me from doing a stellar job at an adaptation.
For the current Outsider game, I needed to do better and create something worthy of Nando’s trust. I started by reading many articles and even books about writing by established authors, finally settling on trying to emulate Stephen King’s writing process.
Stephen King is a great writer and one of the most prolific of all time. His technique can be summarized as “immerse yourself in your fictional world and let the story write itself”. This strongly resonated with me because it is so similar to my early poetry writing. Back then, I would just think about a topic, and the words would simply come out. By the way, this is used by many successful authors, including the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado, who famously said he’d be surprised by his characters’ behavior throughout his novels!
Unfortunately, Outsider isn’t a “fictional world” where I can immerse myself and see what people will do. Nando did what he did, and while some artistic license must be allowed for producing a compelling and cohesive narrative, I must be faithful to the original material. My first attempts at writing in the “Stephen King” style led me back to the problems from the first Outsider story and to the frustration of not doing the job I set out to do.
Something had to change, leading me back to reading advice from other famous writers to find the “spark” that would resonate with my style and allow me to write Outsider as it should be written. Fortunately, worldwide famous writer JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, and the late superstar novelist Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, among other novels, came to the rescue.
Rowling advocates the creation of next-chapter outlines to constrain your writing; some of the outlines she used in Harry Potter can be found online. This is the opposite of what Stephen King suggests, and it ended up being perfect for Outsider. I started creating high-level outlines with some of the main threads from Nando’s story, including a few key phrases, and then “setting myself free” over the outline. Instead of a process of progressive refinement of the Outline, I’d just copy it to the page and then go completely wild between the main points. As I now know Nando’s story well, the outline gave me the boundaries I needed to stay true.
But that wasn’t enough. My first writing output within the outline still had inaccuracies and often a poor flow across the different threads (which map to the users’ choices). At this time, I turned to Crichton:
“The whole idea of debugging puts people off, though I don’t know why. Writers often say that books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. And most formal assemblies of information—proposals, applications, speeches, presentations, designs—go through several drafts or revisions”
Yes, revisions! I created a process of multiple reviews where I could refine the story stitching, remove inaccuracies, and constantly improve the story until I reached something compelling and very faithful to the original. These revisions aren’t simply about reading what I wrote and making cosmetic changes; the revisions start massive, often changing every line of the script, and reduce as I go through the text repeatedly.
As of now, my process is:
- Create the outline for the following 2-4 chapters
- Copy the outline to a page
- WRITE in “stream of consciousness” mode
- Add decision markers and fill in the first version of branches
- Add “abridgment” branches, which allow the user to shorten the story
- Refine the narrator’s voice
- Address “TODOs” left behind during writing
- Revision 1: “dry” re-reading (massive changes)
- Review 2: go through all branches and fix continuity errors (significant changes)
- Review 3: review all code contained in the story script, inject variable values as needed
- Review 4: read the story inside the game, instead of the script, to check the user-visible flow (medium changes)
- Review 5: use Grammarly to fix typos and grammatical mistakes (medium changes)
- Review 6: final review (minor changes)
- Review N: more reviews until each new review leads to minimal or no changes
As of now, going through all these steps for a single chapter takes between 15-20 hours of work. As I said… Writing is hard! By the way, I needed two reviews to write this blog post :(