Newfound respect for authors

I have to admit that I have always had a huge amount of respect for authors of fiction. The ability to dream up new worlds or to come up with crazy situations or characters while at the same time making everything seem realistic and possible. Amazing.

That level of creativity is something which I've always struggled with. For some reason, despite not really understanding the rules of grammar, I don't have a huge issue in writing (generally) technically correct English (I can already tell this sentence is going to bite me in the ass at some point down the line!). The problem for me has always been coming up with something interesting to write about and then to make that "thing" engaging to the reader. If anything, this feeling has intensified recently with my attempts to do a bit of fiction on my game blog.

The whole affair started with a series of journals (the so called Aladuchar Journals) tracking one of my characters in a role playing game. I thought that if I didn't have enough creativity to come up with new situations or characters, then I could just "borrow" them from an existing game. In effect, I was doing a fanfic.

However, I soon found that even doing a fanfic is not easy. The problem I found myself facing was that the journals soon became a pretty boring log of what I was doing in the game. And quite frankly, even I found myself bored to tears upon reading them. I can't imagine what anyone else would have been thinking.

As a result of this, I scrapped the journals and decided to do something on a smaller scale. Instead of cataloguing the adventures of a character over the course of a 100+ hour game, I would just catalog one quest. Hopefully, the smaller scale would be easier to manage and keep interesting.

The result was a write-up of the Blood Ties quest in Fallout 3 (part one here and part two here). Overall, although there are a couple of area's which could be improved, I have to say that I'm relatively happy with the results of that writeup. It's also worth mentioning that your enjoyment of the story probably depends completely on knowing about the background of the Fallout universe.

Of the things I learned while writing that story, the most important one is probably the need to plan out the story. When I first started writing, all I was doing was cataloguing what I had actually done in the game while adding in the occasional commentary on events as they unfolded. If I had a proper plan to the story, I would have been able to incorporate some foreshadowing into part one.

In addition, with a proper plan, I would have been able to make the change in tone a bit more consistent. In writing part two, I felt that I had to keep the start of it lighthearted as well so that it had a consistent tone with part one. Having said that, I'm still in two minds about this. Part of me likes the way that the tone suddenly changes at the end of part two as it serves to make you reevaluate all the stuff that came before.