Writing Wages

In January, I quit my job to work at Tuesday Knight Games full-time. Wages of Sin (crowdfunding soon!) is my first book written whilst doing games full time. The core of the book is 100 Bounties, each a complete scenario. A major point of inspiration was 76 Patrons, which is still one of my personal favourite RPG books. The manuscript clocks in at around 80,000 words. I learnt a lot writing it, which I’ll summarise down below.

Rather than just trying to write 100 bounties, I worked through set of defined stages. They all began in a spreadsheet with the most high-level details: target, client and a one-liner pitch for any complications or setting notes. To help with this, I also created a big list of crimes. Whenever I was uncertain, I could scan the list for inspiration. Having a number of similar resources is essential when creating a large number of similar items. For the &Treasure project, I had a number of lists to pull from. At this phase of the project, I only allowed myself to work on the spreadsheet. By immersing myself in the process, I avoided context-switching, helping find a flow state to generate quality ideas at a good pace.

Once the spreadsheet was complete, I created ‘sketches’ of each bounty, working in batches of ten. This consisted of gathering the existing details and building on them, producing an outline with all the important details worked out. All of this writing happened longhand in a notebook, dedicated to Wages of Sin. For me, the utility of having a single place to put everything was huge, and is something I’ve started doing for everything going forwards. This phase was about generating more concrete ideas and finding the interesting elements within the one-liners in the spreadsheet. By splitting the tasks and focusing only on ideation-in-detail, I didn’t need to worry about presentation or legibility at this point. More on this later. Working longhand, I find myself much less distracted and able to produce better ideas - taking advantage of the flexibility by using lists, diagrams, or simply clustering text by topic. For stationary nerds: I used Mitsubishi 9850s and Hi-Unis in HB for most of the project, working in a Muji A5 30 page notebook.

The project book.

A bounty ‘sketch’.

Finally, it was time to write the bounties. At each stage of the process, they had become clearer and more complex. By doing each stage as a discrete unit of work, each piece was given more time to mature and evolve. Thinking on this, and seeing it happen across the whole project has made me consider the role of patience in writing. Ideas and their expression both need time to grow. Doing this deliberately and slowing yourself down reaps benefits in the quality of both. All this to stay, whilst typing up the text from my notes, things changed and developed. This happened freely and spontaneously as part of the natural writing flow, rather than requiring me to stop and context-switch to ideation mid-writing. The two tasks are deeply linked but are independent, and treating them as such allows better engagement with each part. For writing, this allows you to focus on the best possible expression of the already existing ideas - and any elaboration occurs easily and organically. Further, writing with the knowledge that you will revise the text allows for better writing. The work of revision is once again, an entirely different relationship to the text. Trying to edit your work as you write it will slow you down immensely, as well as producing weaker writing overall.

As mentioned before, the bounties were written in batches of ten, alternating with the idea-sketches. This meant the different phases were in communication with one another. After completing each batch, improvements and refinements for future batches were identified. For example, earlier idea-sketches didn’t include names for all NPCs, which slowed writing down. By batching this work, this flaw was spotted early and corrected going forwards.

The same bounty from before, in Vim.

For computer perverts: the initial writing was done in Vim, using my .vimrc which is a cludged-together mess. Beyond being some turbonerd shit, writing in an offline editor means you can turn off the internet whilst writing - removing a major distraction. Turning off the internet is another reason to do all your research beforehand!

Once all Bounties were complete, I read through all of them with a mind to revision. The process of revision is essential in producing quality process. The best approach for me is to consider it a form of play: “Does this sound better worded like this? Or like this? What if I delete these words?”. There are many approaches to this, but ultimately you are trying to make the words sound better. Taking the time to do this yourself, catching all the low-hanging fruit and giving it an initial tune-up, means your editors can focus on the improvements you will not be able to see in your own work. With this done, I combined all the individual bounties into a single document and uploaded it to Google Docs. As much as I love Vim, Google Doc comments and suggestions remain untouched for collaboration.

The approach (headlines -> sketch -> write) detailed above works for less structured writing too. Wages of Sin features a prison, written using the same process: an initial pitch was developed further using longhand notes into a sketch of each element, which was then typed up once iterated across several times. Rather than batching bounties, the prison was developed a component at a time: a section on prisoners, a section on guards, a section on defences. The batching technique wasn’t used here, as I felt it more useful to have the entire concrete idea mapped out before writing anything.

Much of this will seem fundamental. It is. Yet I have seen countless people jump into a Google Doc to start their project, writing their introduction before anything else. Then they will stop, think, delete a line or two, re-word it. Go back, change an idea. Approaching things a little more deliberately reaps huge benefits.