Rushed Writing Solving Game Story Problems
Posted 05-07-2012 at 04:00 PM by Venks
I have to say I've fallen in love with the concept of rushing writing to meet a certain deadline while also keeping a certain word count. I came across the idea from NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month.
Apparently every November writers are encouraged to write a novel in 30 days. These writers get together in libraries or online and write, write, and write.
To reach their goal they're supposed to keep continually writing, never stopping, even if you're not sure exactly what you want to say next. You have to accept that what ever you've written before was pure gold and keep moving forward never looking back. Even if there are grammatical or spelling errors. That's what editing is for.
I borrowed this idea for my game Berathen: Spirit Detective which will be coming out on May 19th. I've been working on ideas for the story for quite some time and I have to say I was just never pleased. By the time I had decided on one thing I was changing my mind about something else.
When I took to my new writing exercise I would find myself repeating statements and misspelling words. At first I was rather discouraged by my shoddy looking work, but at the end of my sessions I was always impressed by the sheer amount of words I had somehow typed. Forcing myself to write like this was really helping me pinpoint details in the story which I had previously unwittingly avoided.
Writing isn't exactly something I normally find that interesting, but there was definitely something exciting about rushing against the clock. Writing my game's story as fast as I could trying to finish by the deadline. I wasn't exactly writing a novel, my goal was much shorter, but the idea was the same. If you also have problems coming up with the story for your game, or simply writing, I suggest you give this idea a go.