If We Don't Need To Know It, Don't Put It On The Page

In addition to being an author, I run a lot of tabletop roleplaying games. These games combine storytelling and math, allowing players to explore a realm through their characters, and to weave their own narrative as things progress. And whether they're playing knights and wizards, or vampires lurking in the shadows of the modern day, these kinds of games are great for really getting people immersed in a story.

 

However, when you're the Game Master (the person crafting the plot lines, making all the extra characters that inhabit the world, running the world itself, and so on), you generally acknowledge that the players are only going to see about 40% of what you put together. Maybe 70%, if they're really curious. And it is so tempting to find some way to shoehorn in all that lore you worked on that supports the world, the characters, and the plots... but you need to resist that urge.

 

If something isn't important to the narrative, don't let it eat up table time. And if you're an author, do not dedicate word count to things people do not need to know... all you're going to do is weigh down your story, and potentially bore your audience enough that they'll close the book and walk away.

 

There's so much to know... and a lot of it is for you, not the readers.

 

But before I get into the meat of today's post, remember, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.

Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!

 

Backstory Is Necessary... For The Author

 

I've talked at length on this blog about the necessity of research, proper world building, and understanding character motivation, the law, and more. However, most of that is for you, the author. Because writing a book is like an ice berg... most of it remains out of sight, deep below the surface of the story. While it's important for holding up the framework, it isn't the sort of thing your readers need to know.

 

Until it is.

 

After all, didn't you wonder why they called it Skull Island?

Consider for a moment a private detective protagonist. You, as the author, know his full history. You know he was born in farm country, and that he signed up for the marines to get away from that tiny patch. You know he was dishonorably discharged for punching a superior when he was a military police officer, and that he couldn't get a job in civilian law enforcement after that. He was a prize fighter for a while, and then he hung out his shingle as a PI.

 

Now, you might want to find a way to shoehorn all of that into conversation through the book. You might also want to talk about his extended family, their lives, and even lay out the history and genealogy of his family tree and ancestors to show your readers that you did the work... but until that becomes somehow relevant to the story you're telling, you need to keep all of that stuff behind the curtain where it belongs.

 

And this is where an earlier post I made, Lore Drops Instead of Lore Dumps, becomes relevant.

 

Because the purpose of a lore drop is to give a small chunk of relevant information to the audience, either in a subtle way, or in a direct way, to help enhance your story without bogging it down with unnecessary details. For example, your PI might have a client come to him. He doesn't trust cops, but he knows a guy who recommended the detective. Harry White? Yeah, we did a tour of the sandbox together. Client relaxes, knowing that he's talking to a fellow jarhead who's here to help him out. Alternatively, our PI is expecting a call from a contact, but instead his brother calls from back home. He's gossiping about the kids, his wife, the current crop, and can't get to the point, and our detective can feel his old accent trying to claw its way back up his throat. Then he has to cut the call off when another number dials him. This gives us a glimpse into the detective's life, and can provide a kind of tension breaker before we get back into the case.

 

Before you bring a piece of backstory onto the page, whether it's a historical event that happened in the setting, where your protagonist learned to shoot, or the details of a holiday celebration where everyone wears leather masks made from the preserved, peeled faces of their elders who have passed on, ask yourself if this adds to your story, and serves a purpose in the narrative. Because if this information isn't necessary to provide context to your readers, and it won't reveal something important, then you probably need to leave it under the water.

 

And that can hurt trying to hold yourself back from explaining everything that you spent all this time working on. But if the audience doesn't need to know, all you're doing is gumming up the works. And if your audience does need to know, you need to find a way to convey that knowledge as smoothly as possible. For more on how to do that, though, check out my older posts How To Avoid The Dreaded Exposition Dump, as well as 3 Ways To Avoid Info Dumping In Your Story.

 

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (a channel full of short stories, many of which are mine)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

What Stories Would You Like To See On "The A.L.I.C.E. Files"?

As regular readers know, I recently launched a new audio drama YouTube channel in partnership with Alice Liddell called The A.L.I.C.E. Files! While the overarching story of this channel is about the mysterious Carroll Institute and the new "Alice" that's been hired as a witness cataloger, that overarching narrative is punctuated by the stories she finds in the files themselves. These stories come from my and Alice's previously published works, and we're also drawing on public domain books and collections, as well as writing a few fresh stories to add to the collection.

My question for you all this week is a simple one. What stories would you like to see turn up on Alice's desk in Workstation 17?

We have a lot of things to draw on, after all...

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

We're Taking Requests Now (Because They Take Time To Make)

When we sat down to start this channel, I had a handful of dramatized story videos already in the bag. I've been updating them with fresh intros and outros so they add to the channel's overarching story, but these were the seeds of the project that we've been steadily planting over the past month and change.

It started with my story Dead Man's Bluff, which came out of my short story collection The Rejects:

And then we moved on to an audio rendition of my 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, which was one of the most popular fiction posts in my Vocal.media archive:

And there are a handful of future episodes that we're recording fresh intros for. These include:

- 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, Cthulhu Mythos Edition

- 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, SCP Edition

- 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, Warhammer 40K Edition

- Suffer The Children (also from my collection The Rejects)

- An untitled story from the Exalted tabletop RPG

- A dramatization of my short story Devil's Night, from the Pathfinder adventure path Hell's Rebels

However, once we've finished with those episodes, we'll have a wide open field regarding what shows up on Alice's desk next. And that's why I wanted to take a moment to ask my readers what stories you'd like to see us tackle!

And I'm asking now because we still have some lead time. Because full audio dramas that last between 20 and 30 minutes aren't something we can just make in a single week. We have to check the scripts, corral the voice actors, edit, create the soundscape, create the video... it's a whole process! So we need to start slotting in our new audio dramas now to be sure they're ready in a month or two!

With that said, some of the options available include:

- More published short stories taken from books like The Rejects, or possibly from SNAFU: A Collection of Military Horror, and other anthologies Alice and myself have appeared in over the years.

- Samples of full books, like my novels Old Soldiers or Marked Territory, or some of Alice's books like the period vampire novel Succumb to Darkness or her mermaid fantasy novel Love of The Sea.

- Stories taken from public domain works, such as The King in Yellow, or the works of writers like Lovecraft, Poe, and other classic authors.

- Creepy pastas, such as the stairs in the woods, ritual games, and other instances that might come to the Institute's attention.

- Fresh stories that have never appeared anywhere else before, written just for the channel!

Whatever your vote is, please go to The A.L.I.C.E. Files Trailer, and in the comments leave your vote for the kinds of stories you'd like to see going forward! Please mention that this is in response to the Literary Mercenary post, so that we can keep track of how many folks are actually voting.

Also, if you want to help ensure that we have the momentum to make the episodes you're requesting, please subscribe to The A.L.I.C.E. Files, watch the episodes that are already up (it's only about an hour and a half of stories so far, so it's easy to binge), leave comments, and tell your friends about us! We're still growing, and doing our best to get this thing monetized so we can keep the wheels turning, and telling stories for all of you to listen to!

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (where many dramatized versions of my stories can be heard for free)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

Undercutting Death Can Undercut Your Story

When I was very young I loved comic books. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy a good comic these days, but as a child they were my go-to thing I asked for from the store. I read so many of them that concerned adults would whisper to my mother that I should read real books. Fortunately she ignored them, which allowed me to grow up with the heroes (and antiheroes) of the grim and gritty 1990s.

However, there was something that I learned reading comics that I felt was a unique lesson more writers should take to heart. Generally speaking, death is the end. If you are planning on circumventing death (and especially if you're installing a revolving door in the afterlife) then you have to do a lot of work to keep your readers invested, as you just drastically altered the stakes of your conflicts in a manner that can make life-and-death struggles seem pretty trivial when all is said and done.

Welcome to hell... oh... getting resurrected? Nevermind, I guess.

But before I get into the meat of today's post, remember, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.

Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!

It's All About Cost and Consequences

If you've ever played the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons (or any of the other games that pattern themselves after it), then you're likely familiar with the concept of resurrection spells. The general idea is that, once you reach a certain level of power in the game, you should be able to bring back a fallen comrade to continue the quest. The cost for such an action tends to be quite high (thousands of gold pieces in diamond dust, and either being or finding a spellcaster powerful enough to invoke the rite), but there will come a point where it's almost a joke to the players because their characters die and come back so often. Some players might even start a session with, "What happened last game? I was dead at the time."

This is one end of the Resurrection Scale, where death has been rendered relatively trivial (at least by a certain point in the story), and it's the opposite of the other end where death is permanent and irrevocable. And while stories and properties might move back and forth on this scale, it's important for you to ask why resurrection is happening in your storyline. It's also important for you to ask what the cost for such a resurrection is, because the cost (and the difficulty that comes with it) is what is going to maintain the threat and challenge in your story going forward.

Rise my son... today is not the day you die!

For example, let's say a character dies in your story. Tragic. You want to resurrect them, but you don't want it to feel cheap, or to undermine that emotional resonance you built with that death scene. The key here is to think about both how difficult resurrection is, how rare it is, and what it actually costs one to perform... or what it might cost to have it done to you.

Let's return to the fantasy gaming example. Making it essentially a financial and time cost makes reversing death functional as a game mechanic, but it can be pretty underwhelming as a story element. So how do you move the scale a little closer to the less trivial side of things? Well, perhaps a person can only be resurrected once, and if death comes again there is nothing that can bring them back. Alternatively, someone might have to make a deal with an outsider, giving up a part of their body, or a piece of their soul, to return (and if one does this often enough they might end up with the monstrous trope Came Back Wrong). It might even require performing some dire rite, and sacrificing something (or someone) in order to pay the cost; death for death, and life for life.

It's important to remember that cheating death (or just flat-out reversing it) should be its own element of drama and danger. And sometimes the reversing of death can be even more interesting than the death itself.

As a different example, consider The Widowmaker; a heinously corrupt six gun found in my recently-published supplement The Blade Itself for the game Hunter: The Vigil. A cursed weapon, the Widowmaker seeks to wipe the corrupt and the wicked from the face of the earth. However, it tends to be wielded by the desperate, and the mad. Why? Because if the one bound to the gun dies they spend 1 day in hell before being resurrected in the burned out ghost town where the gun was given to its first bearer. However, in exchange for this dark resurrection, the gun takes the life of someone close to the wielder; a mother, a brother, a lover, a friend... and only when they have lost everyone and everything can they truly die.

This is an example of a dear resurrection price... and it still has the stakes of death; it's just the death of others, rather than the character.

This Applies To Villains As Well

It's important to look at the other side of the coin, because resurrection for villains is extremely common as a tactic. Maybe it's that they made a deal with the devil to get out of hell, they were blessed by a dark god with a terrible form of immortality, or they have vat-grown clones of themselves that are updated to make sure they have all the memories and abilities of the last version of themselves that died a horrible death.

Villains get some latitude here, because their ability to cheat death increases the stakes when that is not a power that the protagonists have. However, your villains also have to have some kind of scale and cost for this power in order for it to not become eye-rolling and predictable.

In other words, make sure Palpatine doesn't just return for no reason.

Through the Mirror of Death Sight, all things are possible!

If your antagonists are resurrected there should either be a great cost to them (Darth Vader's cybernetic existence of pain and rage is a good example), or if it's treated as a power then that power needs to come with some kind of weakness (they must maintain the favor of a malevolent force, it requires a costly technology, etc.). Being able to endlessly respawn can lead to some short-term scares if you know that a foe cannot be permanently killed, but if that's the case then it needs to become part of their mythos.

Put another way, killing Jason Voorhees permanently may not be possible, but it's tense as hell as we wait to see whether the kids on the campground manage to get him under the waters of Crystal Lake. But when they take him into space, and that containment is no longer an option, things get ridiculous in a big, big hurry.

Final Thoughts: Match The Scale To Your Tone

The important thing to remember is that resurrection (or the lack thereof) is a mechanic in a story, and you can use it however you want. However, it's important to ask what it means for challenge, for the stakes, and for how interested your readers are going to be.

In a story like The Crow, where a character comes back from the dead as a nearly-unkillable revenant, the very invulnerability of their resurrection is a power fantasy that makes them akin to a slasher. In a story where people can die and resurrect over and over again, death may have become meaningless... but what takes its place if that's the case? And if someone knows they can die and return, but not how often they can do that, it leaves us wondering if this is going to be the death that really matters.

Your setup means a lot here... don't just bring characters back because you didn't want them to be dead for too long.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (a channel full of short stories, many of which are mine)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

If You Can't Come Up With Ideas On Your Own, You May Have Lost The Plot

Generative AI is a solution in desperate search of a problem as far as adoption by the masses goes (corporations want it to solve the whole "having to pay artists" problem). And because of the pushback against these things, the supporters of these programs are trying to justify any use of them as a necessity. And a recent post titled Using ChatGPT And Other AI Writing Tools Makes You Unhireable. Here's Why is something I wanted to draw some attention to this week.

Because the explanation of what this software actually does is on-point, and it cuts to the heart of something that people need to understand, but a lot of folks are resisting. Writing is not content. It's not just words. Writing is a skill, and if you don't want to actually put in the work to master the skill, then you are not a writer, and you certainly aren't employable as an author.

And this is particularly true when it comes to the inception of your ideas.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

This is Actually The Fun Part For Most People

To sum up, these programs are not thinking. They are literally throwing down Scrabble tiles and doing their best to come up with something they think you want to hear. They were seeded with stolen work, they use a colossal amount of energy and water, and they create a massive amount of pollution, while also fucking up the market on computer parts (and RAM specifically). Worse, those who use these programs are basically outsourcing their own thought process. Studies have shown repeatedly that regular use of generative AI leads to lowered thought process, making you actually slower of wit the longer you use these things.

Your brain, and your creativity, have to practice. You have to build new neural pathways, and exercise new parts of your mind... if you don't, they atrophy. Simple as.

Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power...

Most people understand that typing in a prompt and hitting a button is not the same as writing a story. However, there's a particular argument I wanted to focus on in this week's update because it's something that a lot of people are stridently defending for reasons I do not grasp or understand. To paraphrase, their argument boils down to;

"But I need it to give me ideas! I just need a bit of a push to get me started."

You don't, actually.

There are literally hundreds of lists of story prompts and ideas out there if you're feeling stuck. Hell, I did a short search for lists that don't use AI, and quickly found one from E.M. Welsh, one from The Write Practice, and one from E.A. Deverell. Just like there are non-AI generators out there for character and country names that use no stolen materials, and which aren't feeding into a massive overconsumption of resources.

Hell, if you're willing to part with a few bucks, there are simple lists produced by professionals available on Drive Thru RPG, like the Steampunk Street Name Generator by Adrian Kennelly, or my own supplement 100 Dark Secrets which works just as well for writing fiction as running a tabletop game.

More importantly, though, coming up with ideas is literally the easiest part of being a writer. Hell, children can come up with ideas! All you have to do is listen to an average 8-year-old ramble on, and you'll easily have three dozen story setups in the space of 15 minutes.

Now, will they be good ideas? Probably not. But you know what? Organically generated terrible ideas full of bad grammar and no understanding of story structure are still better than the terrible ideas full of bad grammar and no understanding of story structure these Gen AI programs spit out at you hoping for a pat on the head and a tummy rub.

You Are What Makes The Story

As was mentioned repeatedly in the Medium piece, most of what people claim these programs can do they actually can't. It's just snake oil salesmen promising you that this tonic will absolutely regrow your hair, add inches to your dick size, help you lose weight, and make your ex-wife love you again when it's just a bottle of piss mixed with ink.

It isn't a useful tool, and there are already non-AI options for people who genuinely need a little boost, or a story prompt, or some inspiration.

Most importantly, though, the thing that I feel a lot of people need to understand is that it's the writer's skill that makes or breaks a story. You can have an amazing story seed full of emotional potential and solid character concepts, but if you give it to someone with no experience or skill then they're probably going to flounder the same way as if you asked a 13-year-old with no drawing experience to recreate the Sistene Chapel ceiling using nothing more than a mechanical pencil and a few sheets of graph paper. However, you can also take a ridiculous premise or an absurd concept, hand it to an experienced writer, and they will mold it into a story that will make people laugh, cry, and demand to know why they're feeling things from such a dumb story.

Perfect examples of this are my animal-noir novel Marked Territory, or even my recent short story Gav and Bob: Sanguinala Redux which (apparently) brought a lot of Warhammer 40K fans to tears.

Seriously, check it out if you haven't read it yet!

And to reiterate one of the responses on Facebook to the Medium article, if you cannot perform the most basic task of being a writer (coming up with a story idea), then why do you think you should be at the table for a company making video games, a TV series, or writing novels? If you don't actually put in the work to make something, why are you trying so hard to convince others (and yourself) that you're a real writer?

This is not about good or bad. There are plenty of writers and authors out there that I think are lacking in skill and talent. But you know what? If that thing they wrote came from inside of them, and they put those words on the page, I won't do anything to disparage that achievement. We don't have to be bosom companions, but they're more than welcome into the writer's club as far as I'm concerned.

And if you're someone who is so sure they need Gen AI to be a writer, ask yourself why. What does this plagiarism software do that you can't do yourself? If you know the issues with it, and the cost of using it to the environment and yourself, then why are you insisting on using it instead of one of the other, safer tools out there?

It's never too late to delete these things, and start the hard work of writing. And if you're feeling stuck on ideas, go to a writer's group, and ask to start a brainstorming thread. Talk with other writers, and get a conversation going. You might be surprised what they have to say, and how much they're willing to help.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!