Story brilliance

As I lay down yet another sleepless night among many, not in the bad sense, no - not at all. It's silent, only weak white noises and the vibrance of thought passing through my head, mixing into an urban like soundscape.

I sit up, trying to process the plethora of thoughts. They are not heavy, actually my mind rarely feels so empty, so silent.

Then I abruptly disturb the pleasureable soundscape by rapidly tapping out my mind onto the laptop keyboard. It seems the only road tonight is to put my mind to rest through the dance of my fingers.

In harmony the soundscape and the dance blend into what can only be the very essence of my sleeplessness. An idea.

I have told many stories, on paper, by mouth either structured or improvised. And last but not least by action.

And I have been told innumerable stories through my life. Everything from the first children's books read to me as a goodnight saga to Disney on TV or much darker, the lies of grown ups. Some stories have been brilliant, others have served their purpose and some were downright awful.

But we rarely stop and think what components actually make a good story. There's classical ways to write a decent story, but it doesn't teach you how to go beyond and reach your potential and to break the barrier between conventional writing and finding your own style.

So let's do that, let's stop for a brief moment and think.

Conventions such as great characters, a compelling narrative, no huge clichés, sounds very promising don't you think?

While most of those points are valid in most forms of writing. Your way of writing should never have to conform to those, only conform if it is by free will.

One of my most profound pieces is the story of Hexagonica. With Hexagonica I crafted a world to play with freely in which no convention or boundary was needed. I was sleep deprived, probably hadn't eaten correctly in days and been really deep into philosophy and had a decent mixture of odd influences from games and movies when I started to type the first words of the story.

But what is Hexagonica? It is the beginning of a universe. A story meant to portray a certain kind of advent chaos that we really could never begin to understand unless we extracted a chunk of it and present it in chosen pieces. Reading the true "Hexagonica" story would be the equivalent of trying to see a hypercube.

And as you may or may not know, we can only project a hypercube into three dimensional space to approximate it. The same goes with Hexagonica.

Hexagonica doesn't have compelling characters, and the story arch and ending is a mess. It has a few clichés. It's actually trash, from a conventional point of view.

Having read it several times and having it spark numerous philosophical debates I've come to realize that the nature of the story that is Hexagonica transcends that of the paper it's written on. There is almost always somebody pointing out a new reference or a new philosophical point I never intended and as such those people shape the story as they read.

See when I wrote it there were no rules I just wrote whatever came to my mind. In the end it didn't need interesting characters. It was "deep" enough on it's own.

Let's leave Hexagonica and explore more on how to archive "Story brilliance". One of my favorite game companies, Bioware just recently explained in a video how they made the story of Mass Effect.

Anyone who has ever tried making multiple branching storylines where they try to anticipate the choices the player(s) want to make knows it's incredibly difficult. What Bioware did was to create a baseline of characters. At the time the characters were inserted into the world, especially the "team members" they were basically assets.

Whenever they created a "mission" for Mass Effect they created the mission first with it's bare bone basics and then they could at any time call upon the assets if they were avaliable. If not, then another event might transpire or it might not happen at all.

This is a superb way to design an overarching story to a game. The actual lore would be separate of course.

For instance I think it would be interesting to explore this type of writing for books or pen and paper roleplaying scenarios.

But even Mass Effect have clichés which brings me to my next point. Elves and Dwarves are cliché races in fantasy writing. They are so normal now that I'm personally choking everytime I hear about it. But there are settings and ways to give even such an old and over used cliché a small spark of ingenuinity. I'm going to be honest, get off your lazy ass riding the LoTR wave and find your own goldmine.

Elves and Dwarves sure, hey LoTR was not first I know that. But what makes them unique and what are their properties right now that fulfill a part in your story and setting? Unless there's a compelling reason for them to be of a specific "race" then why include them at all?

The answer is simply that people can relate to them. And honestly you are simply looking down upon your readers and your ability to make justice to an entire race of your own making while you should be excited about the fact you can play "god" and shape your creation any way you like

Last but not least. I find sometimes I need to get into a certain mindset to write certain things. These are things you can trigger and control, play with your mindset, write in different situations in life, you might surprise yourself when you see what comes out.

Time to let the tapping fade into the distant unheard echo of the night as I slip into my dreamworld.

Signed, Mireneye