cleverpun’s Idea Graveyard: Sorrow No More · 2:23am Jan 2nd, 2017
Another new year is here. That means lots of new beginnings, looking forward, etc. All those platitudes and cliches we've come to know and possibly tolerate. But just as important as looking to the future, perhaps even more important, is examining the past. Learning from our mistakes and critiquing our own work is crucial if we want to grow as writers (and as people).
So with that in mind, I bring you another in my series of Idea Graveyard posts. Wherein I outline an idea of mine that failed to get off the ground. What strengths and weaknesses it showed during pre-writing, and how that related to it being discarded.
My audience may have noticed that I tend to try a lot of different things. Many of my stories start with a desire to explore a specific topic or genre. Today's concept is no different. A few years ago I was investigating the idea of second person fiction, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories in particular. I had heard about Twine from somewhere, and the idea intrigued me.
The plot bunny that rose out of this was called Sorrow No More (like most of my titles, a working title that I stole from song lyrics, and never spent much effort replacing). Here's the initial summary I wrote to describe it:
A second-person Choose Your Own Adventure about Princess Luna. It's starts sometime after Discord has been defeated, and the reader has to help guide Luna through her first contact with Nightmare Moon.
There would be 2-3 main forks; one where the reader tries to explicitly refuse the Nightmare's More Than Mind Control, and one where they try to ignore it. As the story progresses, a third option appears that involve listening to what it has to say.
Ultimately, no matter what the reader chooses, the Nightmare wins and takes control of Princess Luna. The final scene differs slightly depending on choices made—if the reader refused the Nightmare's advances, the confrontation with Celestia is in 3rd person to represent the Nightmare taking control. If they accepted it, then the confrontation with Celestia is in second person but without any choices, to emphasize the More Than Mind Control of the Nightmare's promises. If the reader tried to ignore it, the the final scene is a Time Skip to when the Elements break Luna free, to represent a complete lack of Fighting From The Inside (kind of the weakest, should probably choose something more thematic)
In theory, this all sounds fine and dandy. A Dark Fic about my favorite target subject, with a deconstructive twist on canon. I also saw it as a good way to get hipster cred: Dark CYOA stories were and are a rarity even now, as are second person fics that try and immerse the reader in the character's mindset (it's usually the opposite—2nd person is a cheap way to establish character). So where did this idea begin to fall apart?
The first problem should be obvious. The story was created to capitalize on a gimmick. The story wasn't chosen to be second person or a CYOA because that was best for the story. Rather, the story was designed to fit the gimmick. As I've mentioned many times before, this is the opposite of how a story should be written: the style and themes and even gimmicks should be chosen to enhance the narrative. The narrative shouldn't be an excuse to let these things happen, because then it won't be entertaining.
The second major problem was logistics: CYOA stories take a lot of effort to write. Even worse, the concept involved a lot of subtlety and character-specific interactions. Even with only 3 major choice paths, that would still be ~12 variations to write (3^2 + 3; three for choosing the same choice throughout the story, and 9 for switching halfway through). Further, how and in what way should the different paths overlap? In what ways should they be different, and in which ways should they be similar? How could I make each branch of the story feel different without being too subtle? And if the differences were too subtle, then what was the point of a reader making different choices? And how much of this should tie into the initial theme of giving the reader no true control over their actions?
Ultimately, there might be a salvageable concept here. A second person story about Princess Luna's first contact with Nightmare Moon, that perhaps emphasizes the control The Nightmare has over her, could be interesting. But this version of it, with the tacked-on gimmick of a CYOA story, became bloated before it even began, and that's why it never got off the ground.
Thanks for reading. Whether this helped spark your own ideas, or whether it showed you some things to avoid in your own writing, I hope it was interesting.
As always, comments and criticism welcome.
Sounds like a plot for a normal Telltale game.
I'm not sure if this is actually true. Restrictions, as they say, breed creativity; if your goal is to write about some central gimmick, there's nothing inherently wrong with starting from there and then coming up with a story which makes good use of your gimmick. In the end, a gimmick isn't intrinsically better than an idea as a starting point for a story. The real problem comes when you try to cram a story onto a gimmick (or a gimmick into a story) that doesn't fit the story or gimmick - as long as the story and gimmick get along, there's no intrinsic reason why brainstorming various ideas and discarding the ones that don't work won't end up with you getting an idea that will work.
4365611
While this is funny, it isn't necessarily a bad thing; it depends on what the purpose of the story is. I think the biggest problem with this story is the question of "What is it trying to tell the reader?" If each of the paths emphasized a flaw with that approach - ignoring your problems doesn't make them go away, arguing with someone who isn't sane can never end with you winning the argument, simply going along with bad things makes you personally responsible for the consequences - that might say something. But taken as a whole, I'm not sure if there's a coherent message here other than "you always fail."
Stuff like Telltale Games' stories are more about telling you stories with some minor variations. They're intending to tell more or less the same story, with some wiggle room in there, which is pretty common in games. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, and it can be fun (like in the case of Dragon Age: Origins, where your choices feel significant because they change who helps you out in the final battle, even though it doesn't "really" matter in any grandiocosmic sense, it feels like it does), but it can also end up feeling like your choices don't matter.
Telltale Games' games are intended to make it feel like your choices mattered, and do so to varying extents - having things turn out the same way no matter what choices you make is only obvious on replay, but the real problem is that it pulls back the curtain and makes it more obvious that your choices don't matter. For instance, in The Walking Dead, you can choose who you save in the first episode, and that person lives for a while and then dies later on in the game. This doesn't feel weird because, well, people are dying left and right - but if you play the game again, and find out that neither person survives, it makes the choice feel less significant.
The problem comes when it becomes obvious to the player that their choices didn't really matter. That was the ultimate problem with ME3 - all of those "choices" you made up to that point ultimately came down to some relatively minor cosmetic changes in most cases. If you spared the Rachni Queen, she gets captured and you have to free her again. If you killed her, a cloned queen is put in her place. In the former case, it feels like your choice had some weight - but knowing that that quest happens no matter what, and you have to fight indoctrinated Rachni no matter what, makes your choice to free or not free the queen in the first game feel retroactively less significant. If they had instead substituted in other enemies if you didn't spare the Rachni Queen, it would have made the choice feel more significant - but it also would have meant a lot more work.
These constraints mean that certain kinds of stories simply don't working out very well, simply because the choices you can make are limited by time/budgetary constraints. You have to make choices feel meaningful without adding an excessive amount of work. And that's very difficult to do cheaply sometimes.
I feel like, if you're designing around something where player choices have to feel significant, you have to approach them from the beginning that way and try and make sure that whatever choices they make are not going to create too much work for you, but simultaneously feel like something is legitimately special about your game.
4366080 I think that that the use of gimmicks (particularly as starting points) falls under the "learn the rules before you break them" umbrella. Yes, Basing a story around a gimmick or singular idea can be successful: If You Came to Conquer originally began as a way to complain about/deconstruct time travel tropes. There are other aspects to the story, but subverting how time travel is usually portrayed in fiction is central to it. But I don't think this should be a first resort for writers, especially if they are still learning.
That's one of those things about working in such a subjective medium: any statement that involves "never" or "should" or similar is always to have caveats and exceptions. I think that a story should not be based around a gimmick, but my own writing has shown that such a process can be successful. But the repercussions and limits of the gimmick need to be considered very carefully.
This also leads into your second point: the logistics and use of the gimmick weren't thought out carefully. I was thinking of the gimmick merely on a surface level. Things like theme, or using the gimmick in a meaningful way (like your example of each path having a different moral/thematic underpinning), didn't factor into my pre-writing. Things like the amount of work that a CYOA story creates only occurred to me briefly.
If one is going to base an idea off of a gimmick, then they need to consider all aspects very carefully. Even more carefully than if they had come up with the idea the other way around.
4365611 Badum tish
As Titanium Dragon pointed out, this premise provides a golden opportunity to deliver a message:
I don't feel the chosen medium would work well for delivering said message, though: to explore three timelines either the player would have to replay the opening three times, which is boring, or you'd have to write three completely different stories that branch off very early on. Nevermind that a lot of people probably wouldn't explore some of the choices because they feel wrong to them or some such.
However, I would be very interested in seeing this plot in a plain old fic with whatever plot device you need to explore several possible timelines. "No Regrets" comes to mind, as well as your own "If You Came to Conquer".
Waaaait a minute... Didn't NMM mention that she's tried all time magic known to ponykind before asking Discord for help, but couldn't change anything? Well, there's your plot device