Guest Post: Rachel Fellman Chews on Bad Food in Fiction

Growing up, two of my favorite things were books and video games. If you’d told me twenty years ago that I’d grow up to write both, I probably would have choked on my Mountain Dew.

But over the past few years, I’ve been doing exactly that. I’ve written the Recoletta series, a science fantasy trilogy published by Angry Robot, and I’ve worked as a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment for three and a half years now, writing for the Pillars of Eternity games and expansions.

In both media, the principles of good storytelling””establishing a strong story arc; building a vivid, believable world; and populating it with complex, memorable characters””are the same.

But the user experience differs, and understanding that is key to knowing how to satisfy both audiences.

Readers generally pick up novels to immerse themselves in stories that they experience through the eyes of another character. Players generally sit down with games to immerse themselves in stories that they discover and define through their own actions.

A large chunk of storytelling in both media comes down to understanding the role your characters play and how to make them real.

Characters bring a fictional world to life. Their problems and dilemmas create the oft-sought tension and “stakes,” and their choices and conflicts drive the story. Most readers and gamers would be hard-pressed to discuss their favorite stories without also talking about the characters who populate it. We connect emotionally with the people in stories rather than the ideas and philosophies.

But who are those characters?

In a novel, the most important character is typically the protagonist. It’s not just because the action (mostly) follows her. It’s also because we experience the story through her perspective. We see what she sees and know what she feels, even if we don’t always agree with it. First-person and close third-person stories have become immensely popular because of the intimacy of the perspective they offer.

For the protagonist’s story to be engaging, she has to have challenges to overcome. Strengths and vulnerabilities that add variation to her journey. A deeply personal investment in the events of the plot. Writing a protagonist who meets these criteria is often a matter of architecture in the planning stages””figuring out who this person is and what it is about her that generates interest and tension””as well as retrofitting in the revision stages””finding ways to connect her more deeply to other characters and events and building momentum over the successes and setbacks she faces.

When it comes to games, protagonists may be a lot more varied. For the sake of simplicity (ha!), I’m mostly talking about Western-style RPGs, which are often characterized by protagonists who are defined by the player in some significant way and whose stories are often discovered over the course of (fairly) open-ended gameplay.

The degree to which players define their characters differs widely between games. In some games, you have a protagonist with an established identity and established personality whose significant choices are defined by the player. That includes Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher.

In other games, you have a character whose overall identity is set, but whose personality and outlook is determined by the player. For example, Commander Shepard of the Mass Effect series is always a human operative intent on saving the galaxy, but the player can cast her as an idealistic savior or a ruthless maverick.

Finally, there are other games, such as Pillars of Eternity, in which nearly everything about the protagonist, including personality, backstory, and race, is player-determined.

In these types of games, the task of the writer is to build everything around the player character as much as””or more than””defining the player character on his or her own. You develop a story that is just loose enough to fit whatever way the player might choose to define the protagonist according to the options you have given them. You create a world with enough freedom for the player to make choices and enough context to give meaning to those choices. You write side characters who establish the world as a living place and who frame the stakes for the player.

It’s a delicate balance, and it’s one that places a much greater burden on the writing that establishes the world around the protagonist.

That’s because you’re defining this character””or, to some extent, allowing your player to””through negative space rather than positive space. You’re creating a stage that will allow the player to shape a personal story, and one that doesn’t feel at odds with the choices you’ve given them.

Heroes of their own stories

And yet, protagonists aren’t the only characters on the page (or screen). A common piece of writing advice is to write villains as though they were the heroes of their own stories. It’s good advice, and it holds true for all characters””sidekicks, love interests, mentors, and spear carriers.

In many books, the most memorable and beloved characters are often secondary characters. Written well, they are typically less encumbered by the constraints of following the plot. Writers may feel freer to embody them with the quirks and idiosyncrasies that help them stand out. And the foil they frequently provide for the main character””whether as comic relief or as someone who pushes and challenges the protagonist””can create entertaining humor, conflict, and character development.

Put simply, these characters work because they have goals and interests that do not always line up with those of the protagonist.

Games may contain even more secondary characters””often called NPCs (non-player characters). Of course, if every character is the hero of her own story, you’ve still got to make them good stories. And “bring me five puffleberries” and “get my cat out of this tree” don’t quite cut it. We don’t like busywork in real life, so why does anyone assume we’d do it for fun? Yet “fetch quests”””formulaic tasks in which the player character is sent to handle a routine errand for someone else””are everywhere.

The problem isn’t just that they usually make for dull content. It’s also that they suggest a world in which other characters’ concerns go no deeper than grocery runs. In which they only exist to provide some degree of involvement for the player. And in which the protagonist only relates to them as an errand boy.

Every quest need not be epic. But it should mean something or reveal something, both with respect to the protagonist and the other characters involved.

In both games and novels, we rely on good characters to develop our stories and to hold our audience’s interest in them. Novelists and game writers merely need to understand how their readers and players will relate to them in order to deploy them most effectively.

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Bio: Carrie Patel is a novelist and a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment. She is the author of the Recoletta trilogy, which is published by Angry Robot. The final book in the series, The Song of the Dead, comes out on May 2. She works at Obsidian Entertainment as a narrative designer and writer. She has worked on the award-winning Pillars of Eternity and its expansions, The White March Parts I and II. She is currently working on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. You can find her on Twitter as @Carrie_Patel as well as at http://www.electronicinkblog.com/.

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Most writers can probably remember the moment when they realized that they wanted to become a writer. Maybe it was a story someone read to them when they were a child. Or a novel they read in junior high. Or the first time they wrote a poem or a short story for an English assignment in elementary school. Maybe they saw a play or a film and felt inspired to write their own script. Or wrote an article for their high school newspaper. Or took a writing class in college.

Everyone has their Aha! moment. An epiphany that sends them down a path of words and characters and plots, that takes them on a journey of creativity and self-doubt and soul-crushing rejection. Not to mention years of emotional therapy.

That moment for me happened in the late fall of 1985, during the first semester of my sophomore year in college. I’d been introduced to The Stand by Stephen King the previous summer and devoured the novel while on a family vacation. I didn’t read much as a kid. I was allergic to libraries and would rather play outside or watch TV. Books were an afterthought or a requirement for high school American and Western Lit classes. Although I did enjoy Vonnegut. And Lord of the Flies remains near the top of my list of Desert Island Books (irony noted). But after reading The Stand, I was hooked.

So I picked up a few more of King’s novels, along with novels by Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, and John Saul, among others. All horror writers, all the time. I’d fallen in love with reading and I couldn’t imagine my life without books. But there came a moment when I was in the middle of The Talisman by King and Straub that I became so caught up in the adventure unfolding within the pages of the story that the world outside of the novel ceased to exist. It was something I’d never experienced before. Not with The Stand or any other of the books I’d read. And it was such an amazing and exhilarating moment that I thought: I want to make someone feel like this.

So I took some writing classes and I kept reading. When I graduated, I got a job to pay the bills and wrote short stories in my spare time, sending them out to magazines in the hopes of having them published. The stories were all of the supernatural horror variety, of course. And the influence of the books I’d read, especially the novels of King and Straub, loomed large on my writing. They were, after all, the impetus for my wanting to become a writer.

Over the next decade, I wrote dozens of short stories along with three novels. While I managed to get a dozen of the stories published, the pay didn’t amount to much. And although I received positive feedback on my novels, none of them found an agent or a home. Writing soon became a grind, the joy replaced by discouragement, and I started to question whether or not continuing along this path was something that I wanted to do. Cue the self-doubt.

Soon after, in October 2002, I was browsing the books at my local bookstore in preparation for another trip and came across the novel Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. I’d seen the movie Fight Club and loved it, and Lullaby was a supernatural horror-satire with a premise that sounded fun. So I bought a copy and put it in my backpack for the flight.

Have you ever read the first few pages of a novel or a short story and had to go back and reread them immediately because they spoke to you in a way that no story has ever spoken to you before? Suddenly an idea forms in your head. Except it’s more than just an idea. It’s an awareness. A realization that you have this story inside of you but you never knew it was waiting to be told until that moment.

That’s what happened to me in the first five minutes of that airplane flight, reading the opening pages of Lullaby. I’d written previous supernatural horror stories with elements of dark comedy and social satire but had never considered expanding any of them into a novel-length form. The idea had never occurred to me. But the dark comedy and social satire in Lullaby spoke to me in a way that straight supernatural horror no longer did.

So I read more Palahniuk. Around that same time, I discovered the comedic fantasy books of Christopher Moore (Lamb and Bloodsucking Fiends). Together, the influence of their books had an enormous impact on my writing. Where King and Straub had made me realize that I wanted to become a writer, Palahniuk and Moore made me realize what I wanted to do as a writer.

When I finally sat down to flesh out my darkly comedic short story “A Zombie’s Lament” that I’d written a year earlier, I discovered the joy of writing again. More than that, I discovered my voice. And that voice helped me to write Breathers, my fourth novel and first published novel, which came out in 2009.

I wrote four more novels after that, all of them dark comedy and social satire with a supernatural, speculative, or fantastic element. In addition to Palahniuk and Moore, I continued to read King and Straub but added other writers to my diet, including Gaiman, Pratchett, and Hiaasen, who all helped my writing to evolve. But Palahniuk and Moore were the catalyst for the writer I had become.

Then around 2014-2015, I discovered the short story collections of Karen Russell and Kelly Link, specifically St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Get in Trouble. This discovery created a third shift in my writing and I found myself exploring ideas and stories and characters that I never would have considered writing about before. Not only did the stories of Russell and Link inspire me to write a number of my own short stories, but they also helped me to bring more balance to my writing.

Although all of my novels and many of my previous short stories included female characters who featured prominently in the plot, none of the women played the role of the main protagonist. Half of the 14 stories in my new collection, Lost Creatures, are told from a female POV””including a ten-year-old Japanese girl, a college zombie, and a time-jumping alcoholic. And they are some of my favorite stories I’ve ever written.

Over the course of my creative career, dozens of writers have had an impact on my writing, influencing and inspiring me. And while my writing wouldn’t be the same without the existence of every single one of those writers, the books and words written by these six authors found me at the right time and had the most significant impact on the formation and the evolution of my writing.

BIO: S.G. Browne is the author of the novels Breathers, Fated, Lucky Bastard, Big Egos, and Less Than Hero, as well as the short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel and the heartwarming holiday novella I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus. He’s also the author of The Maiden Poodle, a self-published fairy tale about anthropomorphic cats and dogs suitable for children and adults of all ages. His new short story collection, Lost Creatures, is a blend of fantasy, science fiction, dark comedy, and magical realism. He’s an ice cream connoisseur, Guinness aficionado, and a cat enthusiast. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, check out his website at www.sgbrowne.com, or learn more about his new collection Lost Creatures.

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