Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

The past year has seen my writing transform me from mild-mannered game designer to international man of mystery, which is another way of saying I’ve racked up an impressive number of frequent flier miles on various video game writing assignments. This has both its good and its bad points. The good ones are obvious – seeing new and exciting places on someone else’s nickel, the chance to work on exciting and interesting projects, and of course, free in-flight movie and beverages.
The bad points – jet lag, meeting new and exciting pathogens and bringing them home to meet my fiancée, having to learn "I am a stupid American, please take my money" in Romanian – are pretty obvious as well. But there’s a non-obvious one, which is to say that it plays hob with my writing schedule, or at least it tries to.
Now I know lots of writers who say they can write anywhere. Give them a coffeeshop, a park bench, a temporarily paralyzed mime in a horizontal position, whatever, and they’ll set up the old laptop and starting pounding away. Me, I can’t do that. I suspect it’s a deep and abiding character flaw, but there you have it. I have to be comfortable when I write. I need to nest, to tune my environment so that it feels like someplace I can focus entirely on the words in front of me.
Starbucks doesn’t pass the test. Not in North Carolina, not in Paris, not in Bucharest. Hell, I don’t even drink coffee, and I only sneak in the occasional cup of tea on the side. There are too many people, too many distractions, too many other possible stories walking by every minute. See the guy over there with the scraggly little beard and the black-rimmed glasses? What’s his story? Maybe he’s waiting for a friend or a study partner, or maybe it’s something darker and more ominous. And my mind starts running down those tracks at a million miles an hour, with all of those stories jostling to be first in line. What if, what if, what if.
The poor novel doesn’t stand a chance. It’s like watching Gulliver take it in the shorts from the Lilliputians.
Airplanes aren’t any good for me either. Using the tray in front of you for a laptop desk requires two very important things to happen. One, you have to be skinny. Two, the person sitting in front of you has to decide that they do not in fact want to recline. If, however, you are not a slender, waif-like thing and the passenger in front of you has decided that on this night, they recline, then you have the choice of having your laptop folded into thirds, or trying to type on something that is resting more or less on your sternum. That doesn’t work so well for me, as it requires me with my elbows flailing in best hockey goon fashion, and the people sitting next to me generally don’t appreciate that. Either that, or the drink cart whangs me as it scoots down the aisle, and there’s nothing like a five minute funnybone stinger from a can of Sprite to make you reassess your definition of the words "hostile work environment".
So that leaves the hotel room, my home away from home. And that’s what it has to turn into. Jet lag must be banished, the writing desk must be mimicked, and the iPod must blare the same sort of moody gunk I listen to at home. This, incidentally, is much easier to do in France, where they don’t have anything even vaguely resembling SportsCenter on late at night to serve as a distraction. "I’m just waiting for the score on the Phillies game" can swallow a productive hour alive in an eyeblink.
And then, maybe, I can settle in and write. Except that the only reason they put me on the road these days is to write, to write all day long and to do so in the proper style and format for video games, which is to say short and sharp. Every word costs money, after all – money to hire actors, to get studio time, to place in the game, to put it on the disc. So there’s no room in video game writing for descriptive passages, for internal monologues and character descriptions. It’s all right up there on the screen, and you just get to do the talky bits for 8 or 10 or whatever hours a day. Forty-seven variations on "Arrggh! I’ve been shot!" and ninety-two on "Got him!" Twenty missions’ worth of "Please boil down this incredibly complex mission design document into a three sentence briefing, using words of no more than three syllables." You get the idea. And to go back to the hotel after all that, to try to stretch out from the box you’ve forcibly crammed yourself into all day, well, that takes some doing. You  know you’re just going to have to tamp all that stuff down again right around the time you hit the continental breakfast bar (Note: very few hotels on the Continent actually have continental breakfasts. It’s one of the mysteries of international travel, along with "Why are the French mad for peanut butter", "Why must all European currencies contain at least one bill that is orange", and "Is there the slightest chance that this convenience store clerk will not attempt to rip me off as I purchase a can of shaving cream"?). It’s easier just to leave it all right where it is, to save yourself the energy of switching back and forth between modes when time and travel and tight deadlines with a hundred dependencies are already nagging at you.
But.
Still.
If you say, "I’m too tired from traveling to write," then you start saying "I’m too tired from mowing the lawn" and "I’m too tired from cleaning up cat barf" and just that plain old "I’m too tired." Start with that and you never stop, and all of the marvelous things you pick up in all of those business trips to Outer Borgistan get wasted.
So I make the hotel room my cave. Pull the drapes down, kill the lights, hide all of the reminders that I’m not in my little cocoon of an office, and get to work. I don’t look at the clock. I don’t let myself think about work, about how I’m going to have to pack up the kit come morning and start the cycle again. There’s no energy or time to spare for that stuff. Sometimes it works better than others – some nights are thousands of words, some are dozens. But there’s always something. In the end, there pretty much has to be.

——–
Richard E. Dansky
Writer, Game Designer, and Cad
(Not necessarily in that order)

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