Games and Story

Since, essentially, the beginning of the pandemic, I've been running a game of Werewolf: the Forsaken on Zoom for friends in L.A., Metarie, Seattle, and (now) Portland (because two of them moved from L.A. to Portland).

For a lot of my life, I've resisted being in positions of creative leadership. I talked a lot about my job as an actor being as an interpretive artist, and I still think that way. In spite of being the most motivated person to initiate role-playing games, I've resisted DMing, wanting instead to play within another's world and story. I've resisted writing and directing, too, occasionally doing it, but knowing that what I WANTED was to act, periodt (as someone I know says in all caps all the time, to the extent that I looked it up to see if it means something beyond the emphasizing phrase "period." It does not[at least not according to my research - looking it up on Google]. But it means explicitly that, so... useful!)

Where was I?

AH! The point here is that I'm starting to not resist as much. At the ripe old age of definitely an adult, I'm here to say ok to writing and directing and leading.

I'm reading Story Genius, and, well, I have notes, but I think the core of what she says is solid and handy. The notes are that I am wary of writings that declare that their theory of writing is the correct one. And this book does that. And I can think of counterexamples, and I'm sure they'd have valid-sounding arguments about why those aren't exceptions, but really, the core of the critique is that they spend a tremendous number of words declaring and repeating their core concept as persuasive argument. I think some editing is in order.

But I shouldn't spend so much time talking about what I don't like in it. The core argument is very useful, even if I don't agree that it's the only way to do things. The core is that Story is the internal change that the character must go through. As a corollary, they point out that folks mistake plot for story, or the events of the novel.

Anywhoodles, where was I going with this?

Oh! I wanted to apply it to the Werewolf story we've been telling for two years, almost. I had grand plans to turn the story, with my players' permission, of course, into a novel. My grander plan, I confess, is to turn it into...I think 4 books, if I remember my imaginings correctly? The first book's plot (not Story) would take us through our characters dealing with some very local problems: there were a couple vampires trying to develop a mall in their town and in doing so were messing with the spirit wilds, meanwhile, a new pack whose alpha had a connection to one of my players was in the area, and the alpha was pushing some unhealthy relationship stuff - that's a complex emotional journey that I'm not in the right frame of mind to sum up right now. Anywhoodles. There's probably more story stuff there. One of the vampires was a long lost beau of my pack's alpha.
Zip zoop, I think book two would have started with a growing awareness that all was still not right with the forest, and when they disengaged with a pus monster abomination, found its source in a mage-caused problem, and long story short, wound up traveling back in time to defeat the root cause.

That's the book we're currently in. I don't want to write much more since my wife is a player, but suffice it to say, I think book three is called "obligations" or something. I have notes in the November monthly journal that I've been using as my rpg journal.

Now I want to go back and think about what these characters need in order to change. I think it's pretty obvious for some of them, but for others, I dunno.