"Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary: Reflection, Influence, Process," ed. Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

About Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary: Reflection, Influence, Process, ed. Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

Almost all Creative Writing courses at University ask students to write reflectively as well as creatively: to submit commentaries alongside their creative work. This groundbreaking guide shows how to do this well - indeed, how commentaries might be works of art in themselves. 

In this unique collection of essays, published writers offer an intimate view of how their work has been informed, shaped and transformed by their literary, political, philosophical or personal influences. Providing models of the critical commentaries that all students of creative writing must write, each essay from contemporary authors of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, scripts and digital writing demonstrates how what writers write is determined by what they have read, and what they read is then determined by what they are writing. As writers reflect on their process of moving from sources of inspiration to a finished and original piece of writing, they reveal their anxieties, passions, discoveries and motivations, offering fascinating insights into the imagination's journey. Introductory chapters explore why writers reflect on their own work, and place this practice in wider contexts, offering theoretical frameworks for understanding process, influence, and inspiration.

As illuminating for aspiring writers as it is for students reflecting on their research and process as part of writing courses, Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary will change the way writers talk about and engage with other texts.

You can read more about Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read the list of contents, about the editors, and a short sample from the introduction of the book.  

Contents of Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary

Chapters include:

Part One: Introductory
1. Preface
2. On Reflection in Creative Writing
3. On Influence in Creative Writing

Part Two: Sample Critical Commentaries

4. The Personal Is Always Political, by Karen Stevens
5. The Art of Persuasion, by Jo Nadin
6. On the Genealogy of Memoirs, by Jonathan Taylor
7. "The Community of Sorrow," by David Swann
8. The End is Never Where You Think, by Dan Powell
9. The Age of Influence in the Age of Authenticity, by Jemma Kennedy
10. Go Outside, by Shaindel Beers, Blue Mountain Community College
11. Jesus, Fairy Tales and Flash Fiction, by Kit de Waal
12. Alternate Truths and Fake News, by Anietie Isong
13. Memoir and Main Character Syndrome, by Jenn Ashworth
14. Experimental Poetic Autography, by Lila Matsumoto
15. Digital Narratives, Technology and the Domestic Gothic, by Kate Pullinger

Part Three: Postscripts

16. Further Reading: Selected Bibliography

About the editors

Karen Stevens is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, where she specialises in teaching fiction. She is an author and editor, and has edited two critical and creative anthologies: Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey (2014) and High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories (2018). Her debut collection of short stories Brilliant Blue (2025) was published with Barbican Press. She is on Twitter @KarenStevens01.

Jonathan Taylor is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Leicester University, where he directs the MA in Creative Writing. His most recent books are A Physical Education (Goldsmiths, 2024) and Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). His website is here.  

From Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary

From the Preface, by Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

Welcome to the mirror-world: the world of Creative Writing in higher education, where the assumption is that learning is, in part, reflective. You learn to write – or learn to write better – by reflecting on your own work and the work of others. The mirror-world reflects both yourself and your (literary) surroundings, and you learn by studying those reflections, by staring into the mirror. In that sense, a reflective practitioner is a split self: you are both a writer and someone who stands outside yourself, reflecting on your own practice, reading and critically evaluating your work as if you were someone else. You are both a writer and a writer who writes about their own writing. 

To put this more simply: almost all Creative Writing courses in formal education – whether at undergraduate, postgraduate or PhD level – include some kind of reflective element, and this manifests itself most obviously in the form of a written text which accompanies your creative work. That is, when you are asked to submit a piece of Creative Writing as part of your course, it is (as you may already know) customary for that work to be accompanied by some kind of "supplementary discourse" – a "reflective commentary" or "critical commentary" or "critical exegesis." (The names vary from institution to institution, but for the purposes of this book we’ll stick with "critical commentary," for the most part). As Maria Taylor suggests, the "critical commentary" allows the writer to see their "'other' self … the twin … in the mirror …. Reflective writing allows for engaging with that mysterious mirror-image figure, and gives the writer fresh insights into the practice of their own writing …. Students must be encouraged to take that brave first step through the looking glass into themselves in order to understand their motives and processes as writers" (The Place and the Writer, 2021: 130-1).

This book aims to help you to take that "step through the looking glass." It is about the process of reflection generally, and its written incarnation, the "critical commentary," more specifically ... 

Kevan Manwaring, "Writing Ecofiction"

Dr Kevan Manwaring is the MA Creative Writing course leader at Arts University Bournemouth. He is the author of The Windsmith Elegy series (Awen), Desiring Dragons: Creativity, Imagination, and the Writer’s Quest (Compass Books), Writing Ecofiction: Navigating the Challenges of Environmental Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan), and editor of Heavy Weather: Tempestuous Tales of Stranger Climes (British Library), Ballad Tales: Traditional British Ballads Retold (The History Press), and other anthologies. He has contributed articles to The Bottle Imp, English Review, Revenant and Gothic Nature. He was an academic consultant for BBC 4’s The Secret Life of Books, and is a panellist on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking. He is also a member of the Climate Fiction Writers League. He is currently working on a book for Routledge exploring environmental aspects of Fantasy. 

About Writing Ecofiction: Navigating the Challenges of Environmental Narrative, by Kevan Manwaring
This creative writing textbook introduces students to ecofiction: narrative writing that focuses on the environment. Also known as ‘climate fiction’ or ‘cli-fi,’ an increasing number of short story writers, novelists and pioneers of emerging forms such as interactive fiction are taking up the call to develop their own creative responses to the climate crisis. This guide explores a cross-section of genres and ways of writing about our world, as well as the ethical and technical challenges involved. It offers a discussion of classic and contemporary texts, literary criticism and creative writing exercises. The book covers a broad range of themes and styles of writing, from works that engage with nature and landscape writing to those that take a more activist approach to climate change. With an awareness of the Global South and the subaltern, the framing of the Anthropocene, wilderness and nature writing is challenged. Each chapter offers a new perspective on ecofiction for the creative writer, with reading suggestions and connections to other writers and texts, and writing activities. Designed for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate writing modules on the environment, the book is also suitable for independent writers looking to expand their skillset. It features twenty-one interviews with ecofiction authors including: Ana Filomena Amaral, Austin Aslan, Denise Baden, David Barker, TC Boyle, Lynn Buckle, Adam Connor, Michelle Cook, Julie Carrick Dalton, April Doyle, Anna Holmes, Somto Ihezue, RB Kelly, Gill Lewis, Anne Mordell, Anthony Nanson, Midge Raymond, Manda Scott, Mary Woodbury, John Yunker.

You can read more about Writing Ecofiction on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Writing Ecofiction

The quiet, gentle, sometimes solitary but never lonely act of reading is one of the most radical actions one can take in the modern age. It is self-reflective, meditative even, as one sits in peaceful absorption. 

Socrates told us that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ The affordances of reading create a space where the examined life can happen – whether through the windows and mirrors of fiction and poetry, a thought-provoking essay or article, the life story of an inspiring figure, a sobering account of a real-life event, or (of course) through the smeuses and refugia of new nature writing. Reading is radical because, in a ‘post truth’ age of information wars, fake news, deep fakes, and the sound and fury of social media, formulating one’s own opinion against the din of the herd, and honing critical thinking skills, is a quiet act of defiance, and perhaps the only conscionable choice for anyone with a lively, enquiring intelligence and a robust personal integrity. 

Yet, beyond this, the act of reading is inherently ecological for a number of reasons. In terms of materiality, reading a printed book (at least one created with wood pulp from a sustainable source, as most books are these days thanks to the Forest Stewardship Council) is an activity with a low carbon footprint, unless you are doing it while cruising on your private jet or aboard a luxury yacht – which 99% of us won’t be doing. For a brief while you are no longer consuming. Of course, the purchase of a book requires partaking in the capitalist system, unless it was gifted, shoplifted, or recycled – but by purchasing from book sites such as Hive (which donates some of the transaction to a local independent bookstore of your choice), or by browsing via Ecosia (which plants a tree for each search), you can have a positive impact on your local community and wider environment. Reading on an electronic device is a different matter – in terms of the carbon footprint of a phone, tablet, laptop, or e-reader – but again these devices can be second-hand, borrowed, or on loan from a library. 

Digital poverty is rarely discussed, and many people assume everyone has access to such tools, and to the internet – but this is a ‘First World’ assumption. And it also assumes universal digital literacy. Yet even amongst those who are digital native – or digital adopters i.e. Boomers, Generation X, etc – there are a growing number of people who choose to go analogue, e.g. by reading a printed book, rather than a pdf on a connected device. This offline culture is manifesting in such diverse cultural initiatives as: Independent Record Store Day and its promotion of vinyl records, immersive theatre experiences, the surge in table-top roleplaying games, re-enactment societies, Live Action Role Playing and cosplay, and the rise in popularity of zines and analogue publishers such as Analog Sea, who publish beautiful hardcover anthologies and only distribute through the ecosystem of independent bookshops. 

Jonathan Simmons, the publisher of Analog Sea advocates in his editorial vision ‘the human right to disconnect.’ He wishes to celebrate the works created by the spaciousness that affords ‘that vital stretch of time when distraction fades and deep wells of thought and feeling emerges.’ Simmons’ desire to ‘maintain a contemplative life in the digital age’ is one by shared by many, even, encouragingly, an increasing number of young people who choose to hold analogue meetups and own non-smart phones. 

Reading is ecological in phenomenological ways too – our breathing slows, our posture relaxes, our hands quietly turn the rustling leaves of the pages, our fingers feeling the fibre of the paper; noses picking up the faint scent of ink, the musty smell of an old binding or the fresh aroma of a new book, and, for a while, we become hyper-focused on the flesh of language itself. Then, pausing perhaps at the end of a section or chapter, we look up and our immediate environment is enhanced by this heightened perception – be it in a civic park, by a river, on a beach, or in a public library, café, or station. We may notice things we didn’t before. If we have been reading what is called ‘ecofiction,’ these may be things to do with our natural environment, our connection, and impact. Birdsong may seem sharper and sweeter, the colours of flowers brighter, the shapes, textures and patterns of trees more fascinating. We may notice ‘weeds’ in the cracks of the pavement, mosses on the wall of an old building or beneath a public drinking fountain, a bird of prey nesting in the heights of the skyline, an urban fox scavenging amongst the bins, or even the behaviour of the human animal: its feeding and mating habits, territorial displays, and nesting instincts. 

Reading is not only a cognitive act, but also a sensory, embodied act. We are using the senses that have evolved through millions of years to enable us to interact with our environment and each other. Senses that connect us to the natural world, to our animal self. With our remarkably developed brains we can decode the forest of text and find meaning within it, in the way that any animal adapted to its environment can interpret a multitude of complex signs and signals (as the latest scientific research into biosemiotics suggests). Ursula K. Le Guin emphasises this extraordinary ability: ‘The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.’ 

Reading may seem to some to be an indulgence, a distraction from the multiple challenges we face, but incrementally I believe it does make a difference. If people read (and thus contemplated) more and consumed less, stayed still and peaceful for a longer, cultivated skills of reflection and discernment, immersed themselves in paradigms other than their own, walking in another person’s moccasins through the lens of fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction, then I think the world would be better place. It doesn’t replace all the things we still need to do to counter the Climate Crisis and other attendant issues, but it can equip us to deal with them better – not least through the benefits to our wellbeing, resilience, and emotional and intellectual capacity that the act of reading gives us. The Japanese concept of Shinrin-yoku or ‘forest bathing’ has gained attention in recent years, but I argue that ‘book bathing’ has similar benefits. Spend some time wandering in the wood of words, and then experience the world with refreshed perception and a greater appreciation of its miraculous actuality.

Anna Vaught, "The Alchemy: A Guide to Gentle Productivity for Writers"

 

Anna Vaught is an English teacher, mentor and author of several books, including 2020’s novel Saving Lucia and short fiction collection, Famished; 2023 saw Saving Lucia published to national acclaim in Italy as Bang Bang Mussolini, memoir These Envoys of Beauty, the magical realism novel The Zebra and Lord Jones and, after The Alchemy, the Curae anthology of short prose from the winning entrants to the prize she established in 2023 for writer-carers; next year sees her first essay collection, To Melt the Stars. Her shorter and multi-genre works are widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies. Until recently, she was a columnist for Mslexia and has written regularly for The Bookseller, including as a columnist. With a background in secondary English, mentoring with young people and community arts, Anna is now a guest university lecturer, tutor for Jericho Writers and teaches occasionally at secondary level. She works alongside chronic illness, and is a passionate campaigner for mental health provision and SEND support for young people. She is a PhD candidate at York St John from December 2023-4, undertaking a PhD by Published Works on Magical Realism and Trauma, foregrounding her own work. Her title begins with a quotation from her memoir: "Go there on a wing in your imagination": Magical Realism and Imagination as Therapeutic Writing in Saving Lucia and These Envoys of Beauty. 

About The Alchemy

The Alchemy is a robust, frank and loving guide to an often opaque industry. As well as offering tips on working in gentle increments and re-imagining what productivity and the work of writing look like, there is advice on sending out work and navigating the industry, looking after your mental health as you go.

Full of practical advice, strategies, comfort and the occasional entertaining essay, The Alchemy is about writing a book when you thought you could not. It is for all writers, but with a particular eye on those who are tired and lacking in confidence, and those who face significant challenges – perhaps you are chronically ill or care for a loved one. It is a book for beginners, but it is also for those of you who are stuck in your habits and practice – perhaps you just need a pal to guide you through the day to day with the book you wanted to write. That’s what The Alchemy is. Let’s do this together.

You can read more about The Alchemy on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short extract from the introduction to the book. 

From The Alchemy, by Anna Vaught

Welcome

The Alchemy is about writing a book – a work of fiction of whatever kind – when you thought you could not. This is a book for everyone, but with a particular eye on those who are tired and lacking in confidence; those who are disabled, chronically ill or perhaps care for a loved one who would struggle without them. Essentially, this has been me for some time now, and that is how I know about productivity – and how I know about challenging what it is; how we think of and understand productivity in terms of a creative project.

I thrived not only from deadlines, spreadsheets and flow charts (although these things are excellent), but from learning to work with what I had, when I could and, also, in understanding that writing a book happens all the time. Much of what can become a book, or deepen what you already have, might be found in being observant in your daily life – insofar as you can be, because I want to exclude no one here. Not everyone will be active.

I want to free you from the idea that you must write every day to be a writer, or even if you want to complete a full-length book. If that works for you, wonderful, but it won’t work for everyone, and won’t be possible for many. So I try to get us to think about the creation of a book in different terms: in observations, but also in knowing that thinking is also a huge part of the job. Give yourself unhurried time in which to do this.

In laying all this out, I am going to offer you various essays full of ideas and first-hand experiences, and I will suggest writing exercises as I go. Finally, I am going to offer thoughts on sending out work and navigating the industry, looking after your mental health as you go. This is a book for beginners, but it might also be for you if you are stuck in your habits and practice; perhaps you are newly unwell or constrained in some way, or perhaps you just need a pal to guide you through the day-to-day with the book you want to write.

Amy E. Weldon, "Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology"

 

Amy E. Weldon is Professor of English at Luther College, USA. She is the author of The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save the World (2018), The Writer’s Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (2019). Her website is here.

About Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, by Amy E. Weldon

After the publication of The Writer’s Eye, I’m thrilled to be returning with Bloomsbury to a conversation about the next level of the fiction-writing process, starting with the place many of our craft questions really start – in our minds. What do we know, or not? Feel uncertain about, or not? In my own and my students’ and friends’ experience, readjusting our internal sense of our projects can unlock difficulties that “craft instruction” alone can't quite do, because our mental approach to the project shapes the words we bring to the page.

The concept of psychic distance is a great example. Essentially, it means “the degree to which you are pretending to be your character, seeing through her eyes to render reality as she understands it, including what she sees and hears around her, while still giving readers the information we need to be able to understand your story.” Students tell me often that understanding psychic distance is one of their most important breakthroughs as advanced writers, since establishing your psychic distance – your relationship to your character and the depth of your immersion in her reality – determines how your point-of-view apparatus and your sentences work. If your psychic distance is too far, readers can feel stranded at an unchanging distance from characters, and the story can feel impersonal because we can’t quite get into anyone’s head. (Sentences can get boring, too, because, eager to close that distance, you may start telling readers what we need to know from your point of view, not a character’s). Too short, and readers feel trapped within the character’s sensibility, with insufficient information about the world beyond her head. But if you can establish and move through a range of psychic distance that works for you (like a film director moving from a long or medium shot to a close-up), you can build a convincing world around your character and signal to readers that this character is the fully developed person we’re meant to be following as she moves through that world.

You can read more about Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology on the publisher's website here. Below is an excerpt from the book, in which I describe how dialogue and psychic distance can interact.

From Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology

Surprisingly, dialogue can be a psychic-distance block too. Dialogue can feel intimate and fun when you’re writing it, because you can “hear” it from inside the story’s world – you’re the writer. But readers are already external to the story’s world – we’re not you, remember?  And overusing dialogue can distance us even further, because dialogue is external to a character; spoken into the world beyond their heads and limited by what would be believable in that situation, it’s therefore limited in what it can tell us about a character’s interior life (unlike italicized “voiceover” thoughts, for example, or sensory detail about what a character’s noticing around her). And without access to that interior life, the psychic distance between the reader and the character grows .... Overreliance on dialogue may also signal that you don’t know enough about your fictional world yet to animate it through action, sensory detail, and other, non-dialogue modes of characterization. What you don’t know, readers can’t know. 

This is why dialogue, especially if it isn’t ballasted with actions and sensory detail, can feel so much like disembodied voices in space. Plus, long stretches of dialogue can give the feeling that the writer is impressed with the characters’ cleverness and wants readers to be as well. (We feel shoved into sitcom studio-audience chairs, watching the characters on stage, invited to applaud at conversations that go on just a little too long). “I want my readers to view this character as X” – without imagining that character as X to write the character being X in reality as they understand it – can be a recipe for psychic-distance weirdness.

Take a look at your paragraphs and your major scenes: where does dialogue appear, and for how long? In many student stories, paragraphs begin with lines of dialogue, then move to exposition kind of grudgingly, then get back to dialogue as quickly as they can. Some also revert to dialogue (or long speeches by characters) to reveal important plot or backstory information. For a first notes-to-self draft, this is OK. In revision, try something else. (Unless you’re James Baldwin writing “Sonny’s Blues”). If your paragraphs fall into a dialogue-then-exposition pattern, reverse that order. If using dialogue, keep it short and interwoven with external and internal detail. If writing a longer scene (like an argument), keep your stakes high (and obvious to the reader), keep the external world present (someone’s gripping that paperweight, ready to throw it), and be sure the characters’ words could believably emerge from an actual, non-televised human’s mouth in that situation. (Remember: high emotion often makes people less, not more, articulate). All these things will help keep your psychic distance on track.

Hannah Nicklin, "Writing for Games: Theory & Practice"

Hannah Nicklin, photograph by Julian Dasgupta 

Hannah Nicklin is an award-winning narrative and game designer, writer, and academic who has been practising for nearly fifteen years. 

She works hard to create playful experiences that see people and make people feel seen, and also argues for making games a more radical space through mentoring, advocacy, and redefining process. 

Trained as a playwright, Nicklin moved into interactive practices early on in her career and is now the CEO and studio lead at Danish indie studio Die Gute Fabrik, which most recently launched Mutazione in 2019. 

You can read a previous article by Hannah Nicklin about Mutazione and game design on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Hannah is on Twitter @hannahnicklin 

Cover by Angus Dick

About Writing for Games: Theory & Practice, by Hannah Nicklin

Writing for Games is an approachable and entry-level text for anyone interested in the craft of writing for videogames.

Focussing on the independent videogames sector, this book provides readers with a vocabulary to articulate and build their games writing practice; whether studying games or coming to games from another storytelling discipline. Writing for Games offers resources for communication, collaboration, reflection, and advocacy, inviting the reader to situate their practice in a centuries-long heritage of storytelling, as well as considering the material affordances of videogames, and the practical realities of working in game development processes.

Structured into three parts, Theory considers the craft of both games and writing from a theoretical perspective, covering vocabulary for both game and story practices. Case Studies uses three case studies to explore the theory explored in Part 1. The Practical Workbook offers a series of provocations, tools and exercises that give the reader the means to refine and develop their writing, not just for now, but as a part of a life-long practice.

You can read more about Writing for Games here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Writing for Games: Theory & Practice

This extract is from the very beginning of the book, where Hannah Nicklin lays out some useful first principles; this part is from pp.23-25 of the book, where she differentiates writing from narrative design, consider the layers of writing in a game and discuss why vocabulary in talking about the craft of both writing and games is vital for its practice. 

The Material Context of Games

The next few chapters will cover a variety of essential vocabulary in specific areas: from games studio structures, to story structure, and story components. But before we run the gamut, I wish to lay down one more set of foundations about storytelling in games.

Here’s the most important thing: Games are really hard to make.[1]

Theatre is also hard to make; dance, ceramics, quilt making, all of it. I know. All media and art forms have their own challenges, but when you make a film, sure, you have to write a script and hire actors, and direct and film and edit. But you don’t also have to invent gravity, and build the actors as puppets made out of flesh and bone and weird perspectives.

That you have to define ‘up’ and ‘down’ and ‘sky’ and ‘ground’ is also part of the joy and inventive potential of games, but please believe me when I say the defining thing about game development is that it is a goddamn miracle if any game functions at all, and still if it functions on most computers, most of the time.

It can take half a year for a team to resource, design, implement, and fix the display of italics in onscreen text (this happened to me). It can take several months to build the tools for defining the logic of, implementing, and displaying a character’s dialogue in the right format. A large part of game development is project planning, MVP[2], and communicating with others about what’s needed, what’s a priority, and when a change is being made – so that other departments can understand how it will have a knock-on effect.

The material context of writing and storytelling in games is that you rarely work alone – especially as a writer – and the practice of writing will as much be about communication, priorities, project planning, spreadsheets, and resources, as often as it’s about being able to actually do it.

Then you face the huge lack of common vocabulary for what we mean when we talk about story in games.

Narrative Design Is Not Writing and Vice Versa

Writing is not narrative design, and narrative design is not writing. One of the common misconceptions in videogames around storytelling is that narrative designers can write and vice versa. Sometimes you get people who do both (often you will be expected to be a dual narrative designer / writer in a small indie development team), but this problem is endemic and often means that the actual brief or recruitment copy for a piece of work isn’t clear about what’s wanted. And it’s even possible the people writing the job description don’t know what they need.

So, let’s set this out as clearly as possible; in this book, these are our definitions:

• Narrative design is the practice of game design with story at its heart. You are the advocate for the story in the design of the game. Narrative is (and we will dig down more into this in the next chapter) the design of the telling of a story. Not just a plot in a world with characters, but also the decisions around in what order the plot is communicated, how characters and the environment build together, structure, pacing, choice design, voice, perspective, role-play relationships, UI, the key decisions around tools, player agency, and much else. It is storytelling through design.
• Writing is the building of characters, worlds, plot, structure pacing, cadence, dialogue, UI text, choice text, exposition, characterisation, character journeys, format, genre, and medial expressivity (i.e. What is this sentence to be read as? Is it a line of dialogue like in a script, a book, for speaking, a comic?). It is storytelling through words.

Even if you are practising – or wish to practise – in both of these areas, separating them is extremely useful, as you will develop both strands through different processes, and both will provide different solutions to a challenge or problem. It’s also useful to be able to articulate the difference to others. If you’re hired as a narrative designer, but the team that hires you isn’t willing to include you in design discussions or consider design proposals from you, then you are not actually being given the means to do your job. If you’re hired as a writer, but someone is suddenly asking you to co-design a dialogue system, it can be empowering to assess that as a narrative design task and ask for more resources (money, time, or hiring a collaborator) to do so.

The Different Layers of Writing in a Game

Not all writing is storytelling. Some writing will be a part of communicating how the player should and can interact with the interfaces and mechanics of a game. One affordance of writing for games is focusing on the utility of your writing. A game may need several levels of ‘voice’ or ‘register,’ from the ‘creative’ register of the story and its characters, to the register of tutorial instructions, UI, inventory descriptions, and quest reminders. Sometimes they combine in conventions such as inner monologue – in many games, characters will converse naturalistically in all manners except that the player character will also talk out loud to themselves in an extremely unnaturalistic manner in order to give the player hints and reminders. And the writing of a UI text is not a simple thing – it is a sub-discipline which also works with genre and formal conventions.

When writing for a game you will need to think about how these registers intersect. Perhaps you’re writing for a game where the characters individually don’t have distinguishable voices because the game voice is the important thing (this is most common in jokey or internet- humour-driven games, where the voice of the game is referential, and characters frequently break the fourth wall). And don’t forget – your choices (if offered) will have a register too! Does the game UI describe the choices, or does a narrator in the world offer them or does the character? Following is one choice expressed in three different kinds of ‘voices’:

• Move on.
• Priya wants to leave.
• Priya: Come on, let’s go.

(More on choice voice, later.)

You also need to think about how the writing in the game sits in the layer of importance for the player. Are they front and centre (in a story-driven game), are they holding two parts together (cutscene writing), or are they part of the supporting framework (a small dialogue encounter in a puzzle-driven game, or ‘barks’[3] in a battle)?

For example, games with puzzles can be simplistically split into story-driven and puzzle- driven. In the former, all the puzzles should move the character or the story forwards; in the latter, the joy should centre on a puzzle well-solved, and the writing is more focused on a supportive background for the puzzle-solving. Neither of these approaches are inherently better – instead consider the effect you want to have and how the working with the affordances of your game can help you achieve it ...

Why Is Vocabulary Important?

The key thing about working in games is that it’s an extremely broad interdisciplinary practice, so it will be common for you to need to communicate with people with widely different training and media / artform backgrounds from you. Understanding the vocabulary of game development will help you understand what kind of background or foundation from which a person might be speaking to you. This will be the subject of Chapter 2.

The act of learning the basic building blocks of storytelling vocabulary benefits everyone; if you are already a game developer without story expertise, it will allow you to understand the storytellers you communicate with. If you are someone who wants to tell stories with games, understanding the specificities of storytelling deeply enough to communicate them clearly will help you fight for the story in the design meeting, development process, and the game’s production. This will be the subject for Chapters 3 and 4 – the first is a grounding in story structure ideas, and the second a run through key story components.

As a writer it’s vital to be able to articulate your practice to yourself and your peers – not only does it help you practise your craft more effectively, but it also allows you to better critique (crit)[4] other works, and therefore understand how they have their effects, and in turn help you better understand how you can learn from them.

Footnotes

[1] ‘Nobody told me when you make a video game you have to make the whole thing’ (Tweet by Ben Esposito, 2018).

[2] Minimum viable product: part of the Agile practice of design. The idea is to make the design idea, tool, or piece of gameplay in its most minimally functional way, and then to test or play it in order to know in which direction to improve and build on it.

[3] Barks: One-off lines which reinforce character and the drama of a moment, delivered not as part of conversation, but to liven up travel, battle, or the exploration of an open world area.

[4] I set out a detailed proposal for a critical methodology in Part III of the book, but for now we can loosely define ‘crit’ as the practice of analysing and understanding how a work uses its affordances to achieve its intended effects.