The Two Elements of Writing

Over the last year or two I've noticed a conversation that's come up more than a few times, and I now feel comfortable enough with the idea to actually write about it rather than just talk. In this post, I'd like to get more in depth with what I consider to be the core two elements of writing, specifically for creative writing. As always, my aim is that by looking at things in more detail, I can flesh it out more for myself and hopefully progress more as a writer. Looking at core things like this can be useful to evaluating writing, whether it's your own piece or not. As writing quality can increase, so can roleplay quality, which leads to more enjoyable roleplays altogether!

Obviously quality will always be something subjectively measured, but theoretically quality roleplay will involve both you and the other roleplayer actually enjoying the scenes you're putting your characters through. I've said this all before, but I think it's certainly worthy of repeating. Roleplay is about two people at once, so that means you've gotta balance two people's happiness at once. 

I think the argument for how to do this begins at the very core itself of writing a story. I would argue there are two basic elements of writing that everything else can fall under, and this applies to all creative writing, not just roleplay. Onward! (I put a page break and a picture!)

 Prose

I've used the word 'prose' here, but I should be careful to define how I'm using it. Technically prose is defined as basically "not poetry" depending on who you ask, but I mean it in a larger sense of the word. The closest brother to prose is diction, which is essentially just word or phrase choice. As was once jokingly said, though, "Prose is the words in their best order" and it is in that sense that I mean it. When I say prose, I refer to the words you use and the strength that you can create with those words. Ultimately, though, I'm really looking for a word that doesn't exist, one that would likely just be several words fused into one another. But prose will suffice.

Prose is what creates strength in your writing from a micro sense. It is diction combined with rhetoric and fused with an author's style, creating something truly powerful. It is prose that allows people to win another over with only a few short words, simply because they chose the best words and put them in the best order they could. It is prose that allows an author to turn his novel's page into a canvas, creating a picture that comes alive to the reader. The picture could be a still-frame, a fantastical view off the side of a mountain over all the realms, or it could be a personal and emotional one, peering into the heart of a character. Do you see?

It's also the easier of the two writing elements to give an author credit for. Prose is incredibly important, whether dramatic or subtle, flowery or simple, because it is very obvious when it is being done well or done poorly. I can point to authors like Proust or Flaubert, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, and you can immediately begin to see just how much effort the author pours into the prose there. You can see prose in things you learned about such as "passive voice" detracting from the power of your writing or that you need to use "loud" verbs to increase the impact of your writing. You can create lots of different feelings with different types of words, and the eye is attracted to certain words on the page at a glance. Furthermore, by shaping the order of these words, you can really bring them to life.

You can also overdo it really easily. I read this review of Iron Man 3 the other day (no spoilers here), and I couldn't help but wonder why anyone would pay this man to write:

"Downey is at his superhero genius best here, rattling off dialogue both clever and boilerplate with non-repetitive aplomb ... The star executes almost continual verbal pirouettes, barking out sardonic quips and rejoinders even in moments of greatest distress but, due to his exceptional lingual dexterity, it rarely gets old and never seems condescending to the admittedly cartoonish context." 

He... definitely thought about his word choice, that's for sure, but (at least to me) it kind of fell through and was all for naught. Correlating this back to roleplay, I think a lot of people tend to shoot for things like what I just listed above, and they figure that doing something less is mainly just out of laziness. There's a lie that many writers are fed that suggests writing can only be sophisticated with equally sophisticated word choice, but prose is about something more. 

Let me use a concrete example that most people should be familiar with. The Harry Potter series, written by one J.K. Rowling, has been and continues to be a smashing hit. However, when you read her books, you realize that the writing isn't particularly flowery nor is it over the top, yet it still seems somewhat sophisticated, doesn't it? She doesn't really use slang, and she keeps a consistent style within the books. There's no jumping between third and first person, no switching between character perspectives, but at the same time it still feels very delicately written.

Rowling's audience was aimed largely at youth and young adults, though she's attracted plenty of people outside those margins, and she chose a writing style and form of prose to match that. It doesn't feel careless, but it doesn't feel oppressive either, and you find yourself simply enjoying the books. While I'm not going to try and make an argument to exalt her over one author or the other, I think her success with those novels can largely be traced back to her own prose. She hit the mark quite well, in my mind.

Like I said earlier, prose is pretty easy to catch when it's done poorly. It's important to note though that most people wouldn't think of Harry Potter as having excellent prose, and that's probably why it's so successful--her word and style choices are so well matched that they're all but invisible to the unsuspecting reader.

Of course, you can also do prose poorly by shooting under the mark too. This is the major criticism of books like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Gray, I believe. Usually when you hear complaints about those books, they don't really involve "I didn't feel like this part of the story was very compelling" it's just usually more along the lines of "The writing sucked." Which... is a pretty uninteresting complaint, but having read from both of them I can understand where it's coming from, I suppose.

The prose in both of those series is amazingly simple. They're written from the first person (which means your mark for the 'bare minimum' is a lot lower than for the third person) and they use a lot of colloquial language or simple sentences. A lot of people who are what you might call "well-read" have a problem with that sort of thing, myself included, because it just feels really lackluster and unthoughtful. Just like you can overdo prose, I certainly think you can under-do it as well. Keep in mind, though, prose is something for which evaluation of quality will change depending on the reader.

While I'm not going to bother trying to defend either Twilight or Fifty Shades of Gray, it is frustrating to hear people say things like "I look at all the crap that's popular and I realize that I could so easily write something better than that." This is frustrating because prose is the easier of the two elements, but people assume that's all their is to it. Prose is a micro-scaled thing, and you can fine-tune it fairly well to levels where most people will stop paying mind to it. I know a lot of people who can write very beautiful paragraphs, describe a situation vivid way that enraptures your mind, but I know very few people who can execute the second element of writing effectively.

Structure

Now we may finally meet the unsung soldier of writing. Like with prose, let me quickly define what I mean by "structure" in a writing context. Where prose brings quality on a micro level, structure is certainly the macro element of writing. As it sounds, structure in writing is the binding element that pulls all your micro elements together. Some people might refer to this as "story" but it's more than just that. Prose very much intersects with style, but so does structure.

In essence, structure is how you tell an effective story as an entire unit. I can write an immense novel, have beautiful scenes, worlds, and characters, but if I don't have structure to bring all those things together, then what's the point? Furthermore, I can have epic confrontations, situations, and possibilities, but if I can't show you them in a way that makes sense, if it feels out of place, then I have brutally failed as a writer. First exposition, then synthesis. Structure makes the latter possible.

Even moreso, I can have a great story, but if I can't deliver it well then we have a serious problem. Say that I tell you I have a book idea. In my idea, I have a man who rises to power with the help of a god. He's promised immense power, great prestige among his race, and, above all, immortality. Only, the bargain states he must never have a child, lest he think he may reproduce his superiority. For decades he rules the world, establishing his empire and drawing closer and closer to uniting humanity under his command. Eventually the temptation is too strong, though, and he accidentally impregnates a woman. When his son is born, he is immediately killed. Now the book can follow this child as he enters a world that is collapsing, torn asunder in the absence of its leader, with the great potential of his father buried within him.

Okay, so it's far from perfect, but it's at least doable. I'm not a tremendous writer and am hardly an excellent storyteller, but that's at least a story, and you could probably write a book about it, provided you have the discipline to do so.

But people have ideas like that all the time.

You can see them in the hundreds of fantasy books on the shelves at your bookstore that you've never heard about before. Most of the books probably have fairly compelling concepts at their core, and those people can probably write at least decently in order to be published, so why are they often unpopular, unknown, or regarded as a lower tier of literature? Well it's probably because they couldn't tell the story well enough, and that is the essence of structure.

Your structure for a story dictates how much emphasis you spend on one thing or the other. Structure dictates when a new character appears, how much attention you give them, and how you lead the reader into regard for them. A story's structure is what orchestrates revelations, foreshadowing, and plot buildup. It is the architecture of your story, and without it you just have a lot of pretty concepts that cannot really be combined with each other effectively.

Like prose, structure must be compelling to your audience. Do you want to know why books like Fifty Shades of Gray and Twilight do so well? I can tell you it's not because all their readers are these illiterate cavemen who couldn't fathom good writing if it hit them in the face. No, it's because the authors have written their prose to just enough to be invisible to that audience, and then they swing back with a story told in a compelling way.

Even though you don't have an enormous span of vocabulary in the books, even though you don't see delicately painted pictures that bring everything to life, they still succeed because they can tell an effective story as a whole. Individual scenes may seem to suffer, but people still find the story immensely enticing and lurid, drawing them into another world and somehow making them care about the characters. I know a lot of people are butthurt because they write "better" prose than Stephanie Meyer or E.L. James, but at the end of the day both of those authors manage to spin a very effective story, and the book sales that result are testament to it.

Make no mistake, that is a very hard thing to do.

As I've mentioned in other sections, last year I got to participate in NaNoWriMo for the first time, and I learned a lot about structure from there. In roleplay, it's really easy to forget about structure, and I was brutally reminded of my failings in that area as I set out to write a 200 page novel. I found that I had trouble keeping track of as many characters as I wanted to, that my story had all these holes and lumps in it. It was really hard, and when I finished I had a "completed" piece of work, but it could hardly have been called finished. I had a lot of neat ideas, but my structure was in tatters, and when you're staring at a full-size book, that's all of a sudden much easier to see.

For Roleplay

Let me wrap this up real quick, since I've gone long as usual. In roleplay, both of these elements are critical. Most people, unfortunately, get too wrapped up in the prose (I must use a large vocabulary, my posts must be this long, I need to have this thing explode, etc.) and they completely lose sight of structure. In a roleplaying context, structure is a lot harder to see since, obviously, you're doing just one post at a time most often. You're getting short snippets of things, and a "thread" or a "scene" is more like a chapter in a book than a complete story, you know?

Structure shows up in roleplay in things like character actions and pacing. Don't steamplow through a thread--pace yourself and make sure what's going on is considered correctly. Absolutely you should write nice paragraphs that convey the landscape and your character's emotions with your prose, but equally too you need to think about larger impacts. You have a whole world to consider, an entire past of your character to fathom, so be deliberate in what you do. Yes, roleplay should be spontaneous, fun, and alive, but you should still be paying attention.

It's kind of like hopping on a bike that's running down a mountain. You're not really in control of what's happening, but you can see where you're going, and if you steer a bit to avoid hitting a tree, it's a much more pleasant ride.