Category Archives: Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little

Found Story

If you’ve played video games at all since 2007, you’ve likely encountered a storytelling innovation introduced by the original Bioshock (note: I don’t know for certain that they are the ones that introduced this technique, but it was the first time I encountered it and the first time I saw it widely discussed).

Bioshock is set in the ruined underwater city of Rapture, once a paradise of pure, unregulated innovation. While it appears abandoned as your character approaches in his submersible, it is anything but. The inhabitants have all gone violently insane, the end result of too much tampering with their own genomes. Your character has been summoned by a mysterious note, and you arrive knowing nothing about the city or its history. But explore around a little, and you’ll find something that binds all the residents of Rapture together beyond their damaged minds. They all just loved recording audio diaries and leaving them lying around where anyone (read: you) can find and listen.

This is cleverly done for a few reasons. First is that Rapture has quite a fascinating and convoluted history from its idealistic founding to its inevitable decline. But there’s *almost* no one left who can tell you straight up what happened, and you might not trust them if they did. By scattering critical bits of information in areas where the player must pass to progress, the player is gradually filled in on the backstory in a drip-feed of exposition and character revelation. Plus, for those who absolutely must find all of Rapture’s dark little secrets, there are plenty of nonessential audio diaries to find if you poke into every nook and cranny the city has to offer.

To say this storytelling innovation was popular among game developers would be a massive understatement. Scarcely any game with meaningful effort put into story doesn’t have them these days. But while playing the recent downloadable content expansion for Horizon: Zero Dawn, navigating the ruins of past human civilization (the game is set in a post-apocalyptic far future), I encountered a little short story in audio log form. Over the course of several logs you discover while exploring the derelict dam, this story concerned two coworkers who became friends in the face of the layoff of all their peers and their replacement by robots (the rise of automation and robotics in humanity’s distant past is a major theme of the game, but seldom is it expressed so succinctly and so effectively as in this sequence of short audio logs). As the logs progress, the two friends are forced to train the robots that will eventually replace them. They form a (terrible) two-woman band, recording songs while pranking their robotic coworkers, all the while knowing they are working on borrowed time. With impressive poignancy, their last days on the job wind down, and after one last night on the town, they both go their separate ways into an uncertain (only the player knows how uncertain) future.

There are several lessons for the writer wrapped up in this. What can I say? I apparently love lists.

  1. Stripped-down, short side stories nested within larger stories can be effective ways at distilling the theme you are trying to convey.
  2. Sweat the details. The details matter. Look how much effort the writers put into this game. All this takes place in a downloadable expansion (read: optional) side-quest (also optional) in which the player can (optionally) hunt down and listen to these audio logs. And guess what? Horizon: Zero Dawn is a phenomenal game top to bottom. As my favorite football coach likes to say: “Take care of the little things and the big things take care of themselves.”
  3. And, in keeping with the month’s theme, think outside the box when crafting your stories.

 

 

About the Author: Gregory D. Littleheadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (all right, during) classes. His novels Unwilling Souls and Ungrateful God are available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens, A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology, Dragon Writers: An Anthology, and the upcoming Undercurrents: An Anthology of What Lies Beneath. He lives with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

 

Welcome to Podcasts

Podcasts. They’re the new digital frontier of talk radio, full of informative content. The perfect way to kill time on a long commute. Trust me, I would know.

But podcasts aren’t all non-fiction in focus. There is a small but growing population of podcasts devoted to telling fictional stories, like the radio serials of yore. Move over The Shadow. Make way for Welcome to Night Vale.

In truth, we at Fictorians have been remiss. This post is long overdue. Night Vale has a been a Big Deal for several years now.  Something like a local radio news show as written by Stephen King, Welcome to Night Vale tells the story of, in their words, “A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.”

With a healthy dose of both horror and humor combined with a sneaky dash of heart, Night Vale has brought audio storytelling into a new generation. It’s a process that entails some challenges. As I mentioned, the show is done in the format of a local news radio station, only set in a town where every conspiracy theory is real and anything horrific you can imagine is probably happening at that moment. Whether it’s mysterious hooded figures marching and chanting at the local sports stadium, the discovery of a mysterious subterranean civilization beneath lane five of the local bowling alley, a doorless and windowless library inhabited by monstrous librarians that defy sane description, or a city council that appears to be comprised of the same group of individuals that founded the town several hundred years in the past, Night Vale is given all the worldbuilding depth a storyteller could ever want.

The radio host, Cecil Palmer, is the voice of the podcast and the radio show within it. Because the show is broadcast from the Night Vale Community Radio station, all action that doesn’t take place at the Night Vale Community Radio Station must be described second-hand by Cecil, who is not generally witnessing it at the time. This flies directly in the face of that age-old writing adage, “show, don’t tell.” With the exception of when Cecil broadcasting on-location or is manning his mobile broadcasting studio, all he is doing is telling you, the listener, about local events, the community calendar, and whatever existential nightmare threatens to destroy his beloved Night Vale this week.

To make matters even more challenging, the climax of an episode’s plot generally occurs “offscreen” during the news show’s “weather” segment, which (contrary to its name) is always a song from an independent music artist. Once the weather concludes, Cecil returns and explains to his listeners how the crisis was resolved, and the episode wraps.

It’s a recipe for storytelling disaster if handled poorly.  Yet somehow, Welcome to Night Vale’s writers, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, make it work. Much of this credit goes to Cecil Baldwin (the actor behind Cecil Palmer). Without someone with his gravitas (his deep voice recalls trusted anchors of days gone by even as his frequent weirdness and goofiness reminds us what era it really is), the show’s format would absolutely fall apart. But the writing style is pitch-perfect for the format, and framing the story as a news segment, something we are all used to hearing told to us in the past tense, is a big part of why it works as well. This serves as yet another example of how for every rule of writing, there exist innumerable exceptions that succeed just fine.

The podcast picks and chooses its conventions well. In the past, seasons would generally have an overarching plot that played out in the background of the more focused, single-episode stories. Only in the last few episodes of the “season” (which spans a full year of real-world time, roughly 25 episodes, much like a network TV season), would the overarching story move into the foreground and come to a head. With the most recent season, they have broken the stories into a series of three-parters which have little connectivity beyond the characters and setting. And in the best tradition of shows like The Simpsons, they’ve populated their town with lots of quirky, lovable characters who grow and change with time.

But the show also experiments quite a bit within the confines of the format as well. In one episode, they recommend wearing headphones, because they play with which ear you can hear the audio feed from. It proves effectively creepy and disorienting, especially if you are listening alone. In one early episode, one of my favorites, they address the entire episode (titled “A Story About You”) to you, the listener, casting you as one particular resident of Night Vale who is having, shall we say, a bad day.

They’ve also created a series of live shows, where attendees can go experience a specially written, extra-long episode which changes every tour. These episodes are written specifically with live audience participation in mind, and with the assumption that attendees may never have listened to the show before. I’ve been to three of these shows myself, and they are a unique experience while still being utterly Night Vale.

Storytelling is a constantly evolving art form. Sometimes, an old form of storytelling, the oldest form, in fact, comes back in a new and different format. Some things about it change while others stay the same, but if done well, the total result is something new and special.

I’ll close with one of my favorite Night Vale quotes, and quotes in general, of all time:

“Before everything, before even humans, there were stories. A creature at a fire conjuring a world with nothing but its voice and a listener’s imagination. And now, me, and thousands like me, in little booths and rooms and mics and screens all over the world, doing the same for a family of listeners, connected as all families are, primarily by the stories we tell each other.

And after, after fire, and death, or whatever happens next, after the wiping clean or the gradual decay, after the after…when there are only a few creatures left, there will be one at a fire, telling a story to what family it has left. It was the first thing, and it will be the last.”

Welcome to Night Vale, Episode 71, “The Registry of Middle School Crushes”

 

About the Author: Gregory D. Littleheadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (all right, during) classes. His novels Unwilling Souls and Ungrateful God are available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens, A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology, Dragon Writers: An Anthology, and the upcoming Undercurrents: An Anthology of What Lies Beneath. He lives with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

 

To Quit or Not to Quit?

That wraps it up for us this month, and what a month it was! We dove into making goals, how to make better goals, when to amend your goals, and when to quit your goals. We hope our insights were helpful to you, and that you carry some of our hard-earned wisdom with you into your future work.

In case you missed a post this month, here they are:

The Stories that Just Don’t Sell by Mary Pletsch

We Always Need a Goal by Ace Jordan

Quitting by Nicholas Ruva

New Goal: Stop Making Goals by Kristin Luna (that’s me!)

A Gamer’s Guide to Quitting by Heidi Wilde

How Goals Can Destroy Your Writing Career by Gregory Little

Finish What You Start, or Not by Kevin Ikenberry

A Faster Book, or A Better Book? by Frank Morin

Quitting with Feeling by David Heyman

In Favor of Failure by Colton Hehr

The Goal Post by Sean Golden

Obstacles May Be Closer Than They Appear by Kim May

To Goal or Not to Goal, That Is The Question by Jo Schneider

Made to Be Broken by Hamilton Perez

2018 – Hello, Universe Calling, Is Scott There? by Scott Eder

When Chronic Illness Sabotages Goals by Ace Jordan

Setting Realistic, S.M.A.R.T. Goals by Shannon Fox

Resources on Goal Setting and Quitting Goals by Kristin Luna

 

What were some of your favorite posts this month? Did we leave anything out? Comment and let us know!

How Goals Can Destroy Your Writing Career

Goals: part of any plan of success, right? WRONG. Take it away, Dr. Cox!

Of course, it’s not really that simple. Goals really are important, in writing or in any other endeavor. But you need to be careful about how you set your goals. It’s important that you approach them with a Goldilocks mindset.

Everyone remembers the fairy tale, I’m sure. This porridge is too hot, but this porridge is too cold. The third bowl? Just right. Goals can have similar qualities. Set a goal too high, and you wind up with an unattainable peak to climb, setting yourself up for inevitable failure. With failure often comes discouragement, and discouragement can really wreck the creative spark and sap your will to sit down in front of the keyboard. Remember that time you went to the gym for the first time in months and tried to pick up where you left off? For some reason, it works fine while you’re doing it, your body every bit as clueless as you are that there is such a thing as muscle atrophy. Then you are in agony for a week, can barely get out of bed much less get down the stairs, and you don’t go back to the gym for another six months.

It’s the same in writing. So, you decide you’re going to pound out three books a year. At 1000 words a day every day, that’s 300,000 words per year, or three 100,000 word novels even if you take 65 days off. Great! And totally doable, which should — oh wait, you have a day job 12 hours a day? And a family? And basic human needs like food and sleep? You … may want to dial that back. Even if you have the time to get down 1000 words, most days, you may not have the energy.

Of equal but more subtle danger is setting your sights too low. Sure, you rewrote that scene three times already until it felt perfect. But I bet if you read it again today you’d find it needs rewriting. The rest of the book can wait, maybe forever, but this one scene will be a flawless work of art. Or, sure, you haven’t written at all in two weeks, but that video game isn’t playing itself, is it? You work hard. You deserve a break before you set out on your second job. Things will probably ease up after the holidays, even though, if you’re being honest, they never have before. As long as you jot down a few quick sentences sometime this month, that still counts as writing. And just like that, guess whose book is never getting written?

A goal should be something you strive for. If you meet it, it should be a challenge to do so. If you fail to meet it, you shouldn’t miss so wildly that you are left feeling hollowed-out and worthless. So what does “just right” mean in a writing context? Hint: it’s not necessarily “just write” as punny as that would be. As I’ve harped on so many times that you are probably sick of it by now, it depends on your particular situation. You have to figure out what works for you.

The catch?  The only way to do that is through experience. I’d recommend trying to set some easy goals first, ones you are confident you can meet. Finish a draft of this chapter this week. BUT make this goal be in service to a larger, more challenging one, one that will, once achieved, feel like a real accomplishment. Finish a draft of the book by your birthday. There’s a funny thing about human beings. Once you sincerely believe you can do something, something that once seemed impossible now seems relatively straightforward. So use this early goal-setting to teach yourself that you can set realistic goals and meet them, all in service to a larger goal. Each small step will be achievable, advancing the larger goal. And even these larger goals can feed into still-larger ones.

Like, say, “become a successful author.”

 

About the Author: Gregory D. Littleheadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (all right, during) classes. His novels Unwilling Souls and Ungrateful God are available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens, A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology, Dragon Writers: An Anthology, and the upcoming Undercurrents: An Anthology of What Lies Beneath. He lives with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.