hi there i recently read main and perdition and i just wanted to say (again) how much i liked it. you said that you may have some pointers on how to write in the style of the game and i actually wanted to come back to that because i want to try to write some myself soon. if you've got any tips i'm all ears. hope this isn't weird or anything 😅
hi em! not only is it not weird, you've made my day. thank you for the kind words, and thank you for giving me the chance to blather about writing and (hopefully) be useful.
*clears throat* *takes off "just chillin" hat and puts on "guy who sometimes knows what he's talking about" hat, which mostly means remembering how to find the shift key*
Hi! I'm Six. I'm an editor who has worked in the publishing industry for about ten years across print, web, radio, podcast and television.
I also write Disco Elysium fanfic. In the process of planning and writing Main and Perdition, I worked hard to craft something that I hoped would play, intelligently, in the DE sandbox.
I didn't wholly succeed. Time permitting, I'm happy to grab a figurative highlighter and point out spots where I failed, why, and what to do differently if you don't wanna do the same dumb things I did.
But this post is not that post! Instead, it's...
How To Mimic Style: Tips For Writing Your Disco Elysium Fic
Pick your playthrough.
One of the most beautiful, epic, fascinating things about DE is its multivariance. That trait extends to Harry. Is he a pacifist sober Sorry Cop who throws his gun into the sea, or a fiery anti-racist who throws hands and roundhouse kicks, or a ~mystic visionary~ who hears voices and does pyrholidon about it?
Yes! And no. Which is phenomenal to experience as a game player, but it's table-flippingly antithetical to writing a fic with a coherent emotional through-line.
So decide which Harry you're writing. It'll help you narrow down what your guy might or might not do, and it'll also help you write characters (Kim, Jean, Judit, Garte, Sylvie, and so many more) whose responses greatly depend on how Harry behaves.
It'll also help you spot places where the game, in its richness, has left space for you to write into questions it leaves unanswered -- but more on this when we get to tolerating discomfort.
Embrace the skillset.
It's daunting at first, but working with it rather than avoiding it helps you understand who's in Harry's head, what they do, and how mighty they are. (It also helps to pay attention to how they talk, but that's less about writing DE fic and more about honing an eye and ear for dialogue -- yet another possible future post.)
To help me with who and what when I was drafting M+P, I made this spreadsheet:
It was my zero-draft bestie because it helped me figure out what skills might comment in any given moment, which I suspect contributes to the places where the fic succeeds at feeling similar to the game. Feel free to use/share if it helps you, too.
As for how mighty, that's where stats come in. I didn't do a full stat sheet for M+P Harry, but I did decide his base attributes (INT-PSY-FYS-MOT). The game lets you put a total of 12 points across them; a base of 3 is average, with 1 being shithouse and 6 being HARDCORE TO THE MEGA. I also chose his signature skill (Inland Empire, which is my favourite one to write because I too am a middle-aged white bi-sexual sopping-wet-dog guy who never became a poet or an entroponaut).
I could then do the maths when deciding, "How hard would it be to succeed at [thing happening in the story]? Is that something this Harry is capable of? If so, is it obvious to him that he'll succeed, or would it *Princess Bride voice* take a miracle?"
And then, when I'm on my A-game, I follow up with my favourite DE-writing question: Regardless of whether Harry *could* succeed, would it be a chewier, more compelling story if he failed? (Yet again, more on this when we talk discomfort.)
So. Difficulty levels: know 'em, check 'em, put 'em in a stew fic. I worked from this screenshot, though I don't remember where I took it (this was at least a year ago, ack). Apologies to whichever wiki I have failed:
Let shit go wrong.
This is hard. It requires tolerating discomfort -- which is already hard -- in a situation where you are at the keyboard and can make it stop, which makes it that much harder.
But shit going wrong is the absolute beating heart of DE.
Let's weave some threads together. In the first section, I mentioned writing into spaces the game makes with unanswered questions; in the second, I mentioned making space in your fic-writing process for skill checks to fail.
Letting shit go wrong is how we as fic writers can expand into those spaces -- and when we do, sometimes, something beautiful is allowed to happen.
While I leave it to each reader to decide whether anything beautiful did in fact happen, here's one example of how this process unfolded in my practice.
I hated reading the solution to "Rigorous Self-Critique." *Hated* it. I hated what it showed me about Harry's callousness, his violence, his utter disregard for boundaries. Most of all, I hated this:
You held a young woman by the arm and kept her in your apartment for 20 minutes against her will.
What the fuck. What the fuck? Who *does* that? (Harry.) *Why?* (Because he wanted to.)
*Fuck*.
This section, you may have noticed, left me feeling kind of a lot of discomfort.
I could've pushed that feeling away. I could've made excuses. ("I mean, the pale makes people confused about which memories are theirs and which are someone else's, right? That must be what happened, because Harry would *never* do that.") I could've done mental gymnastics to avoid the conclusion that what Harry did was wrong. ("Well, maybe he was *helping* her, and he just doesn't remember!")
I wouldn't have been -- and you, person reading this, wouldn't be -- bad for doing any of those things. Life is hard. Sometimes, elective hardness (shush) is too much. That's okay.
But I sat with the discomfort. I followed it into the space in the game: what happened in those 20 minutes? Who was this young woman -- did Harry even know or care? How did she escape? I followed it into the space in my story: what would happen if Harry, as he is post-Martinaise, failed a check (in the fic, he "succeeds", but the outcome of that success is failure #justlittleelysiumthings) and recalled what happened?
And I ended up with M+P.
It's not a perfect fic. It may not even be a *good* fic; I've spent too much time with it to have an opinion on its goodness. But it is absolutely an answer-through-story, and I feel less discomfort and more satisfaction, more joy, for having written it. I hope this post helps you have that experience, too.
