#writer wangst

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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapter summary: A metaphor; a threesome; a figurative pain the ass. (Or: Jean Fucks, Even When Work Doesn't.)

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ok i’m gonna create things again but i feel like i remember nothing??

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A last cigarette; a first kiss; another.

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Writing Elytically: This Time, It's Details

(Last time, it was big-picture stuff!)

So you want to format your fic like the game

I'll start with two words: collect screenshots. The more in-game references you have for those "but how does the game do X?" moments, the easier it will be to find answers.

In addition to screenshots, try FAYDE, which is a searchable database of in-game text (including variables!) and a load-bearing part of my DE ficwriting process. I cannot say enough nice things about it and about @morgue-xiiv, who made and hosts it.

Next up: keep a style sheet, and update it like Kim will be *disappointed* if you don't.

What goes in a style sheet? All the zillion formatting guidelines and decisions you make when you put word to keyboard.

For example, while there are exceptions, the game's skillset dialogues usually follow this case-sensitive template:

SKILLNAME [Difficulty: Outcome] – What the skill says goes here, and it doesn't take quotation marks.

When you plug in the specifics, the result looks like this:

RHETORIC [Trivial: Success] – Words can be exchanged for goods and services.

Note the square brackets and the space-en dash-space that follows them. An en dash is this guy – not a hyphen (that's shorter -) or an em dash (that's longer —).

Also, the body text/content of dialogue uses different dashes again: two hyphens in a row. Here's what that looks like:

I took a screenshot because on Tumblr, some browsers will automatically convert two consecutive hyphens to an em dash, which is a great way to make copy editors very sad.

Exceptions

We actually just saw one! That's because Perception follows:

PERCEPTION (SENSE) [Difficulty: Outcome] – What the skill says goes here, and it doesn't take quotation marks.

. . . except sometimes, when the game does it like:

PERCEPTION (Sense) [Difficulty: Outcome] – What the skill says goes here, and it doesn't take quotation marks.

I'll never know why they're different, but I would guess the team didn't have a "final reads are FINAL, stop re-writing after them you hooligans" policy, which intellectually I recognise is unlikely to end in apocalypse and emotionally I experience with the editorial equivalent of the meat sweats.

Another exception: Coach Physical Instrument just yells at you without following the template, which seems on brand:

COACH PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT – Bracing yet homophobic encouraging-slash-berating goes here!

Weirdly(?), Limbic System and Ancient Reptilian Brain do the same.

Other skills follow the template first, *then* just chime in the second-plus time they appear in a single dialogue event, like this trio from The Whole Sorry Way Down:

VOLITION [Challenging: Success] – Hey. Loser! This isn’t your bed. Get up. PAIN THRESHOLD [Medium: Success] – Oh, *god*.  PERCEPTION (HEARING) [Easy: Success] – Was that springs? And footsteps? They were moving away from you. VOLITION – What? Who cares? Get up, and cut the dramatics. PAIN THRESHOLD – They’re not dramatics. You’re in pain.  PERCEPTION (HEARING) – That’s… definitely footsteps. Getting closer, this time.

Oh my god, what else?!

SO MUCH ELSE. Let's see . . .

Active skill checks

Can I find a screenshot of one at the moment? No, because that would be easy. *facepalm* But here's how I formatted them in M+P when I was still obsessively checking the game to see how these things worked:

1. [Skill Level#: Difficulty] [Thing you're going to do.] "Thing you're going to say, if anything!"

And a concrete example:

YOU – 1. [Strike a Sam Bo pose.] “If you can best me in HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT.” 2. [Move aside.] “Sure, c’mon in.” 3. [Composure 15: Heroic] [Move aside.] “Of course. I’ve missed you.” Composure: Failure YOU – You move aside and get as far as “Of” before some involuntary emotion-muscle spasms. Your throat feels small, your face hot. Fat, guileless tears vanish into your beard.

Note that the dialogue option you "select" is bold, as is the outcome line. Also note that [Action you'll take] ends up in square brackets, but if you're going to lie, then you do it like so: (Lie.)

Miscellanea

Place names: Spelling and hyphenation can be a pain. If not using your own notes, I suggest FAYDE and screenshots; or, for variety, screenshots and FAYDE. Google is okay, but sometimes, it lies.

If you can't find evidence of how the game does it, make a decision and slap it in your style sheet. You're the captain now!

Tricky fish:

The place is Sur-la-Clef; the language is Suresne.

The place is Vesper; the language is Vespertine.

The place is Revachol; the demonym is Vacholière (Suresne) or Revacholian (Vespertine).

LA REVACHOLIÈRE – IF SHE IS SPEAKING, SHE SPEAKS LIKE THIS. Shivers doesn't, though, unless La Rev speaks "through" it.

Hjelmdallermann (bless you)

Satellite Officer X or Satellite-Officer X: The game does both, so pick the one you prefer -- or go full homage and switch it up.

Sam Bo

Wirrâl (I fucked up the accent in M+P and it still bothers me tbh)

There are always more, so keep adding to that style sheet. Kim's depending on you. <3

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twswd update

ok ok so life has been sort of a lot of smacks to the kneecaps for like. a couple months. was hoping ch 14 would go up in march buuuuut a five-week test of Different ADHD Med resulted in two main outcomes:

certainty that this med is nooooot for me; and

stark-ass "oh god i really Cannot huh" loss of word output.

SO. thanks to epic cheerleader/rubber duckie @brennisteinnexe (and also Familiar ADHD Med), i am back in the word mines, mining words, and it is going okay.

i'd put posting at 1-2 weeks out? which for me still involves tolerating a lot of "oh god this is taking forever, i'm a fucking useless piece of shit and also bad at this" strafing from the brainweasels, but yknow what. fuck those guys. they hate my ass whether i do stuff or don't do stuff -- might as well dance in the line of fire.

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adding yet another "twswd ain't dead, it ain't even sleeping, i'm chippin away at the speed of full-time job + surgery recovery but am in fact actively working my way to the end" post to the pile

finding it really hard to be kind to myself atm

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there’s like one chapter left of twswd as planned (insofar as i plan, which is – *miracle max ehhhhhh gesture*)

two things are now happening

i am itchy to do a “behind the scenes” dvd-extras-style thing because there are so many moments/interiorities POV characters can’t access and i love this stupid story so much and want to share more about it and about process, but also, how even would that work

i had before i began a crystal clear “where it starts / where it ends” idea and now i have doubts, and also doubts about the doubts, and also brainweasels, why do you ask

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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.