A Tale of Echoes

Despite all romanticism around writing - the lone genius figure, the chain smoking, the muse that strikes in the small hours and snatches them from sleep - writers in fact survive in packs. We need a sounding board but, most times, we just need a second opinion. Someone who will look at your words without the blind passion or the attachment to them. Putting the words on paper is solitary, but the thinking before and after that doesn’t have to be. So writers get together to bounce ideas off each other on a writer’s room, or send a trusted friend a copy of whatever they are working on. Or they have agents, editors, managers and bosses who do it for them.

Ideas take better form when they can reverberate; put an idea out there in the world and watch how it shapes when other minds pull it apart (or piece it together). Same could be said about stories.

I’m not experienced in working in a collaborative writing environment. My writing has always been solitary from beginning to end, in fact a reflection of both the media I work on and where my journey began; game writers (still) are a rare species in Brazil, so being a lone wolf was not really a choice but an inevitability of the trade.

These pretty words about how writers live in packs and sharpen each other’s words - that’s amazing. Idyllic, even. But I won’t lie: this is not how I’m used to work, not how I know to work. Let us say, for now, I would like to learn.

-Maíra

This week’s recommendations:

• Look it up: One Look, the reverse thesaurus where you search for a meaning and it returns equivalent words. Pure gold for a forgetful wordsmith.

• Read: How the game industry hurts people, a terrific read on why we are stuck in an endless bad cycle in the gaming industry and what can we do about it.

• Watch: I’ve been geeking out on procedurally generated narrative and this ProcGen Character Arcs talk is a great showcase of how useful storylets are. There’s also a paper on the same subject.