Why Writer's Block Isn't An Excuse

Well, two weeks in and I'm still on schedule. That's a good sign! I wrote another vignette this week, about the main character's arrival to the great city of Adriata. Honestly, it was a bit of a struggle. I procrastinated early in the week, which led to a crunch later (hence the Sunday night blog post).

I feel like writing is difficult to schedule. Sometime I sit down to write and my mind just blanks out. There are certain ways to cope with this, like diagramming a scene or conjuring a concrete image in my head and trying to describe it, but it's not like a coding project where I have a clear list of tasks to accomplish and I can just push through it until I've accomplished them.

This makes it very easy to justify procrastination. "I've got writer's block, I can't work right now." Here's the thing: I don't really have the time for that kind of leniency. Not that I'm beating myself up, because things happen and schedules change - but the fact is, I have until the end of this semester, and then I'm starting my senior project and my independent study and my life gets too busy to do development on the side (although I am brainstorming ways I can fit bits and pieces of projects I want to do into that schedule). Anyway, the point is, I have 11 weeks left to write this thing. I'm proud that I finished this week, despite the slow start.


It did have a negative effect, though. This week's vignette doesn't branch as much as last week's, and doesn't have as much narrative depth. I think it's safe to assume that this will happen again before I finish the project, so I've decided to set aside a week at the end of the development cycle to go back over each vignette, add in some side-branches and flesh out the narratives. I also realized that if I want the decisions that the player makes in one vignette to effect the things that happen in another, it would be best to write all the vignettes first then go back through them and add conditionals and connections once I see how everything fits together.

To support this plan, I've changed the structure of the story. Instead of the vignettes having a more or less linear order of presentation, they will be presented in a 'hub' layout, where each vignette can be played in whatever order the reader wants. This means that I can write in sub-plots and story points that change based on which vignettes have already been read, and what decisions were made in those vignettes. This is a relatively labor-efficient way to increase replayability and depth in the project as a whole.

So that's all very exciting! Now, as promised, an excerpt from last week's vignette, about Festival Night in Adriata:

Let me know what you think in the comments, on facebook, or by tweeting to @eighthnotegames.

Next week, another update and some thoughts about the technical side of the project!