A Record of Choices

Writing the Spire

While recovering from COVID, I got back into playing Slay the Spire. (Just in time for the sequel announcement, yikes!) 

StS is a deckbuilder roguelike (which, Mom and Dad, is a kind of video game). You assume the persona of an adventurer fighting a tower full of monsters. Your fighting abilities are represented by a deck of cards, each of which gives you some attack or defense. Every time you defeat a monster, you choose one of three new ability cards to add to your deck. As you climb the tower, your enemies get stronger—much stronger. Your success is determined by luck (a bit) and (a bit more) by your choices: which enemies to face and when, which cards will work best with the cards you have chosen already, what to do on individual turns.

I’d played the game (a lot) back in ‘19, and beat it, but never consistently. This time I decided to get good—or at least less-bad—by watching a few teaching streams by a fellow called Baalorlord, in which he walks through a run and explains his play. It was a striking experience—after one video I beat the game’s extremely difficult final boss on my first try. My hit rate since hasn’t been 100%, but it’s MUCH higher than it used to be. Thanks, Baalorlord!

It would be interesting, though difficult, to stream writing a novel in this way. A novel is a record of choices—story beats, pacing, voice, tense, structure, character, line break, sentence, word. When we talk about these choices we tend to treat them in context of the final text, using techniques of review and analysis. But by that point the choices are givens. During composition, they are made additively, contingently: I will do this now, for a this reason. If that causes trouble, I’ll make other choices later to relieve the trouble. The layered dependencies of choice remain even if no word of the first draft survives. (In a StS deck, it’s not uncommon to remove most or all of your starting cards.) This is as true for obsessive pre-writers as it is for chaos scribblers. Even in a very planned text, the writer chooses at every moment to stick with the plan—and, during composition, chooses whether to welcome or wall out sense impressions, memories, and emotional connotations that arise.

Some of the core concepts even transfer. For example: in teaching streams, Baalorlord talks about the importance for StS play of focusing on the problem in front of you, without losing sight of later obstacles. In fiction, especially fantasy, writers can get hung up on the overall project—conveying worldbuilding, setting up a long-term conflict, etc—in ways that make it harder to accomplish the immediate make-or-break objective of bringing a reader into the story. A reader can’t arrive at your big payoff if they don’t make it past page 1, or sentence 2! But you can also run into trouble if you don’t have some idea of how to address the endgame—producing a book that pageturns well but leaves the reader feeling as though her time has been wasted. 

Writing moves so slowly that it’s hard to imagine a “let’s play” composition stream being fun to watch—though who knows, might be worth a try!—but I suspect this is why you hear stories of, say, Thompson retyping pages out of F Scott Fitzgerald. I used to think that exercise was mainly intended to develop a kind of muscle memory for words that go together—which always seemed suspect. But mindful retyping would provide occasion for thought about why an author chose these words, this line break, this button on the scene, this ending. 

These aren’t writing streams, but I had three interviews released recently which might be of interest:

Hannah over at The Hidden Schools fansite interviewed me about the Craft Wars books a year ago—an hour long interview, great questions from a deep reader of the series. It’s broken up into many parts (with hilarious thumbnails!) for your viewing pleasure.

Amal and I spoke with the Writing Excuses crew as part of their deep-dive series on This is How You Lose the Time War. Great questions here, focusing on specifics of voice that we haven’t been asked to discuss before.

And, I can’t believe I forgot to mention this when it went live: the Plot Trysts podcast with Meg and Alyx invited me on to talk about a beloved book, Lois McMaster Bujold’s BORDERS OF INFINITY. Listen to us enthuse about Bujold and stick around to hear my reading of the title story verge on the theological.

A couple recommendations, too:

I just read Dan Davies’ tremendous The Unaccountability Machine, a discussion of large systems and complex behaviors through a management cybernetics lens—”how companies can go insane” is not quite the right subtitle but would be for the more airport version of the book. A great, propulsive book, especially if you’re interested in the systems / organizations work of the Craft universe. Henry Farrell’s excellent review makes the case at greater length and with greater eloquence than I can muster here.

Robin Sloan’s newsletter, always joy-giving, recently (last month? that’s recent right?) included a discussion of Cable, from the X-Men. I dipped in and out of X-Men continuity through the 90s but never really understood Cable’s whole thing, beyond that he had the Most 90s Character Design—but this piece laid out the core themes in a deep and moving way. Comics can have so much in them.

Take care, and happy reading!