Way back in 2015, I was hyped for Fallout 4 being released in November. I was poking around Bethesda’s YouTube channel and discovered, indirectly, that they were hiring. Hiring quest writers.
Hey, I’m a writer! That sounds like a fun job. I should do that. One of the requirements was a 2-5 page (500-1250 word, approximately) story set in one of their game worlds, focusing on dialogue.
I immediately thought of setting a story in Portland, my home town, only in the Fallout universe, 200 years after the bombs fell. The Fallout universe is grungy, adult, and has an off-kilter sense of humor, and since part of the Portland I love are the underclass, the working class, the service staff and strippers and musicians, I thought a post-apocalyptic Portland would be a perfect setting.
Over the next couple of weeks, I thought about the characters more; since the story was to be mostly dialogue, I needed to have well-designed characters that had distinct voices. Soon enough, I had three interesting people – a woman who was a Vault dweller, descended from a group that survived the nuclear annihilation, a Ghoul who chose to help others but paid the price of loneliness and immortality, and… one other, a mysterious person whose past influenced both of the previous two’s lives. And in the present of the story, they all interacted… somehow.
I had the opening scene down. The woman, Calista Brasesco, was exploring the Willamette Wasteland in search of something to help her Vault and her people, and comes across an old burnt-out bunker, that used to be a strip club in Portland before the war. In the ruins, she finds the Ghoul, Louie “Lovie” Duckworth, who somehow recognizes her from before the war. They trade stories and discover what they have in common… which was the third character. And that’s where I was stuck.
I didn’t know how to make that revelation interesting. I didn’t know how to make the character decisions interesting. I wasn’t even sure Calista had any decisions to make, honestly.
I knew who all three people were, mostly, as I kicked the story around in my head and made notes when the ideas came to me. But it didn’t gel. It didn’t feel like a story yet. So I let the idea sit in my head and kept taking notes, and playing Fallout 4, and reading the wikis for lore in that universe. And I mentally berated myself for not just writing.
I was mad at myself because, while I thought I had a great story brewing, I wasn’t actually churning it out. It was taking too long. In my mind, I told myself, “Bethesda isn’t going to be interested in you if you can’t just toss out good stories. You need higher output. Just write, dammit!” And, as people do, I slowly shifted my rationalization from “I’m writing this to get hired” to “I’m writing this because it’s a good story and I want to tell it.”
And still, I didn’t actually write it.
I had another breakthrough when I picked up another piece of Fallout lore that made the mysterious third person much more menacing, but it still didn’t click for me. Felt too obvious. And maybe it was obvious because I’d been thinking about this story for 6 weeks; maybe it wouldn’t be so obvious to someone reading it for the first time.
Dammit. I needed to just write the story.
If I’ve learned anything at all as a writer, I’ve learned that ideas often don’t click until I begin to put them down into real words, sentences, paragraphs. So, a few days ago, I used a trick that’s helped me break out of my writer’s block for my stalled novel: write daily, with a goal of 50 words per day. It’s worked beautifully for my novel, because once I start writing, I rarely stop at only 50 words. I just keep going.
I put down the opening paragraphs of Calista scouting out the ruin, setting the scene, and felt that was enough. 158 words. That was the first day.
The second day, I wrote out her getting closer and seeing what was inside the building: defenses, and another person, sleeping. Another 158 words.
Today, I had her actually find a way past the defenses and get into the building. Only 114 words, and I could tell I was stalling. Clearing my throat. 430 words, almost two pages, and no dialogue. This wouldn’t do.
So I got in the shower and somewhere along the way, the story started running in my head, starting with Lovie making a cryptic remark to Calista and jumping from there… that’s what I should be writing, I thought.
Suddenly, it made sense. Why Calista was there, and what Lovie wanted, and how the identity of the mysterious stranger was both menace and resolution for both of them, with an added twist of painful irony…
And the story is currently writing itself. Finally. That’s how my brain works.
“Can’t wait to share it” is a much better feeling than “can’t wait to tell it.”