Tag: fiction

The Similarities of Playing Magic: The Gathering and Writing Fiction

October 7, 2019 / Kyle A. Massa

I’m sure you’ve heard of writing. Question is, have you ever heard of Magic: The Gathering?

Magic is the world’s most popular trading card game (and also its first). Created in 1993 by doctoral student Richard Garfield, the game has millions of players all over the world. Players bring customized decks to the table and battle their cards against one or more opponents.

I like Magic. And I like writing fiction. And the more I do both, the more I realize how similar the two activities truly are. They both feature…

Endless Decision Making

When playing Magic or writing fiction, the player/author makes numerous decisions. In Magic, players start with seven cards in hand, then draw a random one from the top of their deck each turn. As a Magic player, every turn presents new decisions to be made, chiefly which of your cards you should play, and in what order. Your opponent’s decisions will further influence your own.

In writing, your only opponents are time, procrastination, and the occasional cup of coffee spilling on your keyboard. Still, there are plenty of decisions to make, probably even more than when playing Magic. For example: What are your characters going to look and act like? How does the setting influence them? What adjectives should you use to describe your protagonist? What’s your protagonist’s cat’s name (very important)?

Decisions, decisions. In both Magic and writing, they’re everywhere.

Contextual Factors

This is one of the coolest aspects of both Magic and writing: individual components change value based on what’s around them. Let’s start with Magic.

Let’s pretend that Magic cards are game pieces. The power level of pieces in most games are flat and predictable: a pawn advances at most two spaces at a time, and a queen moves as many spaces as she wants in any direction. In no game of chess has a pawn ever been more powerful than a queen.

Magic is a great game (the greatest, in my opinion) because its pieces vary in power level depending on what’s around them. For example, goblins appear frequently in Magic. In some decks, they might be annoying little attackers that don’t contribute very much to the game. However, in decks where they’re surrounded by more goblins, they might suddenly become a lot more powerful.

Everything’s contextual in writing, too! Take genre, for instance. If an author writes a novel about zombies, that author had better be aware of all the other zombie stories that have come before, after, and simultaneously. An author might write the best zombie story ever—yet if it comes out in the same year as ten other really bad zombie stories, it could easily lose value for the audience.

So Many Goddamn Rules

Magic and writing have a heck of a lot of rules. Let’s start with Magic.

In Magic, players strive to bend the rules in ways that are either competitively advantageous or just plain cool. No, this does not mean cheating (though that was certainly an issue in the game’s infancy). It means that players seek ways to combine cards in new ways for amazing results.

For example, consider the cost of cards. Magic is essentially a resource management game: players are allowed to play one land card per turn, and these land cards allow them to play their other cards. The game is designed so that, generally speaking, more powerful cards require more land cards to play. If players can find ways to play expensive cards sooner than usual, they can expect good results.

In writing, there are also tons of rules. Grammar, for instance, dictates how you express your ideas on the page. Then there are the rules of storytelling, which almost always come up when writing fiction.

Of course, as is the case with Magic, the fun part of writing is learning the rules, then breaking them. Fiction usually isn’t that interesting when it follows the template you expect it to follow; it’s often more compelling when the story diverges from established norms.

These are two of my all-time favorite subjects, so I’d better stop myself before I start rambling (if I haven’t already). If you like Magic, you might like writing fiction. If you like writing fiction, you might like Magic. Try ’em both!

Kyle A. Massa is a speculative fiction author living somewhere in upstate New York with his wife and their two cats. He has written two books and numerous short stories, both published and yet-to-be published. He enjoys unusual narrative structures, multiple POVs, and stories about coffee.

Story Ideas: Where Do They Come From and Where Can We Find More?

April 9, 2018 / Kyle A. Massa

It’s never this easy.

I’ve heard it said that great ideas are easy to come by—it’s the writing that’s the hard part. I don’t buy it!

On the contrary, I think when you start with a great idea, the writing blossoms from there. So the question is, how do we come by those great ideas?

Man, I wish I knew. I’m no more of an idea factory than anyone else. What I can say is, I’m always trying new methods. Some work, some don’t, but here are a few of my favorite idea generators.

Keep a Notebook

My mom encouraged me to do this, and I’m glad she did. Writer or not, everyone has a hundred ideas every day—it’s just that we remember few of them. That’s where the notebook comes in.

This thing should be the Robin to your Batman, so make sure it’s small enough to fit in your pocket. Whenever you have an idea, any idea, jot it down. It’s perfect for those thoughts that just need to gestate a bit, or perhaps an overheard conversation that would make a great scene of dialogue, or maybe a solution to that complex conflict between your central characters.

If you’re interested, Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook“ explores this topic with much more eloquence than I can. Check it out!

Focus on the Fun Ideas

This one seems like a no-brainer, but a lot of writers (including myself) seem to forget it.

I remember working on a manuscript for far longer than I should have, forcing my way through and groaning whenever it was time to write. Truth was, the initial idea turned out to be far more interesting than the piece itself.

Two months in, I realized I wasn’t having fun anymore. So I put the manuscript away, all 40,000 words of it.

I didn’t throw it away (more on that later), but I didn’t force it, either. Not every piece will be like eating ice cream, but fun should be an essential part of your writing process. After all, if you don’t have fun writing a piece, no one’s going to have fun reading it.

Don’t Abandon Anything

Even if you think you’ve just written the literary equivalent of Plan 9 from Outer Space, keep it! Every idea is like a seed. Some never grow. Some grow into shrubs and die in their first winter. But some flourish and grow tall. Pretty soon, you’ll have yourself one mighty fine-looking tree.

George R.R. Martin encourages young writers to never throw away anything, and here’s a good example why. In his introduction for Dreamsongs, Volume I, Martin describes one of his first forays into the epic fantasy genre. (Remember—this was a long time before A Song of Ice and Fire.)

“Dark Gods of Kor-Yuban” I called it, and yes, my version of Mordor sounds like a brand of coffee. My heroes were the usual pair of mismatched adventurers, the melancholy exile prince R’hllor of Raugg and his boisterous, swaggering companion, Argilac the Arrogant.

And later…

In the sequel, my exile prince finds himself in the Dothrak Empire, where he joins Barron of the Bloody Blade to fight the winged demons who slew his grandsire, King Barristan the Bold.

If you’ve read A Song of Ice and Fire, then you probably recognize the names R’hllor, Argilac the Arrogant, Barristan the Bold, and the Dothrak Empire. All those names reappear in his series!

So what does it take to make a great story idea? It takes hard work, deep thought, and perseverance. Truth is, ideas don’t always come to us—sometimes, we need to go find them.

Kyle A. Massa is a speculative fiction author living somewhere in upstate New York with his fiancee and their two cats. His stories have appeared in numerous online magazines, including Allegory, Chantwood, and Dark Fire Fiction. To stay current with Kyle’s work, subscribe to his email newsletter. He promises not to spam you.

What Does the Adapter Owe to the Source Material?

March 2, 2015 / Kyle A. Massa

Martin Luther King Jr.

“Do you love me?”

You might not remember this scene from Ava DuVerney’s Selma, but it certainly stuck with me. Coretta Scott King (played by Carmen Ejogo) confronts her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (played by David Oyelowo) with this very question. King responds with a quick, “Yes.”

“Do you love any of the others?” Coretta asks. Dr. King’s eyes bounce around the room nervously, and a painfully long silence passes before he croaks, “No.” Coretta leaves the room, and the scene ends.

It’s a powerful moment that’s well-acted on both sides. But what really struck me about that scene, and really most of the film, was this: how much of it is actually accurate to history?

There have been plenty of articles written on this very subject, many of which express disappointment over “historical inaccuracies” in the film. A lot of people are specifically upset about the depiction of President Lyndon B. Johnson. For context, in Selma, Johnson (played by Tom Wilkinson) is portrayed as a mostly unwilling participant in the equal rights movement, preferring instead to focus upon other issues and push King’s agenda back to the following year. Joseph A. Califano Jr., Johnson’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, claimed that the filmmakers felt “free to fill the screen with falsehoods, immune from any responsibility to the dead, just because they thought it made for a better story.”

I agree with Mr. Califano in one respect at least. It did make for a better story.

When it comes to adaptations of any kind, many people seem to be so preoccupied with what happened. It seems like every historical fiction film or novel that comes out has people complaining that it’s not accurate, or that the artist changed too much. But that’s what it’s called historical fiction. As Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his afterword to Lolita, “It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.” In other words, don’t consume fiction and expect to learn any facts about anything.

Let’s say Selma did not portray the King/Johnson relationship with such strong conflict. Let’s imagine a film in which Johnson is fully on board with Dr. King’s plans. That’s a story without conflict, and, without conflict, you don’t have much of a story.

I suppose I understand why people close to the issue might be so upset. Indeed, there’s sometimes a certain presumptive quality to a piece of historical fiction, an unspoken suggestion that this was the way it really happened. But writer/director Ava DuVerney addressed the topic thusly, and I couldn’t agree more: “[Selma is] not a documentary. I’m not a historian. I’m a storyteller.”

Indeed, Selma is not a documentary. It is historical fiction. Perhaps we should remember that fiction is meant to entertain, to tell a compelling story, to make the audience think, and to make the audience feel. Even if a work of fiction is based on real-life occurrences, the artists allegiance should not lie with absolute truth; it should lie with the story.