Nuke_Bloodaxe wrote:
I can certainly understand short-cuts being necessary to in situ writing, but quick switching between characters, and the required change in thinking for that characters perspective, always strikes me as being an important thing to take pause at. Certainly I've found switching personality types for each character, when writing, to take a few moments:- during which time I could be selecting the character out of a list automatically.
Hmm. Personally, I would agree if you were talking about a scene in which there's a conversation between six or seven characters, or between characters I've not really developed yet, but most of the time I can reel off dialogue - at least, first-draft stuff, which is all I want to write the first time through - between two or three characters I know well enough without pause at all.
I wonder whether this is at least partly a question of methodology; myself, I tend to be the "edit it later" kind of writer. I'm writing a short VN right now: I started by writing out a brief bullet-pointed timeline, starting a little before the actual story starts and running 'til the epiologue; I then wrote out a sketchy list of scenes which I think the story should be broken down into then fiddled with that 'til it looked like it made sense pacing-wise (all this in notepad); next I opened SciTE and started a Ren'Py script to type it out. Now I'm in the middle of my first draft; I'll write out each scene without thinking a great deal about it, not necessarily writing in the order it occurs, just getting the approximate length and content of each scene down so I can then read through it from the beginning as a first-time reader would and see which bits I think need editing. Later I'll quite possibly cut and paste chunks of it into different places, or fiddle with the dialogue if some of the characterisation's off, or change what happens in one of the scenes... but reading through the whole thing really helps me determine things like pacing and flow, and for that I need to have had my first draft done without spending
too long thinking about those things while I'm writing it.
I've known some writers who seem to think that once they've put something on the page it's irrevocable, editing is impossible, and they have to get it absolutely right first time and thus think about it before writing. I can kind of understand where the mentality comes from, and I can see that it would leave the space to select stuff from lists or whatever, but it's not the way I work. By the time I'm really properly spending more than half a second pondering a character's turn of phrase I've already laid out most of the prose and I'm just playing with it. (And as it goes, quite frequently the original dialogue does mostly survive the editing process; often bits are cut or inserted, but I don't usually find that I have to totally change the way characters are behaving, because I've thought about that before I started writing.)
Nuke_Bloodaxe wrote:
I think the real question is which parts of the current paradigm are actually suitable for introduction to a visual interface system, as opposed to a scripting system, and which should be left out [ due to their hindering rather than advancing the application ].
Sure, and I wouldn't suggest that - for example - it would be a good idea to require textual definitions of graphic or sound assets in a GUI system. But fundamentally, writing is about words, and you type words, you don't drag-and-drop them with a mouse. Writers aren't afraid of Ren'Py and other script-based engines because they're afraid of
typing; anyone who has done any writing before is already perfectly used to typing character names over and over again, their hands not leaving the keyboard for long stretches at a time.
And fundamentally, if Novelty - or any engine, for that matter - gets in the way of just sitting down and typing a script, then writers won't use it. If it supports one writing method and not another, then only some writers will be able to use it.
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