Writing: No, really, the writing part

Written by Susan Weiner

So, Nat just wrote a lovely entry on the group part of the writing process. However, I’ve been lucky: that part has worked smoothly for every game I’ve written. In the groups I’ve written with, people love hanging out, brainstorming, and showing off their work. That’s easy. The hard part is actually doing the writing in between.

So, you’ve come up with a perfect game idea, you have some concept of the structure and a group of GMs. How do you get from that to the finished game?

Like everything else in any creative process, there are as many ways to go about this as there are LARPwriters. I can’t really describe what they do, so I’m going to start with how I work.

A Group Writing Process

As LARP writers, we tend to talk a lot about game design: characters, mechanics, plot construction, information economy, et cetera. We also tend to talk a lot about runtime issues: logistics, space, props, GMing, and production. This tends to leave out the fact that there’s a whole expanse of stuff in the middle, in which you need to actually sit down and write the LARP.

Writing, as anyone who’s tried it knows, is very, very hard. It’s a craft that many professionals work at their whole lives and never master. I’m certainly not about to pretend to give advice on good writing in general. What I do want to talk about, though, is writing in a group.

Group writing complicates matters significantly. It brings in the problem of coordinating between different writers to ensure consistency and continuity. It also presents a devil’s bargain: do you risk bruising egos and damaging friendships, or do you risk putting out a subpar game because you didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings?

Hello, World!

Welcome to the Alleged Entertainment group blog! We're going to use this blog to talk about our ongoing LARP projects, make announcements, and post articles discussing LARP theory, writing, and practice.

This is somewhat of an experiment for now, so please bear with us. We'll be posting more here soon!