I’m now in Week 7 of #Facility23 and it’s become part of my daily creative process. The idea is to write a single room or location in a TTRPG environment every weekday and it’s going great! It’s teaching me a lot about process too and how to do very nearly everything I do better. Here are the big three lessons so far:
- Threads: So simple, so effective. For January each entry, which I post on social media, was an individual tweet. For February it’s a thread. It helps keep the work in one place, helps collate it and also gives you that nice little contact catharsis of adding more to a Big Piece Of Writing.
- Personal Experience: For a very long time I included as little of my personal perspective as I could in my fiction. That helped immensely with getting the mechanics down, and the simple mechanics of doing something every day are one of the elements I’m good at. As I warm up to a project I always bring more of myself to it and the #Facility23 work is no exception. The last couple of weeks have seen a location based on one of the places I performed stage magic, another based on one of the WW2 camps on the island I grew up on and a third that has a pun title that comes entirely from what makes me laugh. It’s fun, it helps, it’s personal and unique. It also shows how we all tell stories cooperatively. I wouldn’t be who I am without these experiences and these stories. Honouring, and citing them, is the absolute least I can do.
- The Solutions Are Always There: One of the last things I do with every entry is note down locations, people and events that are unique and important to that entry. That creates a rolling directory of elements to draw from and I’m already starting to do that. The more threads you have, the more you’ll have to connect together when you need to. It’s like parking little solution boxes for when you need them.
The current thread is here and I’m having a blast. Next time I’ll talk about the overall location and how I’ve tweaked how I’m using the Story Engine cards. Oh and asteroids. Asteroids are COOL.
Keep making things, folks. I’ll see you next time.