Insight into the Martine Stories, Part 3
January 17, 2002
Original Link (now dead) - http://acdm.turbinegames.com/?cat=0&id=236
Insight into the Martine stories, Part 3
By - Ken Troop
With Sir Martine’s Journal, in the November, 2000 Event, Should the Stars Fall, I knew things were getting serious (Also look at this Gamespy Dev Diary entry on the dungeon I created along with the story here).
This tale wasn’t going to be a comedy anymore. Martine had been sold up the river. And he was going to hurt because of it. Who had betrayed him? I didn’t quite know yet. What were the ultimate plans of his Virindi captors? I didn’t know that either. The AC Live team had been discussing the overall story arc for the year of 2001, and what we mainly knew was that we wanted it to be a Virindi story arc, but the details had yet to be determined.
So, as often happens when I don’t have a firm goal in mind, I start writing and see where the language takes me. One of my favorite joys of writing, and unfortunately also one of my biggest weaknesses as a writer, is that I am easily seduced by language. A certain word, or a turn of phrase, or a string of symphonic sentences will fill me with rapture and joy as I write and read them.
And I don’t want to take them out. So I find myself traveling paths I had never considered before or that I had actively not wanted to write about before the writing, all because I am so entranced by words. While this may outrage some of you, sometimes I focus on the language first, and let the meaning seep in afterwards.
The first paragraph of this tale is a perfect example of this. When I wrote, "Perhaps. It still may be too late. What they have planned...what they are still planning...the loss of blood makes it hard for me to concentrate…" I had no idea what they were planning. Oh, there were many possibilities, some of which were clearer in my mind than others, but there was no bedrock "imaginary" reality upon which I was setting the tale. The language was flowing, the words were seductive, and I thought it was a good start. I could decide what it all meant afterwards.
The potential casualty of this approach is continuity, that seamless web of facts and worldbuilding and character motivation which needs to stay true to itself in order to help the readers immerse themselves in your text. This is not something I take lightly -- it is painful to me to read a fictional work in which the author either blatantly ignores or forgets earlier continuity, or sets a tone of carelessness about these details. (Unless it’s intentional and the author is deliberately using a device of the Unreliable Narrator, one meant to either forget or break continuity because it reveals even more details about character or plot. (see Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos fantasy series for an example of this)).
I constantly have to monitor what I have written before and make sure that I am not allowing loose threads to dangle or disappear or that I am completely breaking continuity by introducing a new development. Of course, this is made more difficult by the nature of our game. Many times I have introduced an angle into one of my stories that I am using as a setup for a future story or gameplay dynamic, only to see the story or intended gameplay change, or to start working on a different project, and never get to followup on that dynamic. There are a number of examples of this I will point to when I talk about some of the later Martine stories.
The other usual outcome of my "freeform" writing style, is that I tend to get drawn to the same themes in that writing. For example, William Blake is one of my favorite poets, especially his Songs of Innocence and Experience. The transition from innocence to experience, and the joys and sorrows of both remain a particular fascination for me. And so I was trying to chronicle Martine’s loss of innocence, and what his embracing of experience would mean, both for him and for Dereth.
The other theme that I was obsessed with back then was the relationship between memory and identity. While growing up, I had a very good memory for past events and facts. I could generally recall minute details of even trivial events. But as I went through my mid-late twenties, I noticed that my recall was not nearly as sharp as it once was. To cite a truly trivial example, while I could still recall the starting lineup for the 1984 Chicago Cubs (Bobby Dernier, CF; Ryne Sandberg, 2B; Gary Matthews, LF; Leon Durham 1B; Keith Moreland, RF; Jody Davis, C; Ron Cey, 3B; Larry Bowa, SS;), I could no longer recall their batting averages. Painful.
Having been accustomed to being able to recall most of the details of the events and relationships in my life, my dawning awareness that more and more of my past was being lost, combined with the fact that events later in my life weren’t imprinting upon me as heavily as earlier events, filled me with fear. If I forgot what I thought about during the past, if I forgot what I loved, did that mean that person, that subset of me, was dead? That I would be increasingly trapped in the present?
I tried to bring out my thoughts and feelings about this through Martine and his fears and torments. It didn’t make the wrestling with the issue any easier. But it was fun to write about.
Non-sequitur detail: Arg Marg, the Mosswart Chieftain that Martine refers to here (what eventually became Arrgkh Mearrgkh) was inspired by Large Marge, from Peewee’s Big Adventure.