Writing Pulp

Part of my time in my recent two week micro-blogging absence has been spent writing. Quite a lot of writing, in fact. But also writing in a way that’s a bit different than my usual method.

As I’ve been working on Deck & Conn, I kept thinking back to the kind of materials that games like this might have had if they were released in big boxes back in the ’90s. Nice fat manuals full of background material too big or nuanced to be inside the game. Perhaps some designer’s notes. Hell, some of the O.G. MicroProse games had absurdly detailed material in their huge manuals. Hell, in the wonderful manual for the Gothic Germany-set RPG Darklands, there was a full bibliography, where the designers showed what books they’d used as research material for the game.

But another thing that often happened was books. Like, actual novels. Tie-in novels happened quite bit. Hell, TIE Fighter had a novella that gave a full backstory for the main charcter, Maarek Stele.

Deck & Conn is set in a world I crafted solely to fit the gameplay style I had in mind. A sort of fifteen-minutes-into-the-future of 1989. A cold war with battles around teh fringes, in nuclear powered space ships with mechanics not unlike a cross between Napoleonic era naval life and 20th century destroyers and submarines.

As research for it, I read a lot of books. On cold war submarines, ww2 submarines, destroyers, and also some novels. The novels were good fun. Short, pulpy adventure stories set at sea, mostly. It felt like a natural fit for Deck & Conn. The idea of writing one began to appear as an almost intrusive thought, until finally I figured out what little story I wanted to tell.

It wasn’t going to be some earth-changing story, or even anything particularly personal. It was going to be pulp. I picked a word count and rough structure based on old novels, about 42k words, and began to flesh out the story beats.

I picked tropes I liked from naval war stories, and used them liberally.

Over about two weeks I wrote 34,482 words. I’m up to the final battle now, and it really has been a good time.

The interesting part of it is that I wrote every major action, event, and character beat ahead of time. Some thins changed a little as I went on, but for the most part, knowing what I was writing rather than my usual “find out what characters do as if I’m role-playing them” technique has been immense fun. It’s easier to go from one chapter to the next, and forcing myself to have a very limited word count and keeping chapters very short helped immensely too.