A friend of mine and a terrific writer just landed a job with a miniatures gaming company as their head writer.  Up until now they have been using folks in the gaming community who fancied themselves writers, but hadn’t really put in the blood and sweat like my buddy.  My friend attended Viable Paradise and Taos Tool Box.  He’s written several novels and lots and lots of short stories.  He has a tool box that’s pretty well stocked with the tools of our peculiar trade.

And now he’s in charge of these other writers.  He’s insisting that the staff plot out the campaigns and the stories, and he’s been getting pushback.  He’s been telling me about the various objections he’s received, and he got one a few days ago that left me a bit breathless and gobsmacked.  It goes like this.

“We’re writing for gamers, and they have no taste, and wouldn’t know good writing from bad, and it will just confuse them if we have plot and character arcs and consistency so it’s not worth doing.”  In other words they’ll eat any crap we shovel out with a spoon and not know the difference.

My friend gently (actually I don’t know if it was gentle or not) anyway, he pointed out that maybe this writer ought to strive to write something that wasn’t crap for his own sense of pride and to honor the art.  Apparently it went right over the guy’s head.

A couple of reasons for this attitude occurred to me.  One is simple laziness.  It’s hard to plot and make sure the structure works, and this was an excuse not to put in the work.  The other is a sense of low expectations about the readership which is always death for a writer.  Readers will know if you are insincere or mocking them.  And why write if you despise readers this much?  It could also be a lack of trust in your own abilities.  If that’s the case then get some training, join a writer’s group, do something to improve.

There’s a corollary to this too.  There’s a growing trend in writing to never rewrite.  Send out your first draft and move on to the next project immediately because it’s all about pushing “product”.  Very few of us are the literary equivalent of Mozart who in the words of Salieri in the movie Amadeus, “…He had simply written down music already finished in his head. Page after page of it as if he were just taking dictation. And music, finished as no music is ever finished….”  99.,9% of us can’t do that.  We have to rework, to ponder a phrase, make sure the character motivations are correct, to plot.  Yes, I treat my writing  as a job in that I make myself work each day and meet my deadlines, but that doesn’t mean I can’t strive to maybe, actually, create… well — art.

One of Daniel Abraham‘s Clarion instructors urged his students to strive for greatness.  I think that should be foremost in all our minds whether we’re doing work for hire, or gaming fiction, or media tie ins or our own deeply personal book.  Because if we don’t strive for greatness on everything we write then the chance to write that deeply personal novel that will illuminate the human condition and touch and move people on the deepest levels will always elude us.