Jacqueline A Lott

Jacqueline's The Fire Tower goes to great lengths to provide an award winning sense of place

Jacqueline is an interactive fiction author and prolific tester. Her story The Fire Tower, won the 2004 Xyzzy award for best setting. These days she tests interactive fiction more than she writes, so has a great deal of experience in judging what works and what doesn’t. She has also been running IntroComp since 2003. Her official website is allthingsjacq, on which she has an interactive fiction section.

1. How do you decide that a piece of fiction should be interactive, rather than a traditional story?

   Jacqueline: Do I have but one linear plot thread in mind? How interesting is the world in which the story is set? How much do I think others would enjoy exploring the issues, experiences, or thoughts of the protagonist? Is this just a story or event that I feel needs to be told, or would it be better explored? I think interactive fiction lends itself, first and foremost, as an excellent venue for world-building and exploration of cause and effect. Personally speaking, there’s also an element of ‘how difficult would this be to code’ or ‘how fun would this be to code’ in there as well, but I’m finding that these days I’m fixing the first of those by collaborating with coders far stronger than myself.

2. What software do you use to write your IF, and why?

   Jacqueline: I use the Inform 7. I first began writing in Inform 6, and was among the private beta group who got to test Inform 7 when it first came out, so I guess I feel a certain affection for the language. I’m also one of those people who’s closer to the writer end of the spectrum than the coder end. Inform 7 is still a coding language, there’s a distinct order to how you can say things, but I do find it easier to grasp mentally because of the natural language aspect of the code. The other day I took a look at something a friend and I started in I6; we’re thinking about resurrecting it, and we both agree that the first necessary thing will be to port it to I7. Reading I6 makes my vision blur a bit these days.

3. What’s the first thing you do when starting a new piece of IF?

   Jacqueline: Laying out the map, and creating locations and their descriptions. I like having a world I can walk around as I lay out parts of the story, and setting the scene is (for me) the easiest and most enjoyable part of the whole affair. I also get a great deal of joy out of research, probably more than is good for me and my actual productivity.

4. How much time do you spend planning your stories versus writing them?

   Jacqueline: I think I almost always spend more time writing than planning. That said, one of my current works in progress has been much heavier on planning thus far, but I suspect that eventually the writing will overtake that.

5. IF takes the practically unique second person perspective. With the reader essentially playing a character, do you expect your readers to roleplay, or do you prefer to give them as blank a canvas as possible?

   Jacqueline: Honestly, unless I have a super firm idea of who the player character is, I like letting the player pretend that they’re actually in the game. In The Fire Tower, the player character was modeled after myself, so I took the easy route when I was writing and made the player role play (hopefully they enjoyed pretending to be me!). I’m usually fond of making games more accessible, though, by allowing people to more comfortably fit in the player character’s skin, but that, too, is an easy route. While I haven’t done this myself, I do very much value works which force the player to step outside themselves and experience challenges that they wouldn’t otherwise have to face. That’s part of what makes the experience worthwhile.

6. There can be an overwhelming amount of choice for the reader. What do you do to signpost important objects or interactions for them? When you restrict their choices instead, how do you make sure it is done in a realistic way?

   Jacqueline: Well, I do believe in very exhaustive world-crafting, which often means that there are a lot of objects you can explore. Generally, though, if an object is there merely for setting (the thing that I believe IF does better than anything else), then I find some way to reasonably lock that object down. I give the player a plausible reason, not merely a “Sorry, can’t do that” response. Those responses are like a wet towel tossed over the player’s head. No fun.

7. There is potential for a tangled web of intersecting paths through a story. How do you keep track of everything?

   Jacqueline: Well, you can make things linear, which is fairly boring and frowned on these days. You can make things branch in a somewhat linear way–that is to say, the game itself isn’t linear, but each critical decision puts you on a separate linear path, so what you end up with are a series of individual linear games nested within one larger work. There are ways to make it more complicated, of course. One of the things I’m working on right now allows for lots of exploration and full reign, but each decision you make has a value to it, and the game silently keeps track of your actions, ultimately affecting the outcome; this is accomplished by a value chart that, perhaps unfairly, the player never sees, but the player does know full well whether his/her actions are selfish or not, cruel or not, etc. Whichever route you chose as an author, there’s one common thread for them all: solid testing. You’ll never be able to predict the multitude of ways in which the paths you think you’ve delineated so well will actually cross until you let other human beings navigate those paths for themselves and report back to you about the journeys on which they’ve been.

8. How do you go about testing your work?

   Jacqueline: There’s a lot of self testing before things go out. I’m actually more accomplished in the IF community as a tester than as an author, and that serves me well. Then I open it to a very small group (say, 1-3 people) and work through their suggestions before releasing it to a larger testing pool.

9. What’s the most valuable mistake you have made writing Interactive fiction?

   Jacqueline: Releasing something before it was ready. I love IntroComp. I love it so much that I took on the role of running it, which I’ve done now for eight years, and which I hope I’ll do well into the future. But I look back on the first thing I released (as part of the first IntroComp in 2002) and see that it really wasn’t ready, and really wasn’t thought out well enough. When the full version of that game comes out (which it will, eventually) it will be a very different thing indeed, a much better creation, which it never would have been had I not fallen flat way back then and gotten some of my newbie blunders out of the way. Shame it had to be public, but it probably wouldn’t have been as valuable a lesson otherwise.

10. If there was only one single tip you could give a new IF writer, what would it be?

    Jacqueline: Use beta testers extensively, not just any ol’ people you can find, but people who you respect, and listen to them. It’s hard to get past the fascination of playing your first game, seeing it run, thinking to yourself, “I created this world oh my goodness isn’t this amazing,” but you need to get past it. Fascinating as that world you created may be, it’s imperfect. You do it a disservice by not polishing it where other eyes see smears or streaks.

But there’s a slight problem with this. Or at least, I have a slight problem with it. Sometimes I know what the next bit of the story is, but I don’t want to write it yet. I’m not in the mood for it. I don’t want to write something flat and uninspiring because of this crap mood. But there is a bit later on in the story that I do feel like writing, for
whatever reason.

This happens to me quit a lot, and I very often give in. It means I have to piece together the bits afterwards, and I end up with lots of different files in one folder (often starting with “draft 1″, but then getting necessarily more descriptive with the filenames as I go on). But I quite like the process of putting the pieces together at the end, as long as there’s not too many.

It seems like it may be counter-productive, and there are disadvantages and pitfalls when working this way that I’ll get to in a minute. But I find it actually helps me to just get on. I don’t want to have to sit there staring at a page or writing something that I know will have to be entirely scrapped and written again. I realise it’s a draft and everything, and I’m fine with that. But I’m talking about a situation where a few pages may have to be tossed aside, and you know it as you write it.

I’d much rather skip to a bit I feel I can write relatively easily and well. Something that flows out more. Then at least I feel like I’m making progress.

Of course, the big danger here is that you skip a bit, never to return. What if you never have the impetus to get that bit done? What if you end up with a Swiss cheese of a story that’s never finished? Well, personally that hasn’t happened to me yet. But I would venture that if those paragraphs, chapters or pages really aren’t that interesting to you, no matter how you try to spin them, they’re not going to be interesting for anyone else either. Perhaps you’d be better off finding away around them.

It’s important to make a quick distinction here. We are not talking about writing that you’re afraid of. If for some reason there is a necessary part of your story that you are afraid of writing (because you think it will be too difficult for example), you should just get on and write it. I think it’s worthwhile taking a minute or two to decide exactly why you don’t want to put pen to paper before you put it off.

There’s also a chance that you’ll return to the previously abandoned section, carry on writing, and realise that you simply can’t get to there from here. You’ve written a future event, but can’t join the dots, and now know you have to scrap it! It’s a risk, I guess, and if it happens, well, them’s the breaks.

And inevitably, there will be times when you have no future event to skip to. You don’t know what’s coming next, and the only way to find out is to write your way there. If you don’t want to at this point, then the best remedy is to just grit your teeth and bear it. It’ll be worth it when you find your way again.

Am I the only one who writes like this? Should I be writing like this, or am I doing my stories more harm than good? perhaps you think skipping ahead when writing is as bad as skipping ahead when reading? As always, let us know in the comments.