Work, Work, Work, Work, and a note about Robin Laws’ new book

I woke up this morning and mainlined Rihanna’s Work in the hopes of easing my way into marking. Mostly, it resulted in sitting there thinking that the genres we once thought of as “popular” grew increasingly more interesting once the mass market collapsed and there was no need to produce hits that were palatable to everyone.

People try and seperate technology and the market from the aesthetics of art, but they’re far more intertwined than people think.

5 assignments left at time of writing. If I can get my focus back, i should be finished tomorrow.

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Robin Laws has a new book out, Beating the Story: How to Map, Understand, and Elevate Any Narrative. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I’ll recommend it to you right now for a very simple reason: Robin Laws is fucking smart, and he thinks very deeply about the mechanisms of narrative.

Lots of folks who read fiction don’t know this yet, because he’s spent a good chunk of his career working in roleplaying games and writing tie-in fiction. I followed his design work for years because he was one of the first designers who looked for a connection between the kinds of stories an RPG told and the mechanics used to tell it. He produced work that was unexpected and surprising, experimental without being inaccessible.

In short, he wrote games that were fucking smart.

He started getting involved in editing original fiction through Stone Skin Press a few years back and put out a series of anthologies. One of them, The New Hero, featured an introduction talking through the differences between iconic and dramatic heroes that caused me to re-think a bunch of my default assumptions about narrative. Over the last year, I’ve been re-reading those introductions and stealing bits to use in my thesis.

I do this because Robin Laws is fucking smart.

What excites me about this book isn’t the large-scale structural stuff, although I expect that will be awesome, but the space devoted to looking at beats within an individual scene. Figuring out the rhythms and building particular effects. The microstructure of story, rather than the macro-structure typified by three-act structures and scene breakdowns.

We don’t often talk about microstructure in that much detail. This will be just the third book I’ve seen attempt a breakdown of things on this scale, and I’ve been reading this stuff obsessively for the better part of twenty years.

I haven’t got that that yet, but I’m looking forward to it. And I’ve already tagged a whole bunch of pages where he talks about character journeys through fiction, so I can use them as part of my thesis.