Faster Stories, More Value
Putting more story in your stories.
After meeting Seth Ring at Realm Makers and learning more about LitRPG, I’ve been taking a deep dive into LitRPG and even comics since I’ve been reading a lot of those recently, and I’ve realized something I hadn’t thought of before.
When a story moves fast, you can give readers more story in a shorter amount of time.
Okay, that sounds really obvious now that I say it out loud (or rather, type it). But this realization came when I finally started playing my first Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy X.
Time struggle
I love video games. I think they’re a great and unique way to tell a story, and they’re a ton of fun. Exploring worlds and leveling up characters always feels great, and the storytelling opportunities are something you can’t get anywhere else.
But I have a job.
And I have to write books.
And articles.
And I have to clean, and work out, and mow the lawn, and keep up with my relationships, and help my church, and…
You get the point.
I can’t just sink 50 hours of my time into a game, no matter how much I want to. Sure, I can play a little here and there, and that adds up over time. But then it takes forever to finish anything, and that stinks.
Which brings me to LitRPG.
For those who don’t know, LitRPG is a writing convention (not a genre!!!) where the author uses video game or tabletop roleplaying game terms and rules to quickly convey information to the reader. Typically, the story takes place in a video game or in a world that operates similarly to a video game, where characters level up, unlock new abilities, and find new items and equipment.
Those of you who have read my Killstream series will be familiar with this idea, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should know that you get a free prequel novella when you subscribe to this Substack that has all of these concepts, not to mention some really fun characters and a great story.
Anyways, now that the shameless self-promotion is out of the way, that’s what LitRPG is about. Communicating essential information to readers as quickly as possible so that what would normally be a 200,000-word novel is knocked down to 120,000 words. All that world-building and explaining the magic system (or technology) is done in just a few brief sentences.
That idea, combined with my recent comic-reading craze, led me to an interesting thought: this is exactly what comics do and probably part of their sudden success back in the day.
Comics don’t use the LitRPG writing conventions (at least, not typically), but they communicate a lot of information to the reader quickly using images instead of prose. That keeps the reader turning the pages and immersed in the story.
But comics aren’t books, and we’re writers, not readers. If you don’t write comics or LitRPG, what does this have to do with you?
Tell, don’t show
Show, don’t tell is a writing rule that I know you’ve all heard at least once before, but more likely a lot more than that. It’s emphasized everywhere, and the reason is good. When you show the reader what’s happening in the story, it’s more immersive and draws the reader into the story world.
But it’s also slow.
It takes a long time to show everything. The story might have to slow down significantly so that the writer can show the reader all the essential information they need to know.
That’s why telling isn’t the sin it’s often made out to be.
Telling your readers necessary information can help them stay immersed in a story by moving the story along faster and getting back to what makes the story interesting as soon as possible.
For instance, if you’re writing a story about fighting an army of alien robots, but the readers need to know how the robots betrayed their masters and conquered their home planet and why they decided to crusade across the galaxy, the readers might check out while you’re showing them this immense history.
If you instead summarize the history and tell the readers, you’ll be able to get back to the story as fast as possible. The readers didn’t come for a history lesson. They came to watch the heroes battle alien robots. So, get to the interesting part as soon as possible.
So, get your story moving. Communicate exposition as quickly as possible, get to the interesting part, and don’t let your readers go.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to subscribe for more articles like this and to receive your free Killstream prequel novella.
For more books, check out my catalog on Amazon and my new sci-fi serial, Ravengard, on Royal Road.
You neeed to use both methods in moderation as you don't always want to lean into telling or showing. It depends on the work the scene is doing and what characters are going through which suits the story at the time. While I love games too, it is a different medium with different storytelling conventions than books, so while it's interesting to pick up on things at the end of the day it is a different way to consume a story and its methods don't exactly translate to writing a book.