5 Tips on Writing With: Kurt McClung
I consider myself a writer, though I have been called many other terrifying things: game writer, lead writer, comic book writer, screenwriter, interactive writer, world designer, narrative designer, dialogue editor, creative producer and script doctor to list the most frequent.
They all called upon the same artisanal writing skills that I have been honing over time with each job. I needed to develop my skills, but the ink was those life taught lessons on empathy, generosity, honesty and humility. They have become my signature.
I started over twenty years ago translating the KJC play-by-mail game Quest from English to French, back when I barely spoke French.
That led me into launching other small game and book studios to develop and publish original Table-Top RPG’s, collectible card games, wargames, board games, and choose your own adventure children’s books.
After I sold one of those studios to Humanoids, the owner, Fabrice Giger, told me that he thought I might actually be a better writer than a creative producer. It was my call to adventure.
I worked two years with Alejandro Jodorowsky, incredible illustrators and an amazing writing team to create a Table-Top RPG of The Metabarons and The Incal sci-fi universe that we published in French and English with Yeti and West End Games.
During that time I also wrote a comic book series for Humanoids called Dragonseed and some short stories for Metal Hurlant. That got me a call from Ubisoft to come and work on the world reboot of the Might & Magic IP. Erwan Le Breton, the Creative Director, wanted to create a Pantheon of Dragon Gods and a world with legs to other media.
The entertainment industry had yet to invent the term transmedia. That M&M world bible, penned with some great writers of the time including Richard Dansky and Jeff Spock, went on to serve as the basis for well over a dozen video games, many of which I oversaw as the Lead Writer.
Since then I’ve worked for nearly 100 IPs for 50 studios, most of them original creations, alongside some brilliant and courageous creative minds.
You’ll find my work in Ravenswatch, Curse of the Dead Gods, Tiger Blade, Greedfall, The Surge, Vampyr, Mars: Warlogs, Might & Magic, Ghost Recon, Skull & Bones, Remember Me, Flashback and Amy to name a few, working alongside iconic talent such as Jeff Lindsay, Jehanne Rousseau, Paul Cuisset, Stephane Beauverger, Adrien Crochet, Simon Mackenzie, Stephen Rhodes, Kallie Frances, Mateo Guerrero, David Gallaher, Christopher Morrison, Lewis Manalo, Emil Daubon, Christopher Hatton and of course, Jodo.
Forgive me all you other friends of the pen I’ve forgotten to mention. I’ve never regretted working on any project. In this business you never lose, you win or you learn.
I’ve co-founded some brave studios, notably Hawkswell, Goldilocks, Open Sesame Games and Taliespin, who each strive to this day in their own way to forge cultural artifacts in interactive and linear media.
I continue to write comics, and am working on one now with Noemi Tedeschi which will come out this year, and of late have been working on movie scripts and TV series, with Cinevilla Studios and the film director Andrejs Ekis.
I also give master classes in writing and transmedia strategy, and have taught in Singapore and France at the university level for ISART and Georges Méliès.
All in all, like all of you reading this post, I am just a writer, with something urgent to say and my own way of saying it.
Hooking Your Audience
Make sure you can trace the origin of your hooks to something you experienced for real. I call hooks “points of attack”. I use my personal memories – like a song writer writing a song about a break-up. Or a poet writing about death.
If you don’t use real memories, your story always seems to sound like a cliché from a marketing campaign. We can all channel an advertising copywriter. Hell, I’ve even been one.
Only real memories lived by real people resonate through the din, no matter how “creative” or “original” you think your cool idea is. In fact, the only thing original in a hook is that you yourself lived it. You are your only originality meter stick.
If you’re courageous and honest enough to go back in time, you can now bring out the emotion of that real moment in a fictional setting. It’s easier said than done.
You have to be willing to look at your past and encourage your co-writers to draw upon those wells of pain and pleasure that the less generous want to keep to themselves. Here is an example.
Let’s say you have to write a scene about someone walking into a bar to pick up a “package”. They don’t know what it is, but need to deliver it to someone shady, and suspect that it might not be legal.
You can “borrow” from any amount of movies or video games, and just spit out the texts. OR – you could actually become a drug dealer, which I do not recommend. OR – you could think back to a time in your life that reminds you of a similar emotional situation. Dig deep and take some time.
I just found a memory when writing this. As part of my daily childhood summer routine, I would walk to the gas station and buy cigarettes for my dad, back when kids still could buy cigarettes for their dads. The deal was that I got to use the “dime in change” to buy a pack of baseball cards, that I would share with my little brother.
Suddenly a lot of feelings rush into my mind – the pride my dad felt at me following in his baseball card footsteps. My brother and I collecting Cubbie cards. The smell of that gas station, tires and treaded down oil. Dad didn’t think for a second that he might be conditioning me to become a smoker, and neither did I. We were just doing something father-and-son-ish. The positive emotions come from my nostalgia.
Now, if I apply that memory to a “drug deal” scene, imagine someone walking into a bar to pick up a package, they are happy because my character steals two of the beer coasters. Maybe his brother collects them, too. He’s excited because he didn’t have this one yet. Believe me, this scene, if written cleverly, will start to feel real because a part of it actually is.
There is a scene in Bladerunner 2 that illustrates this technique perfectly, where the dream maker can tell the difference between a real memory and an imagined one. Try it. Hook your audience with real experiences painted in your imaginary world. Your point of attack could be inspired from a breakfast memory or a wedding joke told by a drunk uncle. It will resonate and hook people if it feels honestly real.
Mastering Plot Development
Plot is the meta-story, the intrigue, the clothesline holding up all the desires thwarted during your characters’ journey. The plot is what drives the main character from one moment to the next. It should be able to stand alone in my humble experience as a story.
Character Arcs are a second layer in my working experience, whose own beats are pushed by the plot meta-story. I have stopped trying to make character arcs push the plot. I get lost quickly trying to stick square pegs into round wholes.
To keep this tip really simple, just make sure that your reader, viewer or player always knows what the people on the screen want. They probably won’t know what they truly need until the end, but we should always know what they want now, what they think they need to solve their problem or attain their objective.
Good plots are an evolving Christmas list of the main characters rifling from one persuasive strategy to the next to get what they have set their sights on. If a scene isn’t serving this chain of delicious delusions then cut it. It doesn’t belong to your plot.
If it ever feels like your character is becoming the victim of your story, and things just happen to them, no matter how spectacular, that were not consequences of decisions they have made during the story, then your plot needs development.
This is true for movies and TV, comics and novels, and especially for video games. In video games you are playing the main character, and who wants to be the victim of a story where every action has no purpose.
What works for me when developing a plot is figuring out at the moment of the catalyst in ACT I what decision the main character makes to go on this journey.
It’s the old school “accepting the call”. It’s your most important beat other than maybe the beat where the character figures out what they want isn’t what they need, what John Truby calls the Epiphany.
If I don’t believe that the main character got themselves into your story, no matter how talented your prose, your public will always have the subconscious feeling that this is more a cautionary news story than an inspiring tale to be shared with others.
Effective World-Building Strategies
I truly recommend designing your fictional world as a metaphor for a real world question. Try to boil it down to one question and only one philosophical question. The most credible and coherent fictional worlds in my humble opinion are narrative frameworks for real world debates.
This is true in Science Fiction, Fantasy, Societal Drama, Crime and Westerns. It’s true in everything. Worlds that garner fans can of course eventually start treating other real world problems, but it is important to remember that a world is not an opinion. It’s not rhetorical. It’s by nature dialectical. It should spark a debate.
If you look at Dune, it asks the big question “Which came first, humans or their gods?” Is Paul Maud’dib made by the Bene Gesserit or his own decisions is just a facet of this question? Everything else treated hinges on that debate, from the tech, the spice to the casts and families.
If you look at The Lord of the Rings, it asks the question, “What is the true stuff of heroes?” Everything in this opus, including Tolkien’s desire to bring back Germanic heroic archetypes to a culture “cleansed” by the Roman Empire, is framed by this question. One could argue that Indiana Jones asks the question, “Should all artifacts be in museums?”. Whatever your question, your world’s job is to frame that debate.
Ask yourself what question your world is framing, and then use that question to set up an ethical debate. Frame your message as a question, but give it as many answers as you can, and let the audience come up with even more.
Factions can be built to represent a thesis and their enemy the antithesis, character classes make a point and their rival the counter point. It helps if you don’t have a definitive answer to your question when starting your world building journey.
That’s the whole point of a good world, to figure out why the question is so troublesome that you decided to build a universe to explore it.
I believe that the best fictional worlds help us develop critical thinking on modern subjects of vital importance. All artistic media in every medium should make us think, if they are telling us what to think, then they are propaganda.
Pull up a painting by Waterhouse or a poster by Mucha. Listen to an opera by Mozart or Wagner. They were not asking the same questions, and they make us think about different things.
Modern digital media has so much potential to help us learn to think for ourselves. Your world can be a debate, and if you treat it like one, people will come.
Techniques for Character Development
All characters are on journeys from birth until their death. Remember that your story is just a snapshot of them getting from point J to point K, in happy movies from a bad letter to a better letter. Not all of your characters will fully arc in your story and they shouldn’t unless you’ve got a lot of pages or screen time to make that happen.
But, if my main character figures something out, the other main characters will likely figure something out as well, or falter and remain stagnant on their life path. When developing your character, figure out what kind of people they need to meet to force them to change their point of view.
What they need to learn is easy, finding the life mentor, bitter rival, deadly enemy, or household pet that can teach them is the hard part. Once you find those characters, your character stories will start to fight for time within your plot. And that’s when the fun begins.
A last bit that helped me from Spielberg, and this is a butchered paraphrase that serves my point. “Good stories don’t have beginnings, middles and ends. They have beginnings and endings that keep on beginning.”
What the important takeaway for me is that once your character gets to K, now, finally, they can start a journey on their way to L and M, and N… There is an underlying rhetoric in this theory, you believe that people can actually change and have agency to make their lives better.
Crafting Meaningful Decisions
All choices are meaningful, but they say different things. That’s what the interactive writer needs to keep in mind.
In the hierarchy of meaningful choices the lowest form is a random choice which tells us that life is random, the second form is a Sophie’s Choice, by that meaning two tragic answers which tells us that life sucks and then you die, and the third form, which I believe is the highest, is choice that helps us form an opinion as we see the story evolve.
Interactive writers need to know the procedural rhetoric behind the kind of choice they put in front of players, because it is telling them how you believe life works.
Either you think we do have free will and our choices lead to consequences of our own design, or you believe that choice is an illusion and that all roads lead to a random destination, heaven or hell. This debate is not new. Fate, predestination, destiny, bad luck, good luck, they are all part of the choice is an illusion school. While stories about people changing perspectives, which leads to changes in their friends’ lives and world environments, have been winning out in popularity ever since Don Quixote.
So, whenever you give people a choice in a game narrative, keep that in mind. All choices have meaning, and what do you mean by the type of question you’re proposing.
In Bandersnatch the dad out and out says that choice doesn’t matter when he asks which cereal his son wants to eat. From that point on, none of the story’s choices have real consequences, the main character always ends up the victim of a dark vision of reality.
I personally was disappointed, but that was the writer’s point of view on life I suppose. In The Last of Us the story sets up and showcases a choice a grieving father will make when confronted with the sacrifice of an adopted child.
We, the player, do not get to make that choice, but we do understand why it was made. Even though we are surprised – the choices in the movie were desperate and in the end it’s the only choice we really have other than just trying to survive.
In the movie, Sophie’s Choice, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. A woman is asked to choose whether her daughter or her son will be killed. It takes a whole movie for her to learn that the choice was never really her choice at all.
The German officer had created the “meaningful choice” that had no right answer. He was responsible, and I believe we are like that German Officer when given those kinds of choices to our player.
There is a similar situation in No Country for Old Men at the end of the movie when the sociopath anti-hero gives a woman a chance to survive if she guesses right on a heads or tails coinflip.
The woman’s only agency in her own mind is to refuse to choose. She throws the question back to the killer, saying, “This isn’t my choice, this is yours, to klll me or not.”
The coin flip is the killer’s vision of how the world works and the woman refuses it, making us all ask the question, which one of them is right.
We really need to understand what we’re trying to say. InXile is a master at this sort of narrative situation, and I hate to extrapolate their internal bleak view of the future of human civilization, but they do help us develop our critical thinking.
And finally, there are meaningful questions that will lead you to winning an NPC’s heart or their eternal hatred, damning one civilization and saving another, making you wealthy or making you wise.
And there are questions that we can learn from when we start over and play again in order to get to the “good” ending. This is truly up to you to decide and it depends on your worldview and how you illustrate that in the world you’re developing.
I like to think that Frodo and Sam saved their Middle Earth because they made a choice earlier in their arduous journey not to kill Golem.
For me, corruption is not a one-time thing, it’s a series of choices that lead to a happy or sad ending, that again, is just another beginning. But then again, that’s the kind of meaningful choices I like to play.
What are your strengths in writing and narrative design?
I’m a structure specialist and world architect. I’m good at figuring out the world metaphor and what sort of meta-stories will best leverage its philosophical conflicts.
I’m also pretty good at helping teams align around a common world vision. I draw-up a lot of one-page story graphs and world maps. I write summaries before treatments and treatments before scripts. I also love to write dialogue, but it is a domain which I believe I still have much to learn.
I still get nervous every time I sign up to work with better writers, I feel like I’m a novice when I discover their talent live in the trenches. Then again, that may actually be my biggest strength. I’ve never been afraid to work with people better than me at anything, and in fact, even though it scares me, I crave it.
Which games or stories have you worked on?
There are quite a few, but then again I’ve been around a while.
You can check the official ones here on mobygames.com. Kurt Mobygames OR Kurt McClung IMDB
I’ve also written some comic books, press and am working on films that should start coming out next year! I probably should write down some day all I’ve worked on.
But the most important thing that I have learned in all this is write anything and everything that pays you something, even if it’s very little. AND everything you write, treat it like you’re writing it for a million dollars.
Never submit work that you believe is mediocre or simply “worth what they’re paying”. In videogames in particular, you are not only the writer, you are often the editor and sometimes the story’s only real critic before publication.
As Hemingway once quipped, you need to have a good built-in, shock-proof shit detector. I think I’ve spent most of my career humbly improving that internal machine. Be your own worst critic, still get the job done on time, make sure they pay you something, even if its dinner and a song.
Exploring Favorites
That’s a meaningful question if there ever was one. I’ll be honest and say that the movie Ground Hog’s Day just barely wins out over some of the older Heroes of Might & Magic stories that inspired me, and my go to Capra movie, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Ground Hog’s Day is all about the choices we make every day. I always strive to make games with as many meaningful choices that are made on Bill Murray’s journey in this amazing film. He finally gets that what he wants is not what he needs, and then discovers a whole new meaningful world. I’ll cheat and talk about It’s a Wonderful Life, too.
I like it for similar reasons, but also because you really get a chance to see two versions of the same world, and the impact all simple Jimmy Stewart’s choices have on it. Even the smallest decisions have the greatest impact.
I loved the Heroes stories for different reasons, because they sparked my imagination and gave me one version of a Ranger’s, a Knight’s or a Nercomancer’s story that I could replay and replay and imagine a hundred more. I believe they were my first encounter with the phenomenon of emergent storytelling. They made me want to write for games.
A Wish for Interactive Audio Stories
I have tons of ideas for audio stories and in my master classes, the final project for my students, is to imagine an audio only interactive game. It’s a brilliant medium that I am eager to see evolve.
The game I believe could really benefit from interactive audio stories would be murder mysteries – such as Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie stories.
Though I think the settings could be changed to accommodate a character with visual impairment as the main character, and tested by players who are sight-impaired.
The story would be about something that challenges our belief that someone with a handicap is less intelligent or capable than someone with “all their senses”. It’s one idea, but the possibilities are endless. My students have had dozens of good ideas if you ever want to meet them.
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