Posts belonging to Category Cross-discipline
Posted by Ravyn on November 17, 2011
One of the interesting things about trying to hybridize novel and graphic novel for my NaNo/the Generic Villain project has been determining what to render in words and what to render in pictures. I’d thought originally that most of my content would be writing, like on the blog; certainly, in the prologue, I ignored illustrations [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Concepts, Cross-discipline, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Generic Villain project, NaNoWriMo, Round 2, visuals, writing | 
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Posted by Ravyn on August 17, 2011
I promised earlier this week that I’d talk about how I get from the image in my head through the principles of art to the image I write, when writing action in stories and games.
As with the image composition, I start with the point of focus. Usually this is both a physical point and an [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: composition, Cross-discipline, description, principles of art, role-playing, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 16, 2011
Yesterday, I mentioned the design principles of art, and how I use them to create the mental pictures that I turn into my descriptions. So how do I get from principles to composition, and from there to a picture?
The principle I start with when laying out my mental pictures is always dominance. Where would the [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: composition, description, principles of art, role-playing, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 15, 2011
When I’m trying to get across a piece of imagery, I start with, well, an image. I don’t mean just getting a basic mental picture; I mean taking the time to take that picture and compose it, as if it were a piece of artwork or a short piece of film, then take the important [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: composition, Cross-discipline, description, principles of art, role-playing, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on August 2, 2011
Yesterday I talked about distinctive silhouettes and why they’re important in comics and other visual media. My question, thinking about this, then became “What’s the prose equivalent? How do we manage distinctive silhouettes when we’re limited to words?
The first thing we need to remember is that for the prose silhouette, most aspects of appearance aren’t [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Character image, Characterization, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Art in writing, concepts, Cross-discipline, roleplaying, silhouettes, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on August 1, 2011
One of the panels I attended at Comic-Con was Bryan Tillman talking about character design—or more specifically, visual character design. I came, I saw, and needless to say, I started thinking about how to apply what I’d learned to prose, to the point where I ended up following up on the jokingly oft-repeated exhortation to [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Character image, Characterization, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Art in writing, concepts, Cross-discipline, roleplaying, silhouettes, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on September 20, 2010
You hear a lot about the importance of time management in the real world; you might even use it to make sure that your prep doesn’t take too long, or that your other tasks don’t interfere too much with your creation time. But did you know that time management and motivation can actually help you [...]
Categories: Cross-discipline, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Motivation, Plot, Technique, The Real World |
Tags: Cross-discipline, motivation, real world, role-playing, time management, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on August 11, 2010
What’s the difference between conversation and combat?
I found myself asking that of one of my friends, while thinking about UZ’s recent question on keeping all participants in a conversation involving more than four characters at once. I have difficulty with that sort of thing too, so I didn’t really have too much to fall back [...]
Categories: Concepts, Cross-discipline, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: combat, comparisons, concepts, conversation, group scenes, roleplaying, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 24, 2009
I hadn’t been going to post this one for a while, but then I blundered onto ChattyDM’s riff about managerial skills and GMing, and he asked for it in the comments. Never let it be said that I turn down perfectly good requests.
The fun thing about writing and role-playing is that there’s no field they [...]
Categories: Characterization, Cross-discipline, Description, Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Technique |
Tags: original posts | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on July 20, 2009
One of the best things about writing and gaming is that they take skill synergy like almost nothing else in the world does. No matter what you do or learn, odds are that some part of it can apply to the writing desk or the game table. Sometimes it’s direct, sometimes it’s obvious when you’re [...]
Categories: Biology, Cross-discipline, World-building |
Tags: original posts | No Comments »