Posts belonging to Category Cross-discipline
Posted by Ravyn on August 9, 2012
Originally published on November 24, 2009. Blame the server issues.
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 [...]
Categories: Characterization, Cross-discipline, Description, Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, Cross-discipline, neuromarketing, roleplaying, writing | 
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Posted by Ravyn on May 9, 2012
The biggest challenge in writing dialogue, I think, isn’t necessarily actually writing good dialogue. Most of us can find examples of snappy one-liners or decent conversations. The problem, instead, is making sure that the dialogue doesn’t yawn and swallow the rest of the scene, leaving us with a couple of characters talking in what for [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Cross-discipline, Description, Dialogue, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: comic method, dialogue, narrative beats, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 25, 2012
I come from a household that does videogames; my boyfriend and I have practically made a sport of watching each other play. We’ve gone through a number of titles, from which I’ve drawn loads of interesting conclusions, and while we don’t necessarily play the same things, in the end our tastes are pretty similar—except for [...]
Categories: Concepts, Cross-discipline, Technique, The Real World |
Tags: concepts, illusion of control, real world, Skyrim, videogames | 1 Comment »
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 | No Comments »
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 | 3 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 »