Reflection: Kristen Cosby on "Visions"

Editor's Note: For our newly released anthology, The Spirit of Disruption: Selections from The Normal School, we'll be running a series of author reflections excerpted from the book. If you like what you read, you can order the book here. 

Reflection on “Visions” by Kristen Cosby

I wrote the first draft of “Visions” seven years ago. It was my second attempt to write about living aboard my family’s boat. At the time, I was in my late twenties, happily teaching and writing for a small but well-regarded science magazine. Sailing and family were two aspects at which I considered myself a failure and I saw no reason to display myself at my weakest.  Until I wrote this essay, I was a writer who hid her personhood behind her writing. I used esoteric vocabulary and complex syntax to make reading my work more difficult. The production of this essay demonstrated a huge change in my writing process and my willingness and ability to represent my memories without pretty distractions. I’d finally understood the necessity of being vulnerable on the page.

Writing the piece didn’t feel like a calculated strategy. I sat down one morning at my computer and an essay about how living on the water changed my way of seeing the world began to happen. I didn’t understand what the piece was about until long after I’d finished it. I don’t mean to say it was effortless; it required a huge amount of discipline and it pushed the limit of my skills at the time, but it was as if the decision to write about my family-life aboard had been made by someone else. I submitted the essay to The Normal School’s nonfiction contest with much trepidation. At one point, I almost called the editors to withdraw from the contest because I couldn’t stand the idea of showing something so raw.

As with most of my projects, when I came to the end, I felt the work was incomplete. I tinkered with it constantly. That urge to improve and amend the piece did not stop after it was published.  I continued to pursue and grow the piece into a book manuscript, which I am still working on six years after the first appearance of “Visions” in The Normal School. In a manner of speaking, the essay hasn’t ended, it just became much longer. I’m uncertain when it will “end” or whether or not it has, or will ever, succeed in capturing the complexity of a family as crew.

The metaphorical journey of writing this piece, and, by extension, the manuscript that’s emerged out of it, has led me on several very real journeys. The pursuit has taken me to from Pittsburgh to Texas, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Barcelona, Budapest, London, and San Francisco.  It’s caused me sadness, stolen sleep, appetite, and many precious hours with beloveds. And yet, I continue to prize this piece and to enjoy the opportunities it’s afforded me. Whether or not the essay succeeds in displaying how living on the ocean changed my perspective, it gave me the idea for my first book-manuscript and instilled in me new skills and standards for my craft.

Bridging the Gap Between Gameplay and Storytelling: A Normal Interview with Robert Denton Bryant and Keith Giglio

By Christina Legler

In Slay the Dragon, Robert Denton Bryant and Keith Giglio lay to rest a few misconceptions aspiring game writers and players alike often have about game writing: gameplay and narrative, they argue, must work cooperatively in a video game. As Slay the Dragon clarifies, there is a certain gap between these two elements of the video game that gamers do not understand about writing, and writers do not understand about gaming.

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Christina Legler: To start, how did you get into video game writing? I understand that both of you have been involved in film and screenwriting, and you both hold MFAs in film and television. How did your backgrounds and professional experiences lead you to game writing?

Robert Denton Bryant: I’ve actually never held the title “game writer,” although I hope to someday. I've been writing all my life . . .

—that’s what got me interested in screenwriting and filmmaking—but I entered the games industry as a tester and then moved up as a lead tester, quality assurance manager, producer, executive producer, and studio director. Along the way I filled in there and there, worked with developers and writers, and saw that very often game designers have an awkward relationship with narrative. When I hired Keith to write a big virtual world game I was exec producing, we experienced that awkward relationship first-hand. And that gave rise to Slay the Dragon.

Keith Giglio: I went with Bob to E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, one year. The room was filled with monitors displaying the new AAA video games . . .

. . . The “trailers” for these games were fascinating. I was instantly taken with the new arena for narrative storytelling. Years later, during the WGA strike, I needed a job and was lucky to land one working for Bob. My assignment was to help turn a toy company’s intellectual property (toys, dollars) into video game content. It was like putting together a puzzle. I had all these assets (setting and characters) designed, but no story.

CL: In an early chapter of Slay the Dragon, you, Bob, relate a tale of when you had an awesome idea for a He-Man video game while working for Mattel that did not fly because your story idea exceeded programming limitations. How did you both handle this transition into game writing when you realized that the limits of game development affect storytelling?

RDB: I think it was much less about programming limitations; everything I wanted to do in that game was do-able in 3D game engines at the time. The problem was scope (my pitch was epic), and, more specifically, I was much more enamored with telling a story than with creating an experience for the player. I had that humbling moment that every writer has when they start talking to game developers. It’s That Moment When you realize that in a game it’s not the writer’s story that matters; it’s the player’s story.

KG: I like a current trend in movies and television of “breadcrumb” storytelling. The audience has to piece together narrative by things they see or hear in the game narrative. Information is there for you to gather and deduce what the narrative or backstory might be. You can see this type of storytelling cropping up in more Hollywood content. A Quiet Place is basically a survival game. No one is telling us about the aliens, we can figure it out by what we see on the walls. Then of course there is Ready Player One, which feels like a video game come to life. Spielberg really knows how to push the tropes.

CL: Game writing is a collaborative effort, something that we as writers of short stories, novels, essays, and poetry may not understand or like. How does working on a collaborative team of developers and writers for a video game compare to, say, co-writing a book with a friend, such as Slay the Dragon? Where is creativity compromised?

KG: By the designers and game producers who do not involve a game writer early in the process. Look at the new God of War. It was rebooted for story. Video game writers are guns for hire unless they are brand name. Engineers know how to code; animators know how to draw and design and bring sketches to life. These are skills which no writer has. But everyone who works on a game thinks they are a writer, because they have played games. They figure if they can write a sentence, they are writers. Sadly, not true. So creativity is compromised by lack of narrative education on the part of the game makers. Game creators like Ken Levine and David Jaffe are literate in screenwriting and narrative structure. This shows in their creation.  I remember writing something for the toy company and was told that scene didn’t work because the level was already designed and we did not have enough polygons. Polygons? They didn’t have enough story!

CL: And, if I may humbly add to that list of mastermind game creators, Neil Druckmann! If these creative geniuses, who not only develop but write as well, were involved in the process from start to finish, we would end up with games that are a more even mixture of story and gameplay/development. If, of course, story matters to them, or if story is the objective.

RDB: Most definitely. We discuss Neil and [The] Last of Us extensively in the book. It’s funny—I misread the question as “when is creativity compressed.” I think the short answer is that creativity is compromised the moment you ask a third party to mediate between you and the audience whose money you want. If you’re not expecting any money from anyone, ever, you can have virtually unlimited creative freedom. If you can sell directly to your audience, ditto, although you have to be mindful of their expectations if you want them to continue buying your work. But if you want a studio to buy your script, or a publisher to finance and distribute your game, there will be collaboration, and some of it may be brutal. This is not always a bad thing. I think limits and boundaries—set by formats, genres, budgets, partner expectations, audience expectations, or your own eagerness for a challenge—can force any artist to grow creatively by turning them into problem solvers.

CL: I understand that you both teach or have taught game writing at universities. What does such a class entail?

RDB: We got started teaching game writing because of the arguments we would have working on our game together. It was obvious that this creative tension between storytelling and game design was worth exploring in a class. Keith had already been teaching screenwriting through The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, so he suggested we pitch a game writing class so that we could present this problem to students and have them tell us how to resolve it. Students in The Writers’ Program were, typically, writers and not game developers, so we found that we had to spend a little time getting them ramped up on basics of game design. In the same way, when our students are mostly game developers, we have to focus a little more on such writerly topics as characters and story structure. The more writers understand gameplay, and game designers understand the emotional journey of a character, the more involving the games they create will be.

KG: Gamers are the original Netflix “bingers.” The kids who take any video game writing course know every game and game characters. They are a passionate group.

CL: In Slay the Dragon, you explain that story depends upon gameplay rather than the other way around. Do you believe that with games like The Last of Us (which focuses heavily on character and story), storytelling is becoming more important in games than it used to be?

KG: Yes and no. I think sadly games have moved to more cooperative play and less you-are-the-hero games. Also with the rise of mobile gaming, there is little or no room for narrative.

RDB: I think any time you talk about “games” as a monolithic, homogenous medium, you’re in danger of running off the tracks.

CL: Good point, because not all games follow the same formula or fit into one big, encompassing genre.

RDB: Exactly. I get frustrated when folks, even players, make sweeping generalizations about “all games” that would be laughed down if they were similarly broad generalizations about “all movies.” Games are a giant, complex, diverse medium. You can point to tens of thousands of recent, popular, and profitable games in which storytelling occupies a very marginal space, if at all, and that’s okay. There’s not much storytelling in Fortnight’s Battle Royale mode, beyond its crazy Hunger Games-like premise, yet it’s one of the hottest games right now. What’s also clear, though, is that for those players who are looking for involving stories, the number of choices have never been better, ranging from indie games like Firewatch and Kentucky Route Zero to story-driven triple-A games like the new God of War.

CL: I would argue that video games have become more “mainstream” nowadays than they were decades ago. By this, I mean that people who play games now don’t necessarily identify as gamers, but simply as people who occasionally play games. Do you agree with this?

RDB: What we know now about the medium, that it took several generations to understand, is that a substantial number of game players play games for life. When they have kids, they’re more understanding about letting their kids play games themselves. Both daughters and sons—every year, the number of women who play video games gets closer to 50 percent of the total audience. Plus, the fact that in the smartphone era, millions of people have a powerful video game device in their purses or pockets, means that games are available almost anywhere, at any time. We’ve come light years from when we were small kids and you had to go somewhere where there was a food-truck-sized computer, or to an amusement arcade, to play a video game. But I think you need look no further than the fact that lifelong video game player Steven Spielberg just released Ready Player One, with a strong third-act message about putting down the controller. The medium of the video game is absolutely within our cultural mainstream—and has been for some time.

KG: All about the tech. But it’s been a while since World of Warcraft pulled so many people into the world. Interesting, that as mobile games exploded, table-top narrative games have resurged. Dungeons and Dragons? Wizard? Create your own fun.

CL: And now for a sort of meta-question: What do you think about an interview with a game writer, about game writing, in a literary magazine? In what ways do game writing and literary writing intersect or differ?

KG: In literary fiction, a writer can spend many pages getting into the mind of the character, so the reader gains empathy to the character or situation. If you wait that long in video games, you’re going to have a very bored player. Games are more like genre fiction. Every chapter/level ends with a turning point and the narrative surges forward. My favorite book last year was Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders. To me, it was the Citizen Kane of literary fiction. A game changer. Celebrate the differences between all writing platforms.

RDB: I think it’s awesome, and quite humbling, to be talking to you in a literary magazine. If we define literature as “narrative art,” I think it’s very easy to consider the best story-driven games rising to fit that. In the book we point to Bioshock as a prime example of a game that works not only as a harrowing adventure tale, but also as a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between game designer and player. It’s pretty meta itself.

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Robert Denton Bryant is the Director of Video Game Development at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. He has also taught game writing and narrative design at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. He holds an MFA in Cinema-Television Production from the University of Southern California.

Keith Giglio has written and produced for a number of feature films and television movies, from Disney’s Tarzan to A Cinderella Story. Presently, he teaches screenwriting and video game writing at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University in New York. He holds an MFA in Film and Television from New York University.

Christina Legler is a graduate student in Fresno State’s MFA Fiction Program. She has been playing video games since the age of four, when a next-door neighbor made the mistake of allowing her to play Sonic: The Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis.

A Normal Interview with Angela Morales

By Tara Williams

Angela Morales will join us in the summer of 2018 for The Normal School’s Summer Nonfiction Workshop and Publishing Institute, July 16-29, on the Fresno State campus.

In her award-winning collection of memoir essays The Girls in My Town, Angela Morales navigates coming of age in Los Angeles as part of a Mexican-American family. In this interview, the journey continues, from the wild moors of England to life in Los Angeles as a writer, mother, wife, and English professor.

Tara Williams:  If I were your fairy godmother, and I gave you a credit card with no limit that was good for one weekend only, with the conditions being you could go anywhere and do anything for that weekend with two other writers of your choice (past or present, living or dead), where would you go, and who would you take with you? 

Angela Morales:  Where to begin…?  First, I’d narrow down my choices to spending time with dead writers as opposed to living writers because, A. I’d want to take advantage of the magic, and B. My list of living writers is too long. 

That said, I’m taking my credit card and heading to Yorkshire to the home of Charlotte Brontë. She and I will embark on an all-day walk across the moors, and maybe Anne and Emily would join us? After the chilly walk, we’d cozy up by the fire and eat scones with jam, and the sisters would reveal to me all their storytelling secrets.

TW: Okay, I have to ask: why the Brontës? And I have to qualify that by confessing my expectations of romance were hopelessly distorted by reading the Brontës in my adolescence. Recently I watched a new movie adaptation of Wuthering Heights and found myself thinking, Oh my God, Heathcliff was a sociopath! That explains so much! 

AM: Why the Brontës? Well, I have always admired Charlotte Brontë because she wrote her novels in the first person, with a narrator’s voice that I’m almost positive was her own voice, with novels that are very much autobiographical. Her voice is clear, steady, and stubborn. She is realistic and very no-nonsense, but quietly passionate, and I feel that, in this way, we are kindred spirits.

TW: Your credit card isn’t maxed out yet.

AM: Then I’d take the train back to London and find a good happy hour in some pub and buy drinks for Chinua Achebe, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, the Romantic Poets, E.B. White, John Muir, Chris Hitchens, and Flannery O’Connor. Oh wait… I’m only allowed two writers, so I’ll have to stick with the Brontës, I suppose, even though, technically that’s three.

TW: As your fairy godmother, I say if you go to the pub with the Brontës, you’re still technically in compliance with the conditions. And if let me know the name of the London pub where you'll be, I could kind of happen by…

AM: Any English pub will do… the smaller the better, anywhere for a nice brown ale and a baked potato.

TW: I noticed River Teeth, in their write-up for your Literary Nonfiction Prize award, described your “escape” from your parents’ appliance store, wording that also appears on the back-cover copy of the book itself, and it occurs to me to wonder if you feel you have “escaped” the influences of your earlier life. What does writing about your childhood do to the way you remember it?

AM: I’m pretty sure that I will never escape the influences of my early life, nor do I want to escape or deny or forget about those influences, even the painful ones.  I’ve always felt that writing about childhood helps me to understand it better and to make order out of chaos. Maybe I’m a bit of a control freak, but I like to take the pieces of my life, or the memories, and tell the stories in a way that’s as true to memory and fact as possible, but to paint the picture of those stories in a way that finds the beauty and the meaning within them. When I write about a childhood memory, I feel like I’ve dragged it out of a burning house, cleaned off the ashes, dressed it up in its best outfit, and pushed it back out into the world, hoping that someone else will love it as much as I do.

TW: That’s a powerful image. Is there anything you can’t or won’t write about?

AM: If an idea or story appears to me and if it feels important, I hope I would be brave enough not to banish it or suppress it, no matter how embarrassing or personal. Thus far, I haven’t come across any topics that make me feel like I’ve hit that brick wall. In nonfiction, however, writers must always consider the ethics of writing about other people and how those people are portrayed. I think if your intentions are pure (meaning, that you don’t aim to destroy anybody) you can write about living people with respect and goodwill, even if it’s a difficult topic.

TW: In the intro to your book The Girls in My Town, you mention your essays growing from recollected images, such as that of your grandmother dying, which you elaborate on in “Nine Days of Ruth.” It reminded me so much of being with my own grandmother, as a mother myself, during her last days, reading aloud to her from her favorite Psalms. Do you have any further thoughts on the role of faith in parenting, in making sense of life and death?

AM: I am not a religious person, though I find much meaning and comfort in being in the wilderness and living in the world. It’s been very important for me to make sure that my children experience solitude and a kind of “nothingness” when they must “unplug” and sit in the deserts of Death Valley or maybe play on a deserted beach on the Channel Islands for days at time. I believe in God, but I think God is everywhere and that the best I can do for my children is to help them to be more mindful of the world around them. As seagulls are squawking overhead and all around us, we might find a dead seagull and notice how the seagull’s body is being eaten by flies and how the ocean waves are pulling it back to the sea. If my children can contemplate that fact of life and death right before their eyes, I think that reality is more valuable than anything I might say to them. Now that my children are a little older, we can talk about how life is really one big mystery and all we can do is search for meaningful ways to understand it.

TW: It looks as if you have so many events coming up in 2018! You’ll be with us here in Fresno for CSU Summer Arts, you’ll be with River Teeth in June, you have a steady schedule of readings and appearances. How does that busy schedule affect your writing? How do you keep it all balanced?

AM: I’m so excited and honored to participate in all these upcoming events! I’ve felt so grateful for all the positive feedback I’ve gotten on my book over the past year, and I’m still trying figure out how to schedule my life so that I have time to write. I teach full-time at a community college, so I’ve learned, over the past decade, if I want to make time to write, I must claim that writing time, no matter what. I’m trying to think of writing time the way you’d think of exercise—it’s an hour or two that you must take to be a healthier person, whether that means getting up before dawn or staying up into the witching hours. My husband, Patrick, my accomplice, has helped me to sneak away to the library or get back to my office late at night. Last month, I was lucky enough to visit Yaddo, an artists’ colony in upstate New York, for an entire month. I got a ton of work done while I was there, and Patrick made sure that the kids got fed and the dogs got walked. So many people are helping me to keep writing, and for this, I’m so lucky. So far, so good.

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Angela Morales, a graduate of the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program, is the author of The Girls in My Town, a collection of personal essays. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays 2013, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, The Southwest Review, The Los Angeles Review, Arts and Letters, The Baltimore Review, The Pinch, Hobart, River Teeth, Under the Sun, and Puerto del Sol, and The Indianola Review. She is the winner of the River Teeth Book Prize, 2014, and has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell Colony.  Currently she teaches composition and creative writing at Glendale Community College and is working on her second collection of essays. She lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband Patrick and their two children, Mira and Leo.

Tara Williams is an MFA candidate in Fresno State’s Creative Writing Fiction program. She has previously published interviews with Bich Minh Nguyen, Leonard Peltier, Julia Butterfly, and former WIBF world champion boxer Lucia Rijker.

The Long Night by Matt Jones and Jess E. Jelsma

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Jess E. Jelsma is a doctoral candidate of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati and a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA in Creative Writing program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Catapult, Post Road Magazine, The Rumpus, The Normal School, Indiana Review, and various other publications. 

Matt Jones is a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA in Creative Writing program. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Post Road Magazine, Slice Magazine, McSweeney's, Wigleaf, The Journal, and various other publications. 

Photo by Saraia77 on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

A Normal Interview with Dinty W. Moore

By Bonita Hele

Bonita Hele: You’re a busy writer, speaking frequently at workshops and conferences. How do you find your work at conferences and seminars informs your writing?

Dinty W. Moore: I learn a lot from teaching, both in my regular Ohio University faculty position and teaching around the country at various weekend and week-long workshops. Teaching forces you – if you do it right – to articulate what you believe makes for successful writing, and to seek out practical, craft solutions to common narrative concerns. It keeps my mind alert, I think, or hope.

BH: This July, you will be participating in the CSU Summer Arts program, for The Normal School’s Creative Nonfiction Workshop. Are we allowed a sneak preview of topics or themes you’ll be covering? More broadly, do you have a similar approach to workshops you teach, or do you revise your material each time?

DWM: My plan for my workshop is to help participants generate new work, growing out of a series of brief writing based on prompts I will bring along. (I revise the prompts regularly, so we’ll see what new ideas July brings.)

I like to think of the work produced in a generative workshop as seedlings – little sprouting things that the writer takes home and nurtures, discovering eventually whether one or the other will grow into a 1,000-word essay, a 4,000-word essay, or something longer. But the seedlings are there, for whenever the writer finds the time to dive back into the work.

BH: The online nonfiction journal Brevity has been around for roughly 20 years now. How have you found its shape transforming or reforming over that time?

DWM: Brevity began as a home for conventional narrative nonfiction of a very brief nature, but over the years it has expanded – thanks to the submissions that come in – to include lyric essays, experimental essays, ruminative (Montaigne-ish) essays, literary journalistic works, and work that is hard to define but stunning. Of course, we have transformed into something much larger than I ever anticipated as well, with thousands of regular readers spread across the globe. We’ve published work from writers living in India, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Dubai, Malaysia, and Japan. I find all of it – the reach, the success, the level of work – to be staggeringly wonderful.

BH: In an interview with Jenny Patton, you remarked on your fascination with the short form. What is the shortest piece you read that still worked, that drew you in as a reader? Is there such a thing as “too short” in the brief art form?

DWM: I’m going to duck the first question.  There are too many examples of “super short” flash and new ones pop up every day.  But no, I don’t think there is a too short limit. Or if there is, someone will prove it wrong.

BH: I’ve read that between first draft and final publication, your essays go through 40 revisions on average. Do you find that as you have developed the writing craft, you don’t revise as much or as deeply as in earlier writings? I guess another way to put it is, is it easier for you to assay these days, or is it as much a journey now as it has ever been?

DWM: No, I still revise almost as much as I did before. Sometimes I may revise even more, because I’ve set my sights higher. I’m one of those writers who works out what he is trying to say in the process of writing and revising, and refining, and rewording, and redefining, and finding new question to ask somewhere in the middle of the revision process.

BH: What excites you most about your current writing project? Is there anything that frustrates you or that you’re finding an inordinate challenge?

DWM: My current writing project is kicking me in the butt right now. Nothing excites me about it but the prospect that someday the tide will turn and I’ll get the better of the project instead of the project having the better of me.

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Dinty W. Moore is author of The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir; the memoir Between Panic & Desire; and many other books. He has published essays and stories in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Arts & Letters, The Normal School, and elsewhere.

Dinty has won many awards for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. He edits Brevity, an online journal of flash nonfiction, and lives in Athens, Ohio, where he grows heirloom tomatoes and edible dandelions. 

Nonfiction writer Bonita Jewel Hele, a freelance editor for nearly ten years, spends weekday mornings encouraging elementary students to love literature, afternoons as a Graduate Assistant with the Fresno State MFA program, and evenings reading stories to her three children.