Part 3 of 3, by David Gaider

Allow me to say a word about editing.

It is one thing to sit down and actually write a novel itself, and I think for many people their idea of how much work that encompasses ends there. You have pages and pages that need to be filled up with words. Tough stuff. That’s usually what people ask me first – how did you get through it? How did you fill up all those pages? The answer’s a bit pat: you just do. Seriously, you just do.

In fact, if I could offer any piece of advice to anyone struggling to complete their own piece of writing out there, it would be not to get caught up being a perfectionist. If you spend all that time making sure that every single page is a perfect little snowflake then you will simply never finish. You have to accept that some parts are going to be golden and some parts are going to be rough. Smoothing things out is what editing is for.

Which was an interesting process for me, and a rather fascinating one as going in I really didn’t know what to expect. I kind of imagined this ogre who would take my manuscript and send it back to me with entire chapters gutted, big red marks through everything and orders to change half the story. Yikes! Talk about feeling trepidatious. It turned out, however, that the editing process was much more collaborative than I thought it would be.

I had two editors, my regular editor and my copy editor. The regular editor was the person I worked with directly. She dealt both with larger story issues – are characters being developed well? Do the story arcs make sense? Does it flow well overall? – as well as smaller questions of continuity and grammar. Maybe not every editor works this way, I can’t really say just from the one experience, but certainly in this case it was much more a case of having a sensible second opinion, someone with a good eye. You can bounce ideas off your friends, and some of them will be fantastic editors and brainstormers both… but even the most well-meaning friend will eventually get glassy-eyed after the second hour of you talking about your book. They have their own stuff to do, and no matter how much they’d like to they really can’t spend all their time tracking down every last issue in your book and telling you so. An editor, however, gets paid to do that. They’re right in there with you (at least once you’re done the writing; you’ll need to get your own cheerleaders for writing the manuscript itself).

The copy editor, meanwhile, was the person who checked things like spelling and punctuation and even more grammar… and who looked for “echoes”. Echoes are words are phrases that you repeat too often, either too often throughout the entire manuscript or in too close a proximity to each other. Let me tell you, getting your manuscript back with all your echoes nicely highlighted in purple with a little tag next to it going “you might want to vary some of these” is a humbling experience. I had no idea I used some of those words that often. With the highlighting it became obvious that every character in my book was constantly spitting, glaring and clenching their teeth. They exchanged looks, glared, growled and even snarled – sometimes multiple times on the same page.

I also used the words “obviously”, “simply”, “attempted” and “began to” so often it was embarrassing, especially since many of those uses could simply be deleted without changing what I was trying to say. I padded my text. I used passive voice. I thought I knew these things and avoided them as a rule, but clearly I did not and I really had no clue that I did not.

So, wow. It was a good experience, I think, as both editors gave me a lot to think about. They worked with me to pound the book into much better shape, and I think overall it has made me a better writer. Every writer should go through that. I could easily imagine how an editor experience could also be bad, mind you, and I have little doubt there are plenty of horror stories to be found – but this one was fantastic.

I’m eager for people to see the final product. I’m eager at the idea that, for some people at least, their first dip into Thedas will be this novel. That’s an exciting thought. I’d love to go on about the whys and wherefores of the plot itself, but I suppose that will have to wait. Now I just get to cover my eyes and have an anxiety attack as the novel goes out there to be torn apart or adored as people will do.

Yikes. I suppose when Dragon Age: Origins itself goes out it will feel similar. Every game does (and Baldur’s Gate 2 will always be my first), but at least there I get to share my anxiety with the rest of the team – who I should thank, incidentally. There’s a lot of people I could thank for making the novel possible, but the Dragon Age team helped breathe the life into this world. I didn’t do it on my own. They made my job that much easier, as I didn’t have to work quite so hard to imagine what I was putting down on paper.

That will make the waiting a little easier to bear, I think.

David Gaider wisely prepared for a career in the games industry by first suffering from terminal boredom as a hotel manager. During that time he gamed as much with his friends as he could, and that paid off with a sweet little job writing for a company he’d never heard of before on a sequel to a computer game he’d never played. “It’ll last a few years, I guess,” he thought. Nine years later he is still at the same company, working as the Lead Writer on Dragon Age: Origins. Who knew?

Part 2 of 3, by David Gaider

So I had accepted the task of writing the Dragon Age novel. Or the first Dragon Age novel, if one chooses to be optimistic. Which I usually don’t. I’m not a very optimistic person, generally speaking… which rather puts this whole undertaking into question, doesn’t it? But we’ll ignore that for now. I was given a deadline. I’m good with deadlines. I respond well to them. It’s my Austrian blood, I think. Guilt and panic are the only motivations that will get me going, most days. Well, that and schnitzel.

There are obstacles that needed to be overcome prior to beginning work on this novel. One such was the fact that I wouldn’t be working for BioWare when I wrote it. I would be working for the publisher. The publisher had expressed interest and went so far as to ask BioWare if they had any writers hanging about who might be interested in the work – cut to me jumping up and down going “Me! Me! Me!” in the background – but it was made very clear by my bosses: work on the book was separate from work on the game. “Go home and write. Here you… well, you write. But you write for the game.”

There was, after all, this whole game thing I had going on the side. You may have heard of it. We were starting into some periods of mild crunch as well (mild at the time) that would make writing a novel in my downtime an interesting proposition. Interesting in the way that said downtime would not exist to any large degree.

There was also another issue. The novel needed to serve two mistresses, as it were. Obviously it needed to be awesome in and of its own right – and awesome is a fine mistress to serve, let me tell you. She’s got these leather boots that go all the way up there and a riding crop and everything. But there was also the fact that this story needed to introduce the Dragon Age setting. It needed to touch on all the important points, as most readers would be completely unfamiliar with any of them. And while the mistress of setting introduction and the mistress of awesome are not completely incompatible, they do tend to stare uncomfortably at each other from across the room. Like maybe they’re all legs and they’re worried they’re just going to get in each other’s way. You reassure them, you pat them on their leather gloves and coo softly but still they’re dubious. (See? Good word.)

I suppose there’s also the problem that I’d never actually written a novel before, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Heck, if I was daunted by a lack of actual qualifications, I wouldn’t be working at Bioware at all. I figure I wrote about half a million words of dialogue on Baldur’s Gate 2 alone, so the way I see it I’m due for a little narrative.

The first obstacle was easy enough to overcome. In concept. I would work in my office, sitting at my little computer typing away all day… and when the time came to go home I would do so. Quickly. And work in my office at home, doing exactly the same thing. Normally I had time for dinner. On crunch days I had fifteen minutes, tops. I did say the deadline was pretty tight, no? If I made my quota each week I allowed myself to take the weekend off. If I didn’t, I worked. And there’s really nothing more I can say about that (although I could probably write an entire dissertation on ‘Things That Will Distract You, Like Browsing the Internet’).

As for the second obstacle… that was a bit trickier. I had to list the elements I needed to touch on. Religion. Elves. Dwarves. Darkspawn. Magic. Ferelden. Umm… yeah. I suppose I could write a plot that conveniently visited each important topic in succession in David Eddings fashion (“Look! This chapter has brought us the land of Religia! Where everyone is extremely religious! Next chapter we shall voyage to Elvia!”) or I could… do something else. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I liked David Eddings and all when I read him the first time. I just wanted to be a little less deliberate. Or try. Or maybe try to try.

I decided on a prequel. We had identified years ago that there was an excellent untold story to be found in the Ferelden rebellion against Orlais. It’s referred to many times in the course of the game, but there was a lot more that could be said about it. It was a great tale. Check one mistress, right? This was before Drew had even written his (most excellent) Mass Effect prequel, so we thought we were being all innovative and stuff. Ooo prequel! At any rate, I still thought it was a good idea. I put together an outline that touched on all those world elements to at least a degree and explained in detail what would happen in each chapter and then submitted it. Surely they wouldn’t like it, right? What are the odds?

But they did. Huh. Go figure.

Now I just had to write the damned thing.
David Gaider wisely prepared for a career in the games industry by first suffering from terminal boredom as a hotel manager. During that time he gamed as much with his friends as he could, and that paid off with a sweet little job writing for a company he’d never heard of before on a sequel to a computer game he’d never played. “It’ll last a few years, I guess,” he thought. Nine years later he is still at the same company, working as the Lead Writer on Dragon Age: Origins. Who knew?

Part 1 of 3, by David Gaider

I am rather fond of the word “dubious”.

When you’re going through every single spoken line of a very large game and writing instructions for how the voice actor is meant to speak that line, sometimes you have to get a little creative. It isn’t enough that someone act simply “angry” or “sad”… the actors require some nuance, some context. They need to know if their character believes what they’re saying, or if they like the person they’re talking to, or if they’re muttering something to themselves as opposed to shouting out to a crowd of hundreds. In game writing you learn very quickly that you need to communicate with exact language for this purpose, lest the audio director get tired of compensating for your lazy butt and starts having everyone read their lines as if they’re onto their third Prozac of the afternoon.

Me, I like “dubious”. It’s an uncommon enough word that the actor reads it and is still puzzling out its exact meaning as he reads his first take. Hence the slight confusion in his voice and voila! Very dubious.

It also helps break up the endless string of “sarcastic” notations I am forced to write, until finally I am faced with the self-realization that some of my characters really need to mix it up a little. One of my tech designers commented to me the other day that a character I wrote was really sarcastic.

“She’s supposed to be sexy,” he said, “but really she’s just sarcastic. Everything she says is pure sarcasm. Was that on purpose?”

“Maybe,” I said dubiously, suddenly wondering if “dubious” meant what I thought it did. I am easily distracted, it appears. “Thanks for your amazing insight,” I replied. “I’ll be sure to run future characters I run by you for a quick check, just to be safe.” I was bitter inside, however. I think he saw through me.

Dubious was also how I felt when the prospect of writing the Dragon Age novel came up. (See what I did there? Nifty, huh?) As I have said many times on our forums, writing prose is not the same as writing for a game. Unless you’re writing Planescape: Torment (here we pause for a moment as I place hand over heart and sigh, ever so regretfully) you just aren’t going to have access to narrative. You’re not going to be able to peek inside the protagonist’s head. Even then, games require that the story be flexible. Even if you know exactly who your protagonist is, you’re not always going to be able to control where he is at what time. You don’t know the order in which he’ll experience events. Most of all you don’t know what his reaction to those events will be.

Not that this is a deal-breaker, per se. It’s just that writing for one or the other involves a very different skill set. You can be an excellent author and yet never quite wrap your brain around the multiple paths required for branching dialogue. It’s true! It might be odd but I’ve always found one of the best qualifications for a game writer is someone who’s spent lots of time as a tabletop gamemaster. You think on your feet, and learn to accommodate the player while simultaneously guiding them. Too far in either direction, however, and you’re screwed.

Yet I digress. I’ve always thought that the reverse must also be true: having lots of experience writing games is probably not going to make you a better prose writer. So the fact that I’ve written games for almost ten years, now, hardly made me qualified to write a novel (aside from those early High School attempts which are better off staying in the drawer where they are currently collecting dust).

But Dragon Age was my baby. I was the one who first formed the world. With direction, sure, but beyond that it was my vision. My footprints are everywhere. I’ve watched it grow, cringed as other hands touched it and tweaked it and sometimes I was even amazed as something I’d barely considered had life breathed into it and became something better than I’d ever hoped it could be. But suddenly there was the suggestion that maybe someone could write a novel, something that for many would be their first look at that world, their first dip into the dark and epic swimming pool that is Dragon Age.

What would you do? I said give me that bad boy and clutched my baby to my chest like an overprotective gorilla. Or so I’m told. I wasn’t to become truly dubious, however, until – rather like changing one’s first diaper – I began to consider just what this baby was about to get me into.

David Gaider wisely prepared for a career in the games industry by first suffering from terminal boredom as a hotel manager. During that time he gamed as much with his friends as he could, and that paid off with a sweet little job writing for a company he’d never heard of before on a sequel to a computer game he’d never played. “It’ll last a few years, I guess,” he thought. Nine years later he is still at the same company, working as the Lead Writer on Dragon Age: Origins. Who knew?