In my last post, I defined a scene. Read it now, if you haven’t done so. It gets at the heart of good writing in any genre.

Ready? Strap in, this one’s a rant.

I’ll be honest. While I encounter weak scenes all the time in novels, television, plays, and film, there’s something about immersive entertainment that more often loses sight of what makes a good story.

What’s up with that?

Perhaps creators rarely have backgrounds as writers. Perhaps the creators have to do so much else to mount these insane productions that they forget about the writing part (which by the way… writing should come first. Or you’ll have problems. Just sayin’). But look: I get it. Just making the thing exist requires puzzle/interaction designers, set designers, set builders, software gurus, hardware gurus, electricians, prop fabricators, stage managers/game masters, painters, etc. It’s easy to forget in this avalanche of skills to add a writer to the team at project conception. (But please don’t.)

Perhaps the problem might be that we don’t often have actors (or if we do, not many actors) for whom we can write more traditional scenes. The genre demands non-traditional scene writing. We instead tell stories through environmental engagement, voice overs, video recordings, maybe an actor here and there engaging with the audience. It’s easy to let these scenes fall into the trap of being exposition or world-building, also known as: irredeemably boring. Avoid this trap.

Maybe there’s other reasons. But understanding doesn’t lead to forgiveness. We need to step up our writing game in this industry.

To sum up my thinking on bad writing in the quippiest quip…

Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.

Let’s break it down…

Backstory is not story

What happened before I arrive to the story is not where it’s at, because that’s not where I’m at. Even in a mystery plot, you need stakes in the here and now, a reason that you need to solve the mystery and soon. “The killer is still on the loose—and inside this snowed-in house” sort of stakes.

Backstory is usually the history of the character or the history of the location or any other events that happened before my arrival on the scene. None of these is exciting, because it’s not happening to me, or even in front of me. You want to give players things that they do and things that they see. If you give them things that they learn, they’ll feel more like students back in school.

Worse yet is when backstory isn’t even a discovery point, but told to me at the beginning by a game master. People’s eyes glaze over when you tell them facts, especially when they’re standing on the threshold of an adventure. Reduce the facts, up the surprise.

Never start your experience with backstory monologues. I recommend crafting an inciting incident in lieu of backstory. Move the past to the present as much as you can. If something bad happened to require the adventure, can players experience that bad thing, rather than being told about that bad thing?

With an inciting incident, you’ll probably discover you can get by with less backstory. Consider too if any remaining backstory may have a greater impact in the middle of the story, rather than at the crucial beginning, when we risk losing people forever.

Think about the story you want your audience to tell to their friends who weren’t there. The best stories will have them using the personal pronoun “I” or “we.”

“And then we caught her lying to us.” “And then we powered up the ship.” “And then we forged the will.”

VERSUS

“And then we read about the maid being unhappy.” “And then we learned why the pirate buried the treasure.” “And then we watched a video about the war between the Snarlofs and Boogatons.”

Let your audience be the subject and give them the very best verbs.

The temptation to write stories that only reveal “what happened here” is strong in immersive theatre and escape rooms, I think because they don’t require a character present, and it’s a very easy way to link puzzles and narrative together, with every engagement uncovering secrets of the past. But these stories only exist in the past. Avoid them. What’s happening now is the story. Write for the here and now.

Backstory is not story.

Gossip is not Drama

Discovering gossip about characters is not inherently exciting. I see a lot of gossip in environmental story-telling experiences, where I learn character details and scandals of their secret lives. But if that does no work in the story, it’s just gossip. It’s a dead fact. You can have “nice to know” bits, but if your entire experience is only “nice to know,” then you have no story.

Say I learn that Sandy is secretly dating Andy. Cool, cool. How does that change what I want? Does that change what they want?

Put that gossip to dramatic use in a scene where: people want things, but then the truth is revealed, and the revelation thwarts someone. That’s how you make a big reveal.

I hold Sleep No More as an example of using details in sets and scenes as plot support and not gossip. If you see what Malcolm types on the typewriter, or what he keeps in the drawer, or what’s depicted in that photograph he just found, you’ll learn about what’s happening in the story.

Meow Wolf’s installations are most often not a good example of this. Sorry, no, I’m not going to visit a second time just because I didn’t read all the diary entries on that computer.

Gossip is not drama.

Information is not interesting

World-building gets wayyyyy too much love. Maybe because of the cultural impact of super-franchises like Marvel and Harry Potter, where the worlds run deep, people think it’s a marker of top-tier writing. But no one memorized the ship names in Star Wars until they fell in love with the movies.

You shouldn’t skip world-building, but it’s not the heart of the matter. I do not care about the metaphysical underpinnings for the pseudo-technology, nor about what happened on this planet 100 years ago. Unless you connect those facts to my objective (or another character’s objective), I do not care.

World-building fleshes things out, but scenes are what matter. And if you trot out your world-building, it’ll be about as exciting as backstory. It’s information without stakes.

And like backstory, not a breath should be wasted explaining your world to the audience. They must discover your clever little details on their own.

I speak from experience. In The Man From Beyond, the ghost has power through electrical currents, so everything it touches in the game has burn marks on it, and intense electrical sound effects accompany the ghost’s actions. We never point this out to the audience, though; we leave it to them to notice or not.

I also speak from future experience: we could spend two minutes in the upcoming Lucidity show explaining the neuroscience behind Dr. Newmark’s break-through technology that supports group-wide guaranteed lucid dreaming. But we won’t. We didn’t even write a first draft with that in. It’s boring. Nobody but the geekiest of Lore Boys care.

Don’t write for Lore Boys.

There will undoubtedly be information the players need to know. Divide up your world facts into need to know and nice to know. Embed nice to know as environmental discoveries for solo explorers. Embed your need to know information in bookend or bottlenecked scenes where everyone has something at stake.

Yep, even with need-to-know facts, we need to care, or we’ll tune out. Make opening scenes raise questions that are only answered later via dramatized exposition. Make the facts matter to character objectives. Exposition goes down easier when it comes with a good helping of drama: desire, conflict, surprise, change.

Oh my, I seem to have discovered this bureaucrat secretly worships a demon! Cool, cool. How does that impact what the character wants, or what I want? Does my team need to be super quiet now because Baphomet is always listening?

Make it matter. And please. Resist the temptation to tell me all about the demonology.

Information is not interesting.

Writing is not facts

When writing your experiences (ideally at the start of project conception), remember the difference between writing that matters and writing that just… exists.

Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.

Just because you have words doesn’t mean they do any work.

Scenes are the most powerful tool at your disposal and will be what people remember best. Create moments that thwart your players and characters, or that produce irrevocable change.

Start always with what happens to the audience in the here and now. Give them a narrative they want to tell afterwards… and you may not spend a penny on marketing ever again.

End rant.