Some have said that 'Frankenstein' is a story of a bad parenting giving rise to a troubled child.
Dave Morris
Back in the early 1970s, what got me and another 400,000 kids out of bed without needing to be called twice was the latest issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.
People nowadays think of gamebooks as rather old hat - and, after all, it was twenty years ago. In their heyday, though, they were a phenomenon, selling upwards of a hundred thousand units per title. And it's not as old hat as you might think: the same design skills I used in those days apply equally when I'm creating modern videogames.
Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.
Readers prefer a world they can relate to.
It is easy to force a reader or viewer to interact. The trick is in making them want to interact, and in letting the story unfold hand-in-hand with that.
There is a great insatiable hunger for good stories throughout the media.
Interactive storytelling emphasizes a personal connection with the characters. It is a powerful tool that can draw you so deeply into the world of a story that you lose sight of it as a story. You think you are there - at least, if it is done right.
Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.
One of the gamebook series I created, 'Fabled Lands', is also the name of my company, and the reason we named the company after it is that it was pretty revolutionary for its time.
A new medium always has a period when it is struggling inside the confining box of an earlier medium. Creators have to unlearn what they knew before they can see the fresh, uncharted vistas stretching before them.
When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.
When I mention that I'm a game designer as well as a writer, someone will nod and say, 'Ah, that's what we like about your script. The videogame feel.'
When a medium like games or comic books whips up such a rapture of enthusiasm, naturally we look for lessons we should be learning.
'Breaking Bad' and 'The Shield' were planned right from the start so that their narrative trajectory would come down in a blaze of fireworks.
You don't get 'The Unfinished Swan' or 'Shadow of the Colossus' or even Telltale's 'Walking Dead' until you've sat through the long, linear infodumps of something like 'Metal Gear Solid'.
Storytelling isn't an Escher staircase.
My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god's hammer.
A well-written novel, the most immersive of all forms of storytelling, should command your full attention and belief.
Have confidence in your strengths, dear writer, or give it all up now and create apps instead.
I could put a sudoku at the end of every chapter and you'd have to solve it to progress through the story, but that doesn't address what would make people want to interact.
Six years old, and I already knew that my natural home was the world inside the head.
In good writing, the contemplative and the exciting happen at the same time.
Granted, a long book can be as daunting as a hard one. I nearly reached for 'Game of Thrones' until I saw the bookshelf sagging under the burden of those other volumes.
If your agent or publisher is jumping up and down at the thought of your novel, it's because they're picturing the movie poster on the side of the bus.
Publishers were ever eager for authors to do their own publicity because nobody else was willing to do it for nothing. But then it became clear that if you want somebody to champion the story, there's nobody better than the person who made it all up.
As we get older, we demand stories that go somewhere. Things must change.
'Frankenstein' is a work rich in possible meanings, so the horror-show interpretation is as valid as any.
Comics have always been storyboards.
Motion comics are just cheap animation. Very cheap animation. And I like animation almost as much as I like comics, but I'm not rushing to pay out for a cheap hybrid of the two.
A very great deal is written about the future of book publishing - much more than on its present or past - and the only takeaway from all these oracles seems to be that a great empire will be destroyed.
'War and Peace' goes down a lot smoother than a Dan Brown novel, let me tell you.
Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.
My advice after thirty years in the business is sign with an agency of reasonable size.
The writer must be a transcendent, not immanent, deity.
