In the most recent episode (Episode 9 at time of publishing) of Till The Heavens Burst, I talked about how I enjoy writing arguments. But it was just in the outro of the episode, and I was just riffing, and I wanted to talk about it a bit more.

It’s no secret that arguments are fun.

Ok, so fictional arguments are fun. In real life they’re terrible unless the stakes are so low that they’re meaningless, in which case they’re essentially fictional anyway. “Which game console is the best?” has no real answer, so arguing about it is nothing more than an exercise in rhetoric*. “Why don’t you want to have a child with me?” poses an existential threat to a relationship so grand that the relationship itself probably can’t recover.

Fictional arguments are fun because they’re an avenue of conflict, and conflict is always fun to read. In a book, in writing, a verbal conflict is just as fun as a physical one—sometimes more so. A witty back-and-forth can delight so much more than metal-on-metal or fists flying, so long as the person doing the writing is witty enough.

I love reading stories where people snip at each other, because, as I said in the outro of Episode 9, it’s a great way to understand the relationship dynamics of those involved.

But when it comes to writing, it’s also a fantastic way to develop the characters, and a good verbal tete-a-tete can alter the relationship dynamics as well.

And most importantly, you can use bickering to sneak exposition into the reader’s brain. Till The Heavens Burst has pretty dense worldbuilding, even if I retracted most of it from the published text. And I realised pretty early on that I was going to need to explain some stuff to readers. I didn’t want to pull the “so you’re telling me, <exposition dump>” move, but sometimes you just have to. When writing a mystery, you have to balance the ‘assumed knowledge’ of your characters against your readers pretty carefully. It can be tricky to pull it off sometimes.

But an argument lets you slip information in while the reader is distracted by the conflict. It lets you build characterisation, establish power dynamics, and—as it was in Episode 9 of the podcast—give the reader a little bit of breathing room thanks to some humour.

When Bob, Adelaide and Xander are all at each other’s throats after a genuinely traumatic experience, that feels natural. I think anyone with close personal relationships of the familial type has probably snapped at someone before, or tried to defuse an argument between siblings with a self-deprecating joke, or absent-mindedly inserted themselves into the middle of a disagreement with a titbit of information. It’s natural to try to talk about anything other than the horrible thing you just saw—and it’s also natural to want to lash out at someone in some way that you know won’t necessarily matter in the long run. To maybe take it a little too far at some point, and to try to walk it back.

The trick is to not employ this device too often, which I struggle with. I’m naturally argumentative. I argue internally about everything. I examine and re-examine my position on things almost to a point of paralysis at times. Hell, screw it, not almost—I am currently in a state of immobility regarding the Best Books series because I am a heavy duty planner, and I may or may not have planned myself into a position where I need to do more planning before I can continue.

So yeah, that’s the writing update, I suppose. I have recharted my overarching arc for my next project, I have charted the first two books, and then I argued my way into realising I might need to modify my overarching arc to accommodate some necessary changes, and as a result I have not been actually writing the damn books themselves.

And weirdly, I’m ok with this. It’s not like I haven’t been writing at all, and planning is still, in my opinion writing, and I am beholden to no publisher except myself. So we’re doing ok**.

I wrote a haiku. I didn’t really know what to do with it.

I’ve been reading The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, and I love it. If I ever write fantasy I’m gonna write under the pen name Joab Ercrombie. The characters are all so barely redeemable while all being endearing. Even Jezal dan Luthar managed to win me over eventually. Well, kind of. He’s still a turd. I do find the magic system a tad inscrutable, but I’m ok with it so far.

I played some Split Fiction this month, but I didn’t enjoy it. I try not to yuck other people’s yums (when I’m not specifically critiquing something, anyway), so I won’t get into it too much my problems with it, but I will say I was flabbergasted at the reception it got when it has a flat out terrible story. Bad dialogue, a nonsense plot, transparent motivations, cliche characters with obvious arcs—and all of it centres around characters who are writers. It has to be on purpose.

More than that, for 20 years gamers have been lamenting the idea that video games in general suffer from bad writing.

Then they almost universally laud a game for having great gameplay despite having a story most people would scrap before they’d finished the first draft. The message? Stories don’t matter to a lot of gamers.

And that’s fine? I mean, I’m generally a gameplay-first kind of guy myself. But if a game has great gameplay and a bad story, I’m still going to notice. I’m gameplay-first, not gameplay-only.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that the gameplay in Split Fiction isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You’re having fun with a friend. Split Fiction is tricking you. The fun you’re having isn’t because Split Fiction is fun, it’s because you chose to play it with someone you have fun with. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Anyway, a game I played that had good writing and much less flashy gameplay is Look Outside, which is available on Steam right now. I absolutely think it’s worth checking out.

That’s all I’ve got for this month. Just barely squeaked it in hey!

*The correct answer is Sega Master System, by the way.

**I feel like I sound like I’m trying to convince myself at this point.