Sunday 17 November 2019

Keeper Advice: Talk Less, Smile More

Keepers often over-indulge, and forget Strunk's ageless wisdom: omit needless words.

Worse, needed words are misplaced.

Consider: It's the start of the session and you, the Keeper, are trying to set a scene. You talk about the weather, the countryside, its geography, even its history. You talk about the city and its streets, the mist that seeps out of manhole covers, rising from some forgotten, dark hole below. You might spend ten minutes expounding, because you see all this as important, even vital. How will the players know what's going on, if you don't tell them?

All this is Exposition.


Hitchcock's 100% gold. Exposition cannot be the spotlight moment, especially not at the beginning of the story. Never start a session with a ten-minute spiel about the weather, the setting, or, God forbid, the geopolitical situation. Or even the local political situation. Devote, at most, one sentence to the start - or as I'd describe it, the starting gun - and then get out of the way.

Night's Black Agents, and the agent is tasked with surveilling a suspicious character. The larger story can be about anything up to and including an apocalyptic death ray, but that's not how you start. You start with the agent, in the moment, doing a thing.

'Pretending to window-shop on a street full of holiday-happy people, you see your target slip into an upmarket coffee shop.'

That's all you need. Don't worry about anything else; the player takes it from there. It doesn't matter whether it's Halloween or Christmas. It doesn't matter whether it's the high street of some regional town, or London. Or Paris. You can define all that in play. Hell, you can even define the target in play - male, female, dressed how, ethnicity? After all, if there's one thing disguise expert Jonna Mendez teaches us, it's that the person who seems to be a young Asian female might be a white European male. If you as Keeper want a particular NPC in the scene, and the player describes a different person, no problem! Your NPC was in disguise all along.

Bear in mind what Hitchcock says about North by Northwest, because that illustrates my other point: needed words are misplaced. You can have exposition. You'll need lots of it later on, when the player wants to know important details about the geopolitical situation, or whatever it may be. Just don't have it right at the beginning of the session. That's when everyone's at the starting gate, eager to get on with it. Don't bore the group with ten minutes of blah when what they want is five minutes of action. Exposition is for explaining what has happened, not what is going to happen.

Going back to omit needless words, I'm also going to draw on the wisdom of M.R. James. I've been re-reading his short stories, and two things struck me.

First, like James Herbert, he goes there, sets it on fire, and sells hot dogs. In a much more genteel Victorian way - James would probably prefer roasting chestnuts. Yet James knows horror is best when the reader, the ordinary person, can picture themselves in the scene. "If I am not careful, something like this might happen to me …" That's why most of James' protagonists are young, professional people, perhaps in their late twenties or early thirties. Too old, or too young, wouldn't work as well. Professional people, well-to-do, thoroughly upper middle class, because James knows (or thinks he knows) his audience shares those traits. Their lives are fairly ordinary; some hold important jobs, or academic positions, but you could pass by them in the street and not immediately know them for who they are. One even rides the Clapham omnibus, the legal definition of the ordinary man.

So James takes the ordinary man off in a dark corner and threatens his life - or, in some cases, plain old kills him. Or kills his children. It's remarkable how often dead children appear in James' stories; I can't think of another author quite so keen to deliver pre-teens to the slaughter. I remember James Herbert had a baby eaten by rats, and Stephen King pulled off something similar in Salem's Lot, but neither of them made a habit of it. Whereas James pulls this chilling swerve all the time.

 ... the baby, I am sure, was alive. Punch [Punch and Judy] wrung its neck, and if the choke or squeak it gave were not real, I know nothing of reality ... [The Story of a Disappearance, and a Reappearance.]

Second, James doesn't bother with things that aren't important, and that includes characters, even those that have narrative impact.

"I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full term is over, Professor," said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St. James' College.

The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.

"Yes," he said; "My friends have been making me take up golf this term, and I mean to go to the East Coast - in point of fact to Burnstow (I dare say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to get off to-morrow."

"Oh, Parkins," said his neighbor on the other side, "If you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templar's preceptory, and let me know if you think if it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer."

It was, as you might suppose, a person of antiquarian pursuits who said this, but since he merely appears in this prologue, there is no need to give his entitlements.

Some of you may recognize this as the start of James' most famous story, Oh Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad. It's been reprinted countless times in any number of anthologies, and filmed at least twice, probably more often. Also a song by Robbie Burns, and I don't doubt James got a laugh out of that.

Look at what James is doing. He sets up the moment in one sentence, which tells you everything you need to know about the moment and the people in it. More importantly, he has a dialogue with three people, in which only one, Parkins, is important to the story - so he does not bother to name the other two. He doesn't even name Parkins until the third paragraph; before that he is merely a young, neat, precise Professor of Ontography.

Think! How often have you been asked, 'who is this NPC? What's their name?' How often have you had the courage to reply, 'as (s)he's not relevant to the narrative going forward, I shall not name him/her.'

If the player wants that NPC to become relevant, then by all means let the player name them. Grow fond of them. Even shoehorn them into the story somehow.

That's when you, as Keeper, murder that NPC in the most gruesome way possible. Harden your heart. If James can shove pre-teens into the sausage mincer, you can feed so-and-so into the ghoul pit. If nothing else, it alerts the agents to vital information - that there is a ghoul pit, and it should be avoided if they want to live.  

So! Omit needless words. Exposition explains what has happened, not what is going to happen. If it is not necessary, ignore it - don't even name it, if you don't have to.

Get on with the story. That's the important thing.

Enjoy!


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