Rule Zero

Above: Me choking from the pressure of naming children and things.

Making up names is a difficult affair for me.

Names go through a few trials before I implement them. First, it gets put into Google and see if I accidentally stole the name outright. If I get past that, then I write up a few things using the name (usually just a back and forth between two people) and see how it sounds/reads. If it makes the cut there, then I start to use it like I would normally. It won’t be until I get used to the name that I’ll remember that I’m going to actually use these names for real, and I should probably pass them through the best filter I have: Pedro.

Pedro has a knack for finding something wrong with most of my names, and then laughing at them for those reasons. It doesn’t sound as bad as you would think, since I’m awful when it comes to picking those things up. The most notable of these examples happened in the first story I ran with Pathfinder.

The group (Pedro and our friend Reggie) tried to get into an adventuring guild called “The Loud Giants” (thank you, GameMastery Guide, for the random name generator), but were against paying the 10 gold to join the guild. Nizmo (Pedro’s rogue) took particular umbrage with the entry fee, and decided to break into the guild late night to take for himself the book containing all the jobs the guild had available. After stealthing in and finding the book, he looked at what the highest paying job was.

Now, I hadn’t really fleshed it out too much. I knew that there was something I wanted to have the group do if they ever got high enough level, but I didn’t know too many details. So when I began telling Pedro about the job, I made it up on the fly, including who the primary antagonist was.

The job called for the culling of a group of bandits that hid inside the chasm that nearly splits the continent in half. The Marauders were a fearsome group of people who had absolutely no moral compass and were utterly impossible to reason with. They were lead by the most fearsome of bandits, someone who struck fear in the hearts of children and monsters alike. No one knew his real name. He was simply…

The High Marauder.

As soon as I uttered those three words, the table erupted with laughter. Between gasps for breath and laughing, Pedro made a number of jokes regarding The High Marauder; Whether or not his parents actually named him that, if that was a name he took himself to feel better, and so on and so forth. It took a few minutes, but we finally resumed the game, and I made a mental note to start to come up with names before a game and run them through Pedro first. (I should note that I was laughing along with them at how bad the name “The High Marauder” was)

Since then, I’ve put my names through my filter system, and I’ve gotten some pretty good results from it. I still have trouble coming up with names, but I at least have Pedro to as a solid check against such stellar names as “Domangin” (“Do Man Gin?”), “Halfus” (“Half Us? Like, is he half a person?”, and “The Solts” (“The Solts? Are they supposed to be like The Colts? Are they pro?”). Without Pedro’s ability to find humorous things about my terrible names, I probably would have ran a game with a villain named “Partin Seasly” and have any and all dramatic reveals involving him ruined.

You have to go with your gut when it comes to writing.

This coming Friday’s comic took about 3 hours to get down. We went through draft after draft, trying to write something that worked. It didn’t help that we ended up abandoning our usual writing spot mid way through, due to screaming kids and the restaurant’s radio going wild with the volume. Eventually we reassembled at a different location that was more chill, and we set back to work.

Still, nothing came up. We’d come up with something, and Pedro would axe it, and while I wasn’t completely sold on what we wrote down either,I didn’t go with my gut right away, which dragged things out. It was that night that hammered in that whole “go with your gut” thing.

We eventually started nailing what we wanted to do, and man, when the pieces start falling into place, it is awesome.  It’s like getting the right blocks one after another in Tetris: What seemed like a lofty task suddenly becomes manageable, and from there you start to see the makings of a finished product. There’s no greater feel in the world than watching something come together after hours of work.

Above: what it’s like pulling through in a difficult writing session.

You gotta go with your gut when doing creative work, to ignore that feeling is to ignore what you really meant to say. Trying to analyze something for more then ten seconds means your just trying to convince yourself that what you wrote is good, when in fact it probably isn’t, and you could do a lot better.

There’s something else to note here as well, and that is the idea of punching, which means that you hammer out the kinks in your writing. Maybe you went with your gut on some dialog, but is it good enough? You can get the right feel for a joke, but you also have to refine it into something you can put out there.  Use your gut to get you to where you need to be, then you can start analyzing what you just created.

It’s also important to listen to your writing partner’s gut as well (You don’t have a writing partner? Get one, they’re awesome to have around). You and your partner need to be on the same page, and making sure your guts are synched together on ideas will lead to far better results than if you simply relent on an idea or go with theirs when you don’t like it.  When I write with Pedro, it helps that he’s able to stop a lot of things that would probably end up being pretty bad. This comic can’t exist with just me writing it, and man, there are a lot of things I have wanted to go with that would have been wildly inconsistent with the comic as it exist now. Thankfully Pedro’s around to check my gut when it needs checking.

I think that’s about all for now. Thanks for coming to our little corner of the web, and we’ll see you back on Friday! To those wondering: Yes, I used the word gut a lot on purpose.