That passage might have been a scintillating batch of prose (it wasn’t, but it might have been), but this isn’t a novel. And when you’re done and they lift their heads from the table, their first question will be “what was that middle part?” When you look up from the text, their eyes will be more thickly glazed than a Smithfield spiral-cut sugar-cured ham. There are woods to the left, while the open, rolling pasture to the right is dotted with large boulders. Overhead, a glowering sky gives the whole scene a apocalyptic air. Around the scene lay the bodies of five humans and half-elves, which have been brutally murdered. It seems to be dressed in a more ornate manner than the others.
Seven goblins, armed with axes, bows, and spears, appear to be ransacking the baggage and goods from the wagons, while an eighth stands atop the larger wagon, waving a staff and speaking in an animated voice. Twenty feet away, a second, smaller wagon lays on its side, with smoke rising from it. And that brings me back to descriptive text.Īs your journey takes you northward along the road, you approach a curve and see a scene of devastation and violence. But I write a fair amount of stuff for my games, and I present that stuff to my players. I don’t write many 30-page business reports these days, and I don’t give many Powerpoint presentations. You know what makes them interesting? Someone who speaks in a lively, engaged manner, keeps your attention focused on him or her, and never seems to be paying any attention to the slides. You know what makes Powerpoint presentations really boring? Someone who writes their presentation out on slides and then reads them to you. When your reader needs you to actually get to the point, you need to put your point in front of the reader quickly, directly, and in clear order.Īround this same time I was giving a lot of Powerpoint presentations. My prose might be scintillating, but scintillating prose belongs in novels and blogs, and maybe the odd RPG sourcebook. But one of his key requirements was that we summarize our main theses in bullet points instead of running text.ĭespite my righteous indignation-and his short tenure at WotC-I eventually came to see that he was right.
#Writing the sound of a gunshot professional#
(By “forced down our throats,” I mean (among other things) “made me rewrite a 30-page report seventeen times.”) I was frustrated and incensed-I’d been a professional writer for two decades, and I didn’t need this philistine to come along and tell me I’d been doing it all wrong that whole time. See, one of the things he forced down our throats was a new style of business communications. But that’s another story: My story revolves around the bullet point. The guy was frankly a dickhead, and most of his direct reports quit over the next few months, after which he was let go. Part of the idea was to modernize the way we managed our brands, and my new boss was hired in from Kraft on the back of his top-notch brand management expertise. In the mean time: A few months after I was hired as Brand Manager for RPGs at WotC, our department was reorganized and a couple new people were brought in, including a new boss for me. And I’ll get back to that point in a minute.
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