Dark Place Progress Post #7 (Patreon)

Hello! This post is very writing-themed! A week or so ago, I reached a point where I literally sat in place and didn't move or think for the entire day. Since then my energy has been increasing. I finally developed one of the ideas I've been mulling over for this whole year. It's unique because it takes one of the first characters I ever wrote for Welcome To The Dark Place (either the first or the second) and gives him a "sequel" which subverts his original fate. I've also been working on another idea for quite some time.

One of Welcome To The Dark Place's goals has been to create an authentic and personal dream world--not a psychedelic trip or a fairy tale, but the kind of dreams everyone has. I finally read some Carl Jung, which was really fun since I've been looking for some serious analysis of dreams and the unconscious. If you want a convincing argument that dreams are at least worth writing down, Man And His Symbols is good for that. Something I liked was his simple differentiation of signs from symbols. What I took away is that a sign represents a conscious idea and is static, while a symbol is "alive" and stands for something fundamental or unconscious. A symbol is multi-dimensional. I can sort of tell what things in the Dark Place are symbols and what are signs, because the symbols are infectious--they easily show up in many different places and color the world with emotional context, and sometimes trying to explain them is like explaining an experience to someone who has never had it. This distinction between signs and symbols was inspiring to me.

However, my focus has shifted to finishing Welcome To The Dark Place ASAP. It's time. In the last post I brainstormed some reasons why I have such difficulty keeping up progress on Welcome To The Dark Place and always switch to other projects and then back. I think one reason is because the game is just too sad. The reason I keep the project alive is because of the dead honest introspection and self-analysis it gives me. But now that I've written the ending, I think the Dark Place has said all that it had to say of this era of my life. I'm satisfied to finish my last few ideas and then try to wrap it up and move on. I have lots of ideas for other projects, and I've even begun revising my book again.

Yes, that book, it is never done. I'm looking at Act 2's character and pacing problems, and again trying to improve Silas. I feel like he's always had Main Character Syndrome, but I have never been able to fix it entirely. Right now I'm considering massive changes to the Prelude chapters to make Silas a more terrible person (and more brainwashed). I recognized he's kind of inconsistent in his beliefs, and the Prelude fails to do its job of planting the seeds for Silas' critical flaws later in the story.

Between Music And Silence (the book) and Welcome To The Dark Place kind of grew up together, and it's neat to look at how they influenced each other as I became better at writing. With Welcome To The Dark Place, I think I became better at releasing my imagination and adding surrealism to stories, and that helped a lot in making Silas' hourglass and his dreams more mysterious and visceral. All the magical elements of the story have been improved this way. Writing the book, I learned to write better characters; for example, I learned that a simple character the audience can understand is more interesting than a complicated character the audience can't follow. I now allow myself to use exaggerated clichés and archetypes as the base of a character, instead of trying to be original. This really felt like an epiphany.