In one of my earlier blog posts, I mentioned a story I wrote called The Knife & The Wolf, and how it was a small spark for my writing improvement going forward. I thought it would be nice to revisit that a little today.
Before we begin, let’s caveat things as always: The Knife & The Wolf was a story, yes, but only about 14,000 words. So, by Whispers of the Machine standards, that is only around five chapters. It was also never really designed to be a book; it was just backstory for my Baldur’s Gate characters for a co-op playthrough. As I mentioned before, it became, as you can see from the word count—a bit excessive, to say the least.
Embracing the “Gardener” Phase
However, what it did was quietly open a small box in my brain to the world of storytelling. And I loved it. I sat down diligently each evening, with no idea what I was doing, and expanded the story. I was writing in pure “gardener mode.” No plan, no direction, just seeing where the story took me. This was the raw beginning of my writing improvement.
The general premise was to build a backstory for me and another character that led to the opening cutscene from the game—to explain how our characters got there. It followed the characters’ journey from children to young adults: a massive, bear-like human called Wilfred and a skinny, roguish lad called Bruce. It was framed around these two characters in the “now,” preparing for and then conducting some low-level thievery, and as those events built, they both reflected on how they got there. Providing the backstory to who they are.
Finding Potential in Characters and World-Building
Before I get into what was wrong with it—all the issues I can see now with structure, plot, characterization, and formatting—I would say I am still proud of it. What it was trying to do with the interwoven events happening in the moment, contrasted with their past, was nice. The characters themselves felt like they had potential and depth, and the world was visual, even if it was, at times, overly descriptive. To give myself a little more credit, I was trying to achieve a lot of writing improvement within a very small word count.
Moving Beyond “Business” Formatting and Tense Consistency
So, what wasn’t so great? A lot. It’s a little painful to read now. It’s even more painful to realize that, at the time, I thought it was great and asked others to read it! But let’s start with the small stuff: the formatting was a mess. It was structured like a business report because that was all I knew how to write at the time. Dialogue and inner thoughts were just buried in slabs of text. The use of dialogue tags was overdone, to say the least.
Also, the tense was all over the place, shifting from present to past. I also had a habit of being overly descriptive, feeling a need to really show the location in painfully long descriptions of mostly irrelevant locations or objectives.
Overcoming “Death by Exposition”
The glaring issue with it, though, was death by exposition. By nature of it being framed around explaining who these two thieves were, it led me to write basically 12,000 words of exposition. I was telling you who they were and what they did in one long chronological order from birth to now. It was sparsely broken up with moments in the “now,” where the characters jumped back from their reflections to the present, but it was handled poorly.
The themes, events, and world behind it all were solid, but they failed to get through the writing itself. Dumping it all in a monologue on the reader makes it hard to digest, even for me now.
Learning the Value of a Defined Objective
As I mentioned at the start, this was all done without a plan or an outline of any form. It just grew from the page as I wrote, which can definitely be felt. I do feel the story is good, but you can feel its listless direction without a central objective to each chapter. What saved it was being short and having a defined “end” event to aim for.
But all that being said, it was truly a first attempt that was quite unintended. It was the start of a journey toward writing improvement that led to the writing of Whispers of the Machine. It was a start that, without me knowing it, allowed me to begin learning and improving. Although I am a long way from being an expert now, I can already see the vast expanse between then and now. It is a useful reminder of how far I have come, and how far I can still go. I’m still quietly proud of The Knife & The Wolf in a way that only the person who wrote it can be. It’s a mess, but it’s my mess, one that taught me a lot about writing improvement without me even realizing it.
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