After School Revival

Converting Prose to Bullet Points

I joked on Twitter when I was heavily promoting The Moss Mother's Maze that if a specific tweet got 50 retweets I'd rewrite the adventure in bullet points with bolded terms because people keep complaining about "big walls of text". Thankfully twitter is a dying platform and I simply can't get that many retweets now, so I don't have to do it, but because of the way my brain works I also haven't been able to stop thinking about that exercise.

Here's the entrance chamber from the dungeon:

Entrance

The floor is a thick carpet of moss strewn with small stones and the bones of a thousand birds and rodents. The walls are a palimpsest of graffiti and crude carvings, a history of intrusion hundreds of years in the making. A map of the first few rooms is carved into the south wall.

A narrow shaft in the roof offers a glimpse of distant sky.

Archways in the south and east walls lead into darkness.

Here's what that looks like as a bullet point dungeon:

Entrance

This is me trying my absolute best to make the form work. It would be very easy to write really bad bullet points, but I think the point I want to make is better served if I actually make an effort and take the exercise seriously.

Rewriting this involves first rethinking the order/priority in which I present the room. In the original prose version we have three paragraphs. The first is an introduction to the room as an intruder might first experience it. Floor, then broad details of the walls, then a closer detail. It could, if you wanted it to, function as read aloud/boxed text. That's followed by exits, the information players will need after they've decided to move on.

In the bullet points, I'm more concerned with hierarchies of information. It's less about what do you, the character, see and sense?, and more about what is the important information. The first bullet point should, in my opinion, be the most important thing in the room that's also immediately visible - which is the partial map of the dungeon.

I am sure that the people who claim to prefer the second method of presenting dungeon rooms are not lying. I am sure that they've found, for whatever reason, that this is better for them. But for me it's just lacking. There's no voice to it, no rhythm, nothing evocative that grounds me in a sense of the place that I'm in. It's just information, recited in the manner of an encyclopedia entry.

I think that this is, possibly, the crux of the disagreement I have with people about this stuff. The people who prefer bullet points largely want modules to just give them Information. I, personally, want the words to paint me a picture. I want to see a writer do Their Specific Thing, that no other writer can do exactly as they do.

This room isn't complex. There's not much going on in it. But the first version still has my voice. The second, anybody could write. And the idea that people would rather have books that sound like anybody could have written them makes me really sad.

To be abundantly clear about what I'm saying here: writing is a skill and a craft that can be learned, and given time and practice anybody can do it. I am not denying that. When I say "anybody can do it" with regard to the second example, what I mean is "anybody, given the same basic information about the room, could reproduce this text verbatim without having first seen it". Part of learning your craft as a writer involves developing your own unique voice. While anybody can write, not anybody can write exactly like me or exactly like you. That is my point, and that's what we lose when we reduce Art down to Information. The point might possibly become more clear if I were to take a longer, more complex room from the dungeon to apply this exercise to, one that's much more clearly My Voice, but that would take much more time and effort that I don't have right now, and so we'll have to be content with this small example.