The NPC

This was a great little Wiki article that sums up NPCs very nicely. I've italicized a few points in the article below that I wanted to touch upon:

* NPCs vary greatly in importance - It's rather obvious in the article that there's a general consensus that NPCs are necessary and integral to the telling of the story in the game. Yet in many role play venues, this is not the case at all, where the majority of NPCs are pulled out of someone's ass at convenient times to avoid certain predicaments within a story. More often than not, these NPCs have no persona whatsoever, and are completely emasculated.. like wooden dummies on a stick. They are not a viable part of any story at all, but are frequently used either to deter god-moders, or to aid and abet god-moders.

* Doing (NPCs) well is.. one of the hallmarks of a good GM - This just goes without saying, and not merely the hallmark of a good GM, but a good Writer as well, who can understand and appreciate the dynamics of well-rounded characters in general, whether PC or NPC. I'm touchy about my NPCs. Ask anyone who knows me. If someone tries to take over an NPC of mine without permission, they get a smack on the hand for bad form. Many of my NPCs upstage my own main PCs! So yeah, they're important.

* The more "real" the NPCs feel, the more fun players will have interacting with them in character - Again this goes without saying. But I'm going to say it anyway. Flesh out your NPCs. Make your role play partners hallucinate and forget the person working the puppet strings. If they're seeing the mun behind the scenes and not the character, PC or NPC makes no difference, then you're not doing it right.

* A player who is without a player character of his or her own can temporarily take control of an NPC - Player beware. For many, finding someone to fill the shoes of an NPC temporarily is a boon. But for some, a poorly played NPC could be the ruination of a great character. Sadly, I have given over a few cherished NPCs of mine to players who swore they could do the character justice, only to find myself banging my head on my desk three posts away. It makes me very reluctant now to offer out my NPCs for other people to play.


How do you feel about NPCs? If you've got any input to add on the subject.. please share!



Role-playing games
A non-player character, often shortened to NPC, is a character that is controlled by the game master in role-playing games. When this definition extends to video games, an NPC in a video game is usually part of the program, and not controlled by a human.

NPCs vary greatly in importance, from the NPC innkeeper seen once by the player characters, to the NPC arch-nemesis who comes back time-after-time again for an entire campaign. While every inhabitant of the game's world except the PC's are NPC's, very few are given any detail by the game master (GM). In fact, most of the minor ones are invented on the spot as needed—doing this well is in fact one of the hallmarks of a good GM. There is some debate about how much work a game master should put into an important NPC's statistics; some players prefer to have every NPC completely defined with stats, skills, and gear, while others define only what is immediately necessary and fill in the rest as the game proceeds. There is also some discussion as to just how important fully fleshed-out NPCs are in any given RPG, but it is general consensus that the more "real" the NPCs feel, the more fun players will have interacting with them in character.

Playability
In some games and in some circumstances, a player who is without a player character of his or her own can temporarily take control of an NPC. Reasons for this vary, but often arise from the player not maintaining a PC within the group and playing the NPC for a session or from the player's PC being unable to act for some time (for example, because they are injured or in another location). Although these characters are still designed and normally controlled by the game master, when players are given the opportunity to temporarily control these non-player characters it gives them another perspective on the plot of the game. Some systems, such as Nobilis, encourage this in their rules. ~Wikipedia

That Thing You Write - Bildungsroman

6. Bildungsroman - "A bildungsroman is a novel that traces the development of a character from childhood to adulthood, through a quest for identity that leads him or her to maturity. The term bildungsroman comes from the German for formation novel, or education novel." (Ginny Wiehardt)

Within the gist of a story and its many plots, the peeling away of a character's many onion layers to get to his or her soul is the most tantalizing part of all. And often the most difficult thing for many writers to grasp hold of. Without the glimpses into history, without the circumstantial molding and shaping into specific flaws or graces, it is almost impossible for an audience to connect to the character's humanity. We're just nosy creatures by nature. And in storytelling, it is essential for the writer to sate the nosy needs of an audience.

I think perhaps the most compelling example for a bildungsroman is "Sybil," the 1973 book by Flora Rheta Schreiber. And while it doesn't exactly follow the chronology of passing from childhood into adulthood, it does indeed paint a vivid, circumstantial portrait detailing all the reasons behind the main character's bizarre behavior. I was eleven when I read that book, and to this day I distinctly remember a choking sensation over this woman's harrowing childhood experiences. It has stayed with me and left enough of a lasting impression that I don't think I could read the book again.

What else is the bildungsroman for, if not to draw an audience into the heart and soul of a character, and leave a lasting impression?

That Thing You Write - Avant-garde

5. Avant-garde - from a French term originally referring to the vanguard of the army.

The term was extended beginning in the late 19th century to describe movements in art and literature that call for experimentation and revolt against tradition.

"Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists, to postmodern artists such as the Language poets." Wikipedia

While I don't often think of literature in terms of avant-garde, I will say this in deference to one extraordinary beat poet: His poem Howl left me breathless, and for very personal reasons that struck a deep chord inside of me when a college literary professor of mine had noted on the margin of one of my essays that it was "written in the spirit of Ginsberg's Howl."

Certainly I am no Allen Ginsberg. But when I finally read this poem many, many years after leaving college, I was spellbound. Spellbound that anyone would compare my work to his.


So, here is my one shining example of literary avant-garde, courtesy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl:



I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and thingy and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be f*u*c*ked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate thingy and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, thingysman and Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts
who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, and
who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

That Thing You Write - Antagonist

3. Antagonist - sometimes referred to as the villain, the bad guy, or nemesis, this is the character who opposes the protagonist or hero. The antagonist is the necessary element which provides a story's conflict.

The Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert for example, in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, is an evil nemesis from beginning to end, while Cedric the Saxon's character plays only minor antagonism to the hero, Wilfred of Ivanhoe.

Sometimes the antagonist is not always so clear cut, such as when the perceived villain turns out to be other than what the writer originally made you believe about him. The Harry Potter novels are filled with delightful, shady flip flops between character tendencies toward hero and villain, designed to keep an audience guessing and always surprised.

Also, the antagonist does not always have to be an actual character, but is sometimes just a force which works against the hero in the tale, such as a rash of bad luck, a severe storm, etc.

That Thing You Write - Allusion

2. Allusion - Within one literary work, it is the practice of making reference to another work, such as a film, a work of art, a book or novel, or even a real event. While allusions may be used to draw upon the collective understanding between writer and audience, they do occasionally run the risk of alienating those in an audience who have no familiarity with what has been alluded to.


One of my favorite allusions is a reference from To Kill A Mockingbird, which comes from the movie Benny & Joon. After Benny discloses to Sam that Joon suffers from chronic schizophrenia, Sam sneaks down to the kitchen, staring at Joon from the stairwell. After spying him from the corner of her eye, Joon asks him: "Having a Boo Radley moment, are we?"

Of course, for someone who has never seen or read To Kill A Mockingbird, this line would not be obvious in drawing reference between Sam's blank stares and Boo Radley's blank stares.

That Thing You Write - Alliteration

Coming up:
A list of fifty-three commonly used terms used by writers of fiction.


1. Alliteration - the use of repetitious consonant sounds in a verse or sentence, more commonly used in poetry, but many fiction writers sometimes make use of it (sometimes without even realizing it) to convey rhythmic styles in narrative or dialogue, place emphasis on certain mental imagery -- or for humorous effects.

Most often the use of alliteration will strike a chord in the flow of speech and literature, giving it a comforting sound or rhythm. Such as in Shakespeare's Sonnet XXX:
"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought...."

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:
"Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely breach'd his boiling bloody breast."

Robert Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral:
"No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's
Circling its summit.
Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
Wait ye the warning?"


And of course some extreme and rather humorous examples of repetitive consonants for example:
A big black bug bit a big black bear and made the big black bear bleed blood.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
She sells seashells by the seashore.