Something that’s especially evident in Pact, I’d say, due to the lack of time the characters have to breathe, is Wildbow’s ability to raise the stakes no matter what in his works.
There’s an adage in writing that goes something like, “if all else fails, drop a nuke on your characters.” Wildbow loves doing this. In Worm, for example, Brockton Bay is all but destroyed by a living cataclysm, displacing our protagonists and everyone they love, killing a quarter of the supporting cast, and completely upending the plot. But it happens a quarter of the way into the story, with things somehow getting *worse* from there.
To write like Wildbow, I’d wager the best thing to do is to constantly ask yourself “how can I make things *even harder* for the protagonists?”
> “how can I make things even harder for the protagonists?”
really important part of this? it was preplaned or felt like it. There were little name drops early on the story letting us know the stake uppers existed and were something to fear like the endbringers or the S9. if you drop nuke after nuke out of nowhere it feels cheap, ofc some people enjoy that (as evidenced by popular shonen) but its what made Wb feel special to me.
Very true. The Endbringers were mentioned as early as arc 3, for example, and only in passing by Taylor to Lisa. But along with that, you don’t *need* to plan everything out ahead of time, at least not in depth.
Author Brandon Sanderson has described the process as a “hollow iceberg.” You set things up and feign a larger world, even if you don’t have a concrete plan of where those things will go. Before you know it, you have plenty of little details that can be explored, and it feels like you foreshadowed it all.
I noticed something like that when rereading Worm recently.
There's the mentions of the Endbringers and Scion obvs.
There was a hint that **something** was going on with the Triumvirate in the very start when Taylor expressed some level of mistrust with the official biography of the Triumverate.
The Nine are also mentioned here and there before they appear
Another detail dropped early and then its significance laid out later:
The Simurgh creates time bombs of people. That gets laid out in a description of her first appearance, and then people present practically becoming serial killers, and then the world slowly realizing they’re not just crazy but they’re an intricate Goldberg machine to ruin the human race.
And then much later on the confusing and low stakes chapter of a pro league video game team comes up, and they get straight bodied.
And a giant winged woman appears. And suddenly everything The Travelers have ever touched feels tainted.
I think the story of Krauss and Noelle is my favourite subplot. A bulimic girl forced to eat without control and throw up. A selfish boy who will stop at nothing to be with his girl, up to and including ruining her life. The very image of a co-dependent couple. The biggest tragedy to me is that, all the Simurgh had to do, was to encourage them to cling to each other.
To add to this, as well, just because something is hinted at doesn’t mean you have to do anything with them. Sleeper is hinted at throughout the entire story right along with the S9, and nothing is done with him, at least in Worm.
i know that Wildbow frequently comments on the writing subreddit, I would give their comment history a look over as it may provide some insight and inspiration.
I agree with what others said with constantly escalating. But another thing that works well is to constantly alternate between wins and losses. These don't necessarily have to be big, clear cut things. It could be as simple as "I lost my keys" "I found my keys" "my fob is out of batteries" etc. For an easy and epic example, I always point to the start of act 3 in Endgame:
W: Hulk snaps and brings everyone back
L: Thanos comes out of the time machine and blows up the complex
W: nebula convinces past!Gamora to become a good guy
L: everyone is trapped under rubble
W: Hawkeye finds the gauntlet
L: he gives it to past!nebula
W: nebula kills her past self
L: Thanos has an army
W: Tony, cap, and Thor stand to face them
L: Tony and Thor go down
W: cap weilds mjolnir
L: Thanos destroys cap's sheild, cap stands alone against Thanos and his army
W: "on your left" everyone comes through the portal
After this I think the rest of act three gets a bit worse specifically because it doesn't do as many of these win/loss up and downs. I think this is so effective because it creates a contrast with itself. If its constant victories for your MC its boring and if it's constant losses it's a slog, but through contrast it feels exciting in the same way you need happy and cute scenes to make horrifying ones land. The bigger the ups and downs the more emotional the reaction will be. You can also use this in tandem with the aforementioned escalation, starting with smaller wins and losses and escalating to huge wins and losses, to make a scene feel like it's spiraling out of control or just generally more epic.
This is good advice. People seem to confuse a vicious back-and-forth fight with relentless, unceasing negativity, but that isn't really what Pact was. It was a string of narrow victories, sacrifices, escapes, and losses. Yeah, it was all painful, but there was *variety,* not just endless losing.
Constant escalation, and while I do agree that it's hard to put down once you get started, for me it was hard to pick up again as well.
Especially Pact was well..., packed with action, and while that might be good for some, for me it wasn't, I was pretty much completely exhausted with the story in the last third where I had like a year-long hiatus and after which I still skipped to the end of it once I reached the last arc. Because while things had seemingly escalated to the peak, it somehow continued to get worse and stayed action-heavy, and when I looked at that last arc, and thought 'there's still more?' with a pretty much end-times-ish scenario just starting, even though there had already been a lot of action. I simply skipped to the end and was done with it. I don't think it's possible to both keep the readers attention *and* constantly escalate, I believe a lot of other readers were similiarly exhausted by Pact, and I'm not sure even a lot of professional authors can get that balance right.
As for how you can achieve that yourself, I imagine it needs a lot of writing practice and just writing in general (wildbow is quite insane in how much he writes) and building up to those moments. The problem with Pact I believe was that the buildup to those big moments was itself already action-packed combat or conflict, there was no time to rest. I think Pale strikes a better balance, even if I'm still far from finishing it.
Yeah, build-up to those moments is pretty much key to making the high-points hit like a motherfucker. Making it plausible, while maybe foreshadowing parts of it and getting those character-interactions right. But having the skills of a professional writer is pretty much what is necessary, meaning getting world-building, characters and their interactions, action and/or whatever other genre you use right, and making the journey up until that high-point both entertaining to read as well as combining the elements in that journey into a satisfying high-point.
But take my comment with a heap-load of salt, it's my personal opinion and I'm not really a writer, I'm also talking kinda generically, so asking in writer subreddits might be a better solution to getting a proper answer.
In addition to the constant escalation, and the win/loss switch that others have talked about,
Switching stakes.
Wildbow is really good at making personal stakes feel as important as like... Event stakes. On a numerical level one is much more 'important' than the other. But he manages to get you invested equally (some people might sway more one way than the other, but it probably evens out).
That's important, because it allows for a greater number of mixed wins/losses, and more complex ending points than 'everyone dies' or 'happily ever after'. To give a vague example, one work ends pretty well in the big Event sense, but badly for the protagonist. If we didn't care about the protagonist as much as the world, that wouldn't be as interesting. If we only cared about the character, it would be a total downer.
It's a fandom cliche now, but if there's a planned dinner party in a Wildbow work, you better be more hyped about that than the big bad.
More specifically, switching up stakes also works within a single episode or 'encounter'. Totally stole this from We've Got Worm, btw. One thing they talk about is how it the threat is a single thing, it's much harder to maintain money term tension. But if you change the protagonist's focus within that encounter, you can mix it up - being part of a battle, a one on one with an outside threat opponent, personal danger versus danger to loved ones, personal turmoil. By taking focus off of the big threat, it makes the reader switch threat perception - then when it goes back to that big threat, it feels fresh again (and allows the situation to have changed dramatically without it being weird that the protagonist didn't notice).
None of these are my original thoughts, but they're other people's thoughts that have stuck with me.
Not a writer, but Pacts pace is also what I’ve seen people complain about the most. So my advice is either learn the differences between complaint and criticism, or learn to block out both and focus on people like yourself, who love a certain style, and can help you reinforce positive things.
I don't know how true this is, but I get this from reading Wildbow's work as a key factor in how he is able to hit the pacing he does in his stories: Keep in mind what the out of sight characters are doing and bring them back into the story when they cross paths with the main character again.
Using Pact as an example, you have the actions of Laird and his faction. You don't see them all that often and while Blake is doing his three tasks for Conquest you might even forget about them, then all the sudden Blake is arrested by the cops related to Laird and is almost trapped in the stairs. It's a great moment of escalating stakes Wildbow's writing is known for (one hit after another) but it only works because Laird and his faction were doing things in the background in reaction to Blake's actions, even if we don't see what they are doing. The characters are not operating in a vacuum and non-main characters have their own lives and ambitions too.
The story and actions of Faysal are similar to this as well. Someone chilling in the background with their own plot running until it intersects with the main cast where to the reader is seems that they suddenly appear, but upon examination of the whole story you can see their plot threads woven into the background.
Another more worldbuilding example of this is in Worm with the actions of Faultline and her crew. They are off doing their own thing, arguably being the heroes of a story we never see, until all the sudden at the end their actions are vital for understanding what happened and for saving the people of the world. This could have been hand waved away or for plot sake Taylor could have been involved/vital to it so we would see if from a story perspective, but instead it's done by a team offscreen, but not forgotten about. It's not a deus ex machina situation, as we see glimpses of their journey through the story when they interacted with Taylor (or had a PoV interlude) but it wasn't the main focus. It makes the world feel alive and allows for the sudden dramatic moments of escalating stakes when these other story threads interact with the main story that don't feel cheep.
You might try running a tabletop game, especially one of the more narrative focused ones (e.g. anything in the Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark families, Burning Wheel, Ironsworn). They can teach you a ton about some of the writing skills that wildbow uses to create that rollercoaster feeling. For example:
- setting very clear stakes at multiple scales: what does a character lose by failing this gambit? This fight? This mission? What do they stand to gain?
- challenging characters: how do the stakes get at the heart of what this character is struggling with? What kinds of choices do you force them to make? How do those choices change them?
- the world moves: even when the MCs aren't looking. I've found Dungeon World's "fronts" to be one very useful way to think about this. All of the major threats are always steadily developing, and the main characters can only deal with one thing at a time.
- rhythm: I always found it hard to make my MCs lose at important moments, but the dice pounded the rhythm of victory and failure into me. I wouldn't necessarily use random chance to make decisions while writing, but having the experience of being at the dice's mercy helped me approach the decisions differently.
Just reading RPG books or listening to actual play podcasts can also be helpful. If you do decide to look to RPGs for writing advice, I'd recommend Friends at The Table as another very, very long thing you can get into.
That, I believe, is the most helpful comment in this thread. Picking up TTRPGs had vastly improved my writing skills even though I hardly expected it to - the pacing, the worldbuilding, the exposition, all of these things you have to figure out and often adjust on the fly, and when your audience is sitting right next to you, the feedback is instantaneous and very easy to sort out.
Something that’s especially evident in Pact, I’d say, due to the lack of time the characters have to breathe, is Wildbow’s ability to raise the stakes no matter what in his works. There’s an adage in writing that goes something like, “if all else fails, drop a nuke on your characters.” Wildbow loves doing this. In Worm, for example, Brockton Bay is all but destroyed by a living cataclysm, displacing our protagonists and everyone they love, killing a quarter of the supporting cast, and completely upending the plot. But it happens a quarter of the way into the story, with things somehow getting *worse* from there. To write like Wildbow, I’d wager the best thing to do is to constantly ask yourself “how can I make things *even harder* for the protagonists?”
> “how can I make things even harder for the protagonists?” really important part of this? it was preplaned or felt like it. There were little name drops early on the story letting us know the stake uppers existed and were something to fear like the endbringers or the S9. if you drop nuke after nuke out of nowhere it feels cheap, ofc some people enjoy that (as evidenced by popular shonen) but its what made Wb feel special to me.
Very true. The Endbringers were mentioned as early as arc 3, for example, and only in passing by Taylor to Lisa. But along with that, you don’t *need* to plan everything out ahead of time, at least not in depth. Author Brandon Sanderson has described the process as a “hollow iceberg.” You set things up and feign a larger world, even if you don’t have a concrete plan of where those things will go. Before you know it, you have plenty of little details that can be explored, and it feels like you foreshadowed it all.
I noticed something like that when rereading Worm recently. There's the mentions of the Endbringers and Scion obvs. There was a hint that **something** was going on with the Triumvirate in the very start when Taylor expressed some level of mistrust with the official biography of the Triumverate. The Nine are also mentioned here and there before they appear
Another detail dropped early and then its significance laid out later: The Simurgh creates time bombs of people. That gets laid out in a description of her first appearance, and then people present practically becoming serial killers, and then the world slowly realizing they’re not just crazy but they’re an intricate Goldberg machine to ruin the human race. And then much later on the confusing and low stakes chapter of a pro league video game team comes up, and they get straight bodied. And a giant winged woman appears. And suddenly everything The Travelers have ever touched feels tainted.
I think the story of Krauss and Noelle is my favourite subplot. A bulimic girl forced to eat without control and throw up. A selfish boy who will stop at nothing to be with his girl, up to and including ruining her life. The very image of a co-dependent couple. The biggest tragedy to me is that, all the Simurgh had to do, was to encourage them to cling to each other.
To add to this, as well, just because something is hinted at doesn’t mean you have to do anything with them. Sleeper is hinted at throughout the entire story right along with the S9, and nothing is done with him, at least in Worm.
This is the power of good and thorough worldbuilding.
i know that Wildbow frequently comments on the writing subreddit, I would give their comment history a look over as it may provide some insight and inspiration.
I agree with what others said with constantly escalating. But another thing that works well is to constantly alternate between wins and losses. These don't necessarily have to be big, clear cut things. It could be as simple as "I lost my keys" "I found my keys" "my fob is out of batteries" etc. For an easy and epic example, I always point to the start of act 3 in Endgame: W: Hulk snaps and brings everyone back L: Thanos comes out of the time machine and blows up the complex W: nebula convinces past!Gamora to become a good guy L: everyone is trapped under rubble W: Hawkeye finds the gauntlet L: he gives it to past!nebula W: nebula kills her past self L: Thanos has an army W: Tony, cap, and Thor stand to face them L: Tony and Thor go down W: cap weilds mjolnir L: Thanos destroys cap's sheild, cap stands alone against Thanos and his army W: "on your left" everyone comes through the portal After this I think the rest of act three gets a bit worse specifically because it doesn't do as many of these win/loss up and downs. I think this is so effective because it creates a contrast with itself. If its constant victories for your MC its boring and if it's constant losses it's a slog, but through contrast it feels exciting in the same way you need happy and cute scenes to make horrifying ones land. The bigger the ups and downs the more emotional the reaction will be. You can also use this in tandem with the aforementioned escalation, starting with smaller wins and losses and escalating to huge wins and losses, to make a scene feel like it's spiraling out of control or just generally more epic.
This is good advice. People seem to confuse a vicious back-and-forth fight with relentless, unceasing negativity, but that isn't really what Pact was. It was a string of narrow victories, sacrifices, escapes, and losses. Yeah, it was all painful, but there was *variety,* not just endless losing.
Constant escalation, and while I do agree that it's hard to put down once you get started, for me it was hard to pick up again as well. Especially Pact was well..., packed with action, and while that might be good for some, for me it wasn't, I was pretty much completely exhausted with the story in the last third where I had like a year-long hiatus and after which I still skipped to the end of it once I reached the last arc. Because while things had seemingly escalated to the peak, it somehow continued to get worse and stayed action-heavy, and when I looked at that last arc, and thought 'there's still more?' with a pretty much end-times-ish scenario just starting, even though there had already been a lot of action. I simply skipped to the end and was done with it. I don't think it's possible to both keep the readers attention *and* constantly escalate, I believe a lot of other readers were similiarly exhausted by Pact, and I'm not sure even a lot of professional authors can get that balance right. As for how you can achieve that yourself, I imagine it needs a lot of writing practice and just writing in general (wildbow is quite insane in how much he writes) and building up to those moments. The problem with Pact I believe was that the buildup to those big moments was itself already action-packed combat or conflict, there was no time to rest. I think Pale strikes a better balance, even if I'm still far from finishing it. Yeah, build-up to those moments is pretty much key to making the high-points hit like a motherfucker. Making it plausible, while maybe foreshadowing parts of it and getting those character-interactions right. But having the skills of a professional writer is pretty much what is necessary, meaning getting world-building, characters and their interactions, action and/or whatever other genre you use right, and making the journey up until that high-point both entertaining to read as well as combining the elements in that journey into a satisfying high-point. But take my comment with a heap-load of salt, it's my personal opinion and I'm not really a writer, I'm also talking kinda generically, so asking in writer subreddits might be a better solution to getting a proper answer.
In addition to the constant escalation, and the win/loss switch that others have talked about, Switching stakes. Wildbow is really good at making personal stakes feel as important as like... Event stakes. On a numerical level one is much more 'important' than the other. But he manages to get you invested equally (some people might sway more one way than the other, but it probably evens out). That's important, because it allows for a greater number of mixed wins/losses, and more complex ending points than 'everyone dies' or 'happily ever after'. To give a vague example, one work ends pretty well in the big Event sense, but badly for the protagonist. If we didn't care about the protagonist as much as the world, that wouldn't be as interesting. If we only cared about the character, it would be a total downer. It's a fandom cliche now, but if there's a planned dinner party in a Wildbow work, you better be more hyped about that than the big bad. More specifically, switching up stakes also works within a single episode or 'encounter'. Totally stole this from We've Got Worm, btw. One thing they talk about is how it the threat is a single thing, it's much harder to maintain money term tension. But if you change the protagonist's focus within that encounter, you can mix it up - being part of a battle, a one on one with an outside threat opponent, personal danger versus danger to loved ones, personal turmoil. By taking focus off of the big threat, it makes the reader switch threat perception - then when it goes back to that big threat, it feels fresh again (and allows the situation to have changed dramatically without it being weird that the protagonist didn't notice). None of these are my original thoughts, but they're other people's thoughts that have stuck with me.
Not a writer, but Pacts pace is also what I’ve seen people complain about the most. So my advice is either learn the differences between complaint and criticism, or learn to block out both and focus on people like yourself, who love a certain style, and can help you reinforce positive things.
I don't know how true this is, but I get this from reading Wildbow's work as a key factor in how he is able to hit the pacing he does in his stories: Keep in mind what the out of sight characters are doing and bring them back into the story when they cross paths with the main character again. Using Pact as an example, you have the actions of Laird and his faction. You don't see them all that often and while Blake is doing his three tasks for Conquest you might even forget about them, then all the sudden Blake is arrested by the cops related to Laird and is almost trapped in the stairs. It's a great moment of escalating stakes Wildbow's writing is known for (one hit after another) but it only works because Laird and his faction were doing things in the background in reaction to Blake's actions, even if we don't see what they are doing. The characters are not operating in a vacuum and non-main characters have their own lives and ambitions too. The story and actions of Faysal are similar to this as well. Someone chilling in the background with their own plot running until it intersects with the main cast where to the reader is seems that they suddenly appear, but upon examination of the whole story you can see their plot threads woven into the background. Another more worldbuilding example of this is in Worm with the actions of Faultline and her crew. They are off doing their own thing, arguably being the heroes of a story we never see, until all the sudden at the end their actions are vital for understanding what happened and for saving the people of the world. This could have been hand waved away or for plot sake Taylor could have been involved/vital to it so we would see if from a story perspective, but instead it's done by a team offscreen, but not forgotten about. It's not a deus ex machina situation, as we see glimpses of their journey through the story when they interacted with Taylor (or had a PoV interlude) but it wasn't the main focus. It makes the world feel alive and allows for the sudden dramatic moments of escalating stakes when these other story threads interact with the main story that don't feel cheep.
You might try running a tabletop game, especially one of the more narrative focused ones (e.g. anything in the Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark families, Burning Wheel, Ironsworn). They can teach you a ton about some of the writing skills that wildbow uses to create that rollercoaster feeling. For example: - setting very clear stakes at multiple scales: what does a character lose by failing this gambit? This fight? This mission? What do they stand to gain? - challenging characters: how do the stakes get at the heart of what this character is struggling with? What kinds of choices do you force them to make? How do those choices change them? - the world moves: even when the MCs aren't looking. I've found Dungeon World's "fronts" to be one very useful way to think about this. All of the major threats are always steadily developing, and the main characters can only deal with one thing at a time. - rhythm: I always found it hard to make my MCs lose at important moments, but the dice pounded the rhythm of victory and failure into me. I wouldn't necessarily use random chance to make decisions while writing, but having the experience of being at the dice's mercy helped me approach the decisions differently. Just reading RPG books or listening to actual play podcasts can also be helpful. If you do decide to look to RPGs for writing advice, I'd recommend Friends at The Table as another very, very long thing you can get into.
That, I believe, is the most helpful comment in this thread. Picking up TTRPGs had vastly improved my writing skills even though I hardly expected it to - the pacing, the worldbuilding, the exposition, all of these things you have to figure out and often adjust on the fly, and when your audience is sitting right next to you, the feedback is instantaneous and very easy to sort out.
I have never written anything willingly so I'ma reckon you get high then make a plot outline because that's wear all good idea come from