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Dodging Bullets: Overcoming problems when writing AARs
by Alwyn
Neo: “What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?”
Morpheus: “No, Neo. I am trying to tell you that, when you are ready, you won’t have to.”
- The Matrix, 1999
by Alwyn
Neo: “What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?”
Morpheus: “No, Neo. I am trying to tell you that, when you are ready, you won’t have to.”
- The Matrix, 1999
Writing an After Action Report (AAR) can bring a campaign to life. Ordinary events - such as negotiating a treaty or pursing raiders - can acquire new significance. We can give characters motives and goals, sometimes inspired by game mechanics and sometimes independently of them.
Like a modder seeing their changes appear in a game for the first time, or Neo discovering what he is capable of in The Matrix, an AAR writer can discover an exciting world of possibilities. Of course, modding can be exciting but it can also be frustrating. We can work for hours on a mod only to see the game crash; every attempt to fix the problem can fail. Neo discovers that his exciting world of possibilities has limitations and dangers. He is told that, if he dies in the Matrix, he will die in the real world too. He learns that the enemy agents who pursue him and his friends have killed every resistance fighter who tried to stand against them.
In a similar way, AAR writers experience problems and challenges. For example: our writing can lose momentum, such as when we play ahead to see what happens next and our AAR becomes detached from the events of the game. We can invest ourselves in writing a story about a campaign, only to see the campaign killed by a corrupted save game. We might immerse ourselves in the development of a character, only to see that character die in our campaign.
1. The problem of getting discouraged
Different things might discourage different people. Perhaps you posted a chapter which took you a long time to write, which represents your best writing so far, only to see no comments on it. Maybe you entered your work in the Monthly After Action Report Competition (MAARC) several times and did not win once. We all feel discouraged sometimes.
Sometimes simple things may help. Commenting on other people's writing can encourage them to comment on ours, especially if we include a link to our writing in our signature. We can decide for ourselves that our main goal in entering the MAARC is to advertise our story and attract more readers. We can decide that winning is a long-term goal or not a goal at all. It can take time for a new writer to build up a reputation. A new writer might not realise that some other AARs entering the same competition are by well-established writers on TWC.
The best suggestions which I have found on this issue came from an article by Skantarios, My Ten Rules for Writing an AAR. This is part of the his first rule for writers:-
Be passionate about what you write. You have to really want to write about the subject. If you don't feel passion for your character/faction/story, you will procrastinate doing updates and soon enough, you will have lost the bubble and be so far behind that you just don't want to start again.
You are going to have problems and setbacks - accept that. You won't get a lot of replies at first - don't worry about it. Write the AAR for yourself and don't worry about who has or hasn't written you back. The AARs that are well done can take weeks or even months to catch on. Just know that going in and keep going. As I said in my first rule, you have to be passionate about what you are writing for its own sake - not for the comments or rep you get.
Winning the campaign normally involves starting wars and playing aggressively, but this not what we expect heroes to do in most fiction. AAR writers often create characters who are heroes. Total War games tend to involve your faction expanding and conquering other clans or nations - however, heroes are more likely to end wars than begin them. Readers might wonder why, if the main characters are the good guys, they keep aggressively attacking others.
One way to resolve the problem of 'why good guys fight' is to create good characters who are not the leaders of your faction or the generals commanding the armies, as Merchant of Venice does in Way of the Bow. Another option is to embrace the darkness and create anti-heroes rather than heroes. This solution could create a new problem, though; what if our readers don't like our characters? We might give up on reading a book if we didn't like any of the main characters; we might worry that our readers will do the same with our AAR. However, in the hands of a skilled writer, such as the author of the legendary AAR I am Skantarios, this new problem can be overcome.
The TV Tropes entry for I am Skantorios contains an impressive list of reasons why Skantarios is an anti-hero. He behaves with cruelty and ruthlessness towards his enemies, including prisoners and civilians in captured cities. Someone who behaved that way today could be prosecuted in a war crimes tribunal, however the popularity of this AAR suggests that an evil protagonist is not a barrier to successful writing. There are ways to make an evil character compelling, despite their disturbing deeds. For example, you can provide insight into the character's backstory, showing what motivates them to act in this way. While the facts that the father of Skantarios was murdered by an Egyptian assassin and that Skantarios often fights against superior numbers would not justify or excuse the slaughter of civilians in a trial for war crimes, they can make it easier to keep reading.
There are other options. If we start as a small faction, then we can plausibly present our character as defending against the aggression of others. Of course, that only works until the point at which our faction becomes large and powerful. This is not necessarily a problem. An AAR does not have to tell the story of a whole campaign; you could show how your nation survived the attacks of powerful rivals, rising to become a major player in the affairs of the world.
Alternatively, you could set up situations where your expanding empire will face even more powerful enemies, through your choices in game-play, modding or roleplaying. For example, a Rome II player could use the Guaranteed Major Faction Empires mod and/or a mod for more aggressive AI to provide more challenging opponents in the later stages of the campaign. If your AAR involved your faction fighting an alliance of three enemy states, you could simply declare war on those three factions in the game. In your AAR, your explanation for how this war started could be different.
An AAR can simply report what happens in your campaign, but it does not have to, as Shankbot de Bodemloze explained in When Life Gives You Lemons. As Morpheus said to Neo in The Matrix, your character might not need to dodge bullets. Shankbot wrote that, if a character dies in the campaign but you want to continue to use the character in the AAR, then you can do so:-
Yes, you are hearing me right - continue the game as you would even though your character is dead. The readers don't have to know, and you don't have to include pictures of him/her, heck you could use older ones but remove the traits/age section. This is, surprisingly, the least disruptive in terms of the writing, as you can just keep moving it forward until a more convenient place of death - of course you could be really clever and save the death notification pic that appears until a time when you need it.
When Masako – the woman Nobushige loves and will eventually marry – is injured by an assassin sent to kill Nobushige, Nobushige starts a war to eradicate the clan who sent the assassin. Despite having a reputation for being more of a thinker than his brother, Nobushige's only motivation for this is a desire for revenge – a desire he justifies to himself as being something he's doing for Masako, even though he knows she would be horrified at the revenge he chooses to take.
Nobody is a knight in shining armour all day every day in real life, so they shouldn’t be in your AAR. Give them real problems, real dilemmas, and they will come to life in front of you.
3. The problem of a lack of time to continue your AAR
Some writers spend a lot of time on their AARs, writing and editing thousands of words and carefully creating a long series of screenshots. For some writers, this works well. For others, this makes it too difficult to keep writing their AAR. This might cause some people to conclude that writing an AAR is not for them. If this is an issue for you, then you have several options.
Your AAR does not have to tell the story of a whole campaign. You could tell the story of how your faction defeated a particular nation or a specific general. Your chapters do not have to contain thousands of words. For example, an update for Nad's EB AAR - Rome v1.21 might contain just 300 words, yet this is an impressive and enjoyable AAR. You could set yourself the challenge of writing an AAR in which every chapter is within the word limit which is used for the Writers' Study Tale of the Week competition (entries have to be between 200 words and 500 words). If you find the process of creating suitable pictures to be time-consuming, then you could use only one picture in each chapter (this would be similar to Tale of the Week). Some AAR writers use very few images, or none at all, and attract and entertain their readers nevertheless.
Another option for making your AAR manageable is to only post updates occasionally. New AAR writers often post a large number of updates in a short time. There is nothing wrong with that, if you are enjoying it; I did the same thing with my first two AARs. The potential downsides are that readers might struggle to keep up with your story, that posting updates quickly tends to give you less time to edit them and that, when you run out of updates and have less time, you might give up on your AAR. You could post updates once a week, or once or twice a month. There is nothing wrong with taking a break and returning to your AAR after a week, a month or a year if you need to. If you know that you will not be able to post updates for a specific period of time, then you can inform your readers in a post on your AAR.
4. The problem of writer's block
What can we do when we get stuck, when we have no ideas about what to write next? In the first episode in season 1 of the Writing Excuses podcast, three published authors, Brandon Sanderson, Howard Taylor and Dan Wells, discuss how they come up with ideas for writing. Their suggestions include doing something which relaxes you, discussing your story ideas with others, listening to dramatic music and writing down ideas as soon as you think of them. Sometimes it helped them to go the gym, do chores, or go on a walk - doing something which used some but not all of their attention.
Different things work for different people, as this podcast shows. McScottish, responding to a question in the Writers' Lounge from a writer about finding inspiration to write, said:-
... when I write an AAR or participate in a role-play or whatever I like to 'go ham' with it - I will download books regarding the topic, scour the internet for information, even go as far as buying books to read through them. Even books not on the subject sometimes help. For example, I wanted to write an AAR on the Late Roman Empire, so I spent hours of days pawing through Karen R. Dixon & Pat Southern books, reading Ammianus Marcellinus, and generally getting a feel for the time, place and people. On the other side of the spectrum, I read a book on the Pakeha Maori of New Zealand, and inadvertently started spewing ideas that had almost nothing to do with it!
As the creative writing professor and novelist Colum McCann showed in an article, So you want to be a writer?, sometimes when a writer cannot add new words to a story, we can cut them instead - and sometimes simple determination can overcome writer's block:-
Don’t worry so much about your word count. Your word cut is more important. You have to sit there sharpening that red pencil or hitting the delete button or flinging the pages into the fire. Often, the more words you cut, the better. A good day might actually be a hundred words fewer than you had yesterday. Even no words on the page is better than no time at the page at all.
Just keep your arse in the chair. Arse in the chair. Arse in the chair.
Stare the blank page down.
Just keep your arse in the chair. Arse in the chair. Arse in the chair.
Stare the blank page down.
For more ideas about overcoming writer's block and generating ideas, I recommend listening to the podcast and reading previous Critic's Quill articles, such as Robin de Bodemloze's article on Writer's Block and Juvenal's Writing: What's the Point? plus the rebuttal which follows by m_1512. If you would like to use Critic's Quill articles to help you to become a more confident writer, you will find a complete list in the Log Book.
5. The problem of enjoying your campaign too much (or not enough)
What should we do when we have played ahead and our AAR has fallen behind?
There are different ways of dealing with this problem. For example your AAR can suddenly jump forward in time if you want it to. McScottish wrote an Empire Total War AAR, The Sun Never Sets, in which he skipped over most of his conquest of North America - presumably because he was more interested in what happened afterwards. Another option is to start your AAR later on in your campaign, as Zeion did in his Warhammer AAR The Age of Peace, which starts after the Chaos invasion. (Having no experience of Warhammer, I confess that I have never played through a Chaos invasion; it seems that this feature is intended to provide players with a late-game challenge, like Realm Divide in Shogun 2 and civil wars in Rome 2).
One option is to have an AAR campaign with one faction, and a 'not for an AAR' campaign at the same time. The 'not for AAR' campaign can be with a different faction (or in a different TW game), to make it easier to differentiate, or with the same faction, if you want to try out possible long-term storylines for your AAR. In the Iceni campaign which Andraste's Children is based on, I played many turns ahead of the current stage of the campaign, experimenting with two ways for the Iceni to enter mainland Europe. These two routes resulted in very different outcomes for my faction, providing options for the development of the story.
6. The problem of corrupted saves
It can be immensely frustrating, when we have invested much in a campaign, to be unable to continue because the game crashes when a saved game is loaded. Alternatively, you might set yourself a difficult challenge in your campaign, perhaps beginning with a small faction with powerful rivals nearby, only to find that your rivals send armies which you cannot defeat. Of course, if we lose our saved game early in a campaign - or are defeated early on - then we can start again with a new campaign. There are some obvious things which we can try: if we discover that a particular mod (or combination of mods) tends to crash the game, we can search for a solution or try different mods. We can play a 'test campaign' before playing the campaign on which our AAR will be based. We can ask for advice on the Strategy & Tactics sub-forum for the relevant game on TWC.
But what if our saved game becomes corrupted after we have published several - or many - chapters? Justinian Australis experienced this problem with his epic The Last Pagan Emperor, after publishing over 80 chapters! Sometimes, a solution can be found to enable the player to continue. Perhaps returning to an earlier save and making a different choice can enable you to get around the problem. If you have already published many chapters and if your new campaign does not follow the same sequence of events, then of course this can be a problem. Perhaps in your original campaign, your Roman Empire invaded the Greek city-states? However, in the new campaign, your Roman Empire had to fight a war against Carthage and their allies in the west, which prevented you from expansion in the east. In this new campaign, the Greek city states are still free. Events like these could be explained within your story. You could invent Greek heroes who led their widespread uprisings, liberating Greek cities from Roman control, and tell the story of how you re-captured them (even though, in your new campaign, you are capturing them for the first time.)
However, perhaps the events of your new campaign contradict the story which you have already published in a way which you cannot avoid or explain. One option would to tell your readers that your new chapters came from a different in-world writer. Different history books can provide different interpretations of the same events. They might emphasize different facts and even report facts differently - particularly for events which happened a long time before the history books were written. Maybe your previous chapters and your new chapters came from history books which were written two or three centuries after these events? Perhaps, in your previous campaign, the city of Massalia was overrun by barbarians from the east - and your previous chapters commented on that, because it mattered for your story? In your new campaign, however, Massalia fell to barbarians from the west and you feel obliged to report this in your AAR, too. This could be a situation where different history books make different claims. This could enable you, and the readers of your AAR, to accept the differences between the old chapters and the new ones, and move on.
Alternatively, what if your old computer stopped working and the computer which replaced it doesn't run that game, or that mod, as well (or at all)? Surely, if you cannot play the game, there is no way to continue the AAR - or is there? Hitai de Bodemloze reported this problem when writing Yōkai his magical Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai AAR. On May 17, 2015 - after posting over 40 chapters - Hitai reported some bad news. He could not resolve the technical problem which prevented him from either continuing his campaign or starting a new one. Did this mean that he could not continue his AAR?
I had a bright idea. It might not be pretty and it might be a little radical, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let this story die and I'll do whatever it takes to finish this.
7. The problem of losing interest in (or losing the ability to play) the campaign
What if you lose interest in the campaign or can no longer play the campaign and want to continue the story? You still have options. The remarkable journey of Forgotten Tales of Germania by m_1512 provides an example of both options. If you would like to continue your campaign with a different game, you can do this. We have already seen that Hitai did this out of necessity when writing Yōkai.
What Hitai did by necessity, m_1512 did by choice, moving Forgotten Tales of Germania from its original home (the Rome II AARs sub-forum) to a new home (the Attila AARs sub-forum) and continuing his AAR with the new game. Hitai's Yōkai is a hard narrative AAR: the events in the story do not depend on the campaign (or even on any campaign being played.) The game provides the setting, the inspiration and some images; it does not dictate events in the AAR. Writing a complete AAR in hard narrative (as opposing to having some chapters which went outside the scope of a campaign) prompted Hitai to speculate about whether his story was still an AAR. He concluded that it was, so Yōkai remains in the AAR sub-forum for Shogun 2 (including Fall of the Samurai). While writing Forgotten Tales, m_1512 made a different choice:-
Now, I will continue this ... this writing is pretty much has nothing to do with any TW game. So if the WS staff thinks so too, they can move this to the CW forums
Conclusion
I hope that this article has shown how creativity and determination can enable writers to overcome even the thorniest of difficulties. Like Neo in The Matrix, being aware of those problems might enable you to anticipate and avoid these problems - to dodge bullets. I hope that these suggestions will help writers to think of solutions for the difficulties we can face when we write AARs. Thinking of your own solution might enable you to write an AAR which will stand out and inspire the next generation of writers.
When you encounter difficulties with writing, don't forget that there is a large collection of Critic's Quill articles available and you can find them in the Log Book. Also, writers can ask for advice or suggestions from other writers on the chat and feedback thread in the Writers' Lounge. Thank you for reading, see you in the Writers' Study!
[Thank you to McScottish for his suggestion which was included in the section on writer's block and to Caillagh de Bodemloze for your help with editing this article.]
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