I'm writing this one near a window, in daylight, which is unusual for me. Most of what I make is made in the dark. But the dark is where you start things, and this is a different kind of writing — the kind you do after a thing is, for the moment, finished.
The coffee is the same. The cup is different.
The second game has a first draft.
The Wake is a small visual novel. About the same length as Last Orders — half an hour, free, with a few branching choices. You play the night caretaker at a small-town funeral home called Whitlock & Sons. Four nights, four guests, four last conversations.
Their names are Eleanor, Danny, Owen, and Walter. They are not who I thought they would be when I started, which is, I think, how it's supposed to go.
I thought I was writing about death. I think I might have been writing about something else.
Somewhere in writing the third character — a man who had given fifty years of his life to a quiet job he eventually stopped believing in — I caught myself writing a line I did not quite know I had been waiting to write. I will not give the line away here, because it belongs to him, and the game is where he gets to say it. But the shape of it was this:
The work was big enough to hold me whether I believed in it or not.
I wrote that down for him to say. And then I sat with it, and it occurred to me that I had been doing exactly the thing he was describing, for some time now, without quite naming it. Smoulderhouse is small. The audience is small. There is no certainty that any of this work will be read, watched, played, or remembered.
I have been making it anyway. Slowly. In the dark. Mostly alone.
What I think I learned, in writing The Wake, is that the making is the part that holds. Not the receiving. Not the reading. Not the numbers. The making. The setting-down of one careful line after another. The trimming of the lamp a quarter-inch high. The opening of the page to a fresh sheet. The fact that there is a kettle on, and someone has set out a cup, and the porch light has been turned on, and these are small things that do not require an audience to be worth doing.
Other people have learned this earlier in their lives than I did. I am not particularly proud of how long it took me. I am only telling you because the character who taught it to me did it gently, and I would like to pass that gentleness on.
There is something I did not expect about finishing a draft.
The four people I just wrote — Eleanor, Danny, Owen, Walter — are now, in some quiet way, done. I will revise their scenes. I will catch lines that don't ring quite right. I will trim and tighten and watch them through one more time. But the discovering of them is finished. I will not get to meet them for the first time again.
The closest thing I can compare it to is finishing the Harry Potter series the first time, and still wanting the magic. The world existed. The people in it were real. And now the last page was turned, and they were finished, and the wanting-them-back did not have anywhere to go.
That feeling, it turns out, can come from the other side of the page too. From the writer's side, looking down at four people who were strangers on Friday and are family by Sunday, and not knowing how to talk about it yet.
Eleanor had sea-blue eyes and kept a porch light on for forty years. Danny had ink-stained hands and a notebook of sixty-three years of names. Owen had hands like a man who had lifted things carefully for a long time. Walter had a small, kind smile and an old story.
I am the kind of person who would have liked to be warned that this happens. Nobody warned me. I am telling you so that if you make a thing, and the thing ends, and you find yourself still wanting the magic — you will know it is a real feeling, and not just yours.
The light at the window has shifted while I have been writing this. I have stopped noticing the time, which is, I think, the small daily luxury of work that is allowed to take as long as it takes.
The next part of the work is different than the writing. Revision. Backgrounds. Music. The hundred small kindnesses you do to a draft to ready it for a stranger's reading. None of it is the same as the discovering. It is, instead, the kind of work that is bigger than the believing in it.
I am ready for it. Not because I am sure of how it will go — I am not — but because I have learned, this weekend, that the readiness is not the point.
The light is the point. The kettle is the point. The setting-down of one careful line after another is the point. The rest of it is what happens to the work after it has been made.
Leave the porch light on. I'll be in here, working.