me: "post apocalyptic game"

creative directors: *cheering*

me: "but you can't have a religious cult in the game that eschews technology because of the hubris of the old world"

"creative" directors:

me: "sorry you can't have post-apocalyptic biker gangs, slavers, or cannibals either"

people who peter principled their way into a position of creative leadership despite having nothing new or interesting to say or do and whose success comes mostly from big budgets:

I'm not doing this to be mean, I'm pointing out how common the crutch is and suggesting it's deeply ingrained in a way that leads some people to feel defensive. My hope is that the humorous context will empower you to consider post apocalypses that exist outside the predictable

My belief is that when we rely on tropes as puzzle pieces for our narratives, we end up repeating other stories but losing the human elements of them; if we come from a human place, we might tell new, vibrant, and more truthful stories

Anyways, consider this your homework. Pitch a story--game, book, movie, whatever--that takes place in a world where an apocalyptic event has destroyed the society of its time, makes the world around our heroes dangerous, and features none of the tropes from the earlier tweets

Like I might go "in a world where the pain and misery of the Great War resulted in horrific monstrosities stalking the fields of Europe, an ugly little thief rides one of the massive fortress trains into the walled remnants of Paris, determined to steal from a powerful wizard."

"in 2086, a group of teens decides in a flooded earth decide to scavenge the remains of an abandoned spaceport to build a rocket that will take them to the moon."

you can do so many post-apocalyptic stories that don't rely on biker gangs, slavers, religious cults that hate technology, and cannibals. To do this is a woeful lack of imagination.

One of the best writing teachers I ever had (and I got taught by a guy who literally won an oscar for writing good and a guy who used to work for william s. burroughs and was a cult hit novelist in his own right)--once made us all write a story with absolutely 0 death.

EVERYONE in class moaned, tried to get an exception, tried to make a way around it. She remained resolute. "No deaths."

"Why?"

"Because death is an easy way to raise the stakes and if you use it like a crutch you won't learn how to write interesting stakes."

This is the same thing--if you're going with slavers and cannibals and biker gangs and cults, you are just doing what's safe; you're doing what you've seen before. Your story might have good PARTS but you're relying on predictable tensions. Push out of your comfort zone!!

I figured out what she meant when I tried to write a sad story that wasn't about death and like half of what I initially came up with was like "at a funeral--wait, no..." "in a hospital--shit, okay, hmm" "cancer--oh goddammit"

I find restraints more interesting than prompts. I know a lot of people hate them--but those people are, I hate to say it, intellectually lazy. They want the comfort of their first thought; the real, interesting creativity comes from going "what if I can't use my go-tos?" imo

(I think everything I've come up with passes three checks before I send it out into the world:

1) what is something that is uncommon about it?
2) what is a constraint that makes it interesting?
3) are its characters acting in a way that accurately reflects human nature?)

(so that leads to a pitch that's like 'what if two bodybuilding brothers went to rob an expensive race prize in Japan during the 1980s, but didn't know about the existence of yakuza and were about to find out?)

(being bodybuilders limits their ability to disguise themselves or sneak about, which are common aspects of heist fiction)