How do you approach the act of writing/creation in regards to the Lore? Do you work from an initial outline idea (either sourced from yourselves or elsewhere) and then add flesh, or do you pick a topic sans outline and see where the fancy takes you? How much of what you each write gets reviewed by the other? (I'm thinking that working so closely together gives you great opportunity to share and collaborate on most pieces).asked by DoublarThackery
TL;DRThe writers work both from their own ideas and from designers' pitches, use a worked-out outline for Squadron 42, and the lead writer reviews nearly everything while the other reads along.
Will Weissbaum:: We do... like you kinda mentioned, we do both processes, where sometimes it starts from an idea from us, and other times we're handed kind of a design pitch, and a designer will come to us demanding high quality lore - which we always deliver! You can go either way really... and so we talked about that a little bit before, but probably the interesting thing that we have haven't talked about is kind of how we coordinate between each other, and how being in the same office is fun and helpful. Oddly enough when I first started here I was, like slightly farther away from Dave and-...
Oh yeah. We had a smaller office so there was not room.
And our collaboration has definitely improved now that our desks are touching.
Yes, yes. But yeah, I mean sometimes we do take-... it sort of depends on what we're doing. For the Squadron 42 based stuff we have a very kind of rigid-... not rigid, but "worked-out" outline, that we're sort of going through and we're starting to work from. Particularly because as things come online asset-wise, we're sort of jumping around - we're not writing it from start to finish. Whereas something like a news dispatch for example, which we sort of alternate on, week in and and week out... I mean sometimes we'll sort of say, "hey, I got an idea. I'm thinking about doing this for Tuesdays's thing. What do you think?" and maybe talk it over, and other times it's just sort of a, "hey, I wrote this out. What do you think?" type thing. I mean, we review all of the stuff we write.
Yeah, Dave definitely reads pretty much 99% of everything that goes on, so he takes his Lead Writer position very serious. So, you know, it's of unified content through him. I don't necessarily look at everything, I try to read along, but, uhh... it's pretty great.