#writing elysium

[satelliteaccident]

Writing Elytically: This Time, It's Details

(Last time, it was big-picture stuff!)

So you want to format your fic like the game

I'll start with two words: collect screenshots. The more in-game references you have for those "but how does the game do X?" moments, the easier it will be to find answers.

In addition to screenshots, try FAYDE, which is a searchable database of in-game text (including variables!) and a load-bearing part of my DE ficwriting process. I cannot say enough nice things about it and about @morgue-xiiv, who made and hosts it.

Next up: keep a style sheet, and update it like Kim will be *disappointed* if you don't.

What goes in a style sheet? All the zillion formatting guidelines and decisions you make when you put word to keyboard.

For example, while there are exceptions, the game's skillset dialogues usually follow this case-sensitive template:

SKILLNAME [Difficulty: Outcome] – What the skill says goes here, and it doesn't take quotation marks.

When you plug in the specifics, the result looks like this:

RHETORIC [Trivial: Success] – Words can be exchanged for goods and services.

Note the square brackets and the space-en dash-space that follows them. An en dash is this guy – not a hyphen (that's shorter -) or an em dash (that's longer —).

Also, the body text/content of dialogue uses different dashes again: two hyphens in a row. Here's what that looks like:

I took a screenshot because on Tumblr, some browsers will automatically convert two consecutive hyphens to an em dash, which is a great way to make copy editors very sad.

Exceptions

We actually just saw one! That's because Perception follows:

PERCEPTION (SENSE) [Difficulty: Outcome] – What the skill says goes here, and it doesn't take quotation marks.

. . . except sometimes, when the game does it like:

PERCEPTION (Sense) [Difficulty: Outcome] – What the skill says goes here, and it doesn't take quotation marks.

I'll never know why they're different, but I would guess the team didn't have a "final reads are FINAL, stop re-writing after them you hooligans" policy, which intellectually I recognise is unlikely to end in apocalypse and emotionally I experience with the editorial equivalent of the meat sweats.

Another exception: Coach Physical Instrument just yells at you without following the template, which seems on brand:

COACH PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT – Bracing yet homophobic encouraging-slash-berating goes here!

Weirdly(?), Limbic System and Ancient Reptilian Brain do the same.

Other skills follow the template first, *then* just chime in the second-plus time they appear in a single dialogue event, like this trio from The Whole Sorry Way Down:

VOLITION [Challenging: Success] – Hey. Loser! This isn’t your bed. Get up. PAIN THRESHOLD [Medium: Success] – Oh, *god*.  PERCEPTION (HEARING) [Easy: Success] – Was that springs? And footsteps? They were moving away from you. VOLITION – What? Who cares? Get up, and cut the dramatics. PAIN THRESHOLD – They’re not dramatics. You’re in pain.  PERCEPTION (HEARING) – That’s… definitely footsteps. Getting closer, this time.

Oh my god, what else?!

SO MUCH ELSE. Let's see . . .

Active skill checks

Can I find a screenshot of one at the moment? No, because that would be easy. *facepalm* But here's how I formatted them in M+P when I was still obsessively checking the game to see how these things worked:

1. [Skill Level#: Difficulty] [Thing you're going to do.] "Thing you're going to say, if anything!"

And a concrete example:

YOU – 1. [Strike a Sam Bo pose.] “If you can best me in HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT.” 2. [Move aside.] “Sure, c’mon in.” 3. [Composure 15: Heroic] [Move aside.] “Of course. I’ve missed you.” Composure: Failure YOU – You move aside and get as far as “Of” before some involuntary emotion-muscle spasms. Your throat feels small, your face hot. Fat, guileless tears vanish into your beard.

Note that the dialogue option you "select" is bold, as is the outcome line. Also note that [Action you'll take] ends up in square brackets, but if you're going to lie, then you do it like so: (Lie.)

Miscellanea

Place names: Spelling and hyphenation can be a pain. If not using your own notes, I suggest FAYDE and screenshots; or, for variety, screenshots and FAYDE. Google is okay, but sometimes, it lies.

If you can't find evidence of how the game does it, make a decision and slap it in your style sheet. You're the captain now!

Tricky fish:

The place is Sur-la-Clef; the language is Suresne.

The place is Vesper; the language is Vespertine.

The place is Revachol; the demonym is Vacholière (Suresne) or Revacholian (Vespertine).

LA REVACHOLIÈRE – IF SHE IS SPEAKING, SHE SPEAKS LIKE THIS. Shivers doesn't, though, unless La Rev speaks "through" it.

Hjelmdallermann (bless you)

Satellite Officer X or Satellite-Officer X: The game does both, so pick the one you prefer -- or go full homage and switch it up.

Sam Bo

Wirrâl (I fucked up the accent in M+P and it still bothers me tbh)

There are always more, so keep adding to that style sheet. Kim's depending on you. <3

[unitedstates0fdakota]

What the fuck do you mean you can ask Kim if u can work on his car with him and depending on how much u geeked out about the car beforehand he has varying levels of enthusiasm about the idea

That last one tho like bro is in love. U charmed him so much with ur car knowledge that he’s actually entertaining the idea of letting u near his car. That’s next level dude

[mrtequilasunset]

Unprovoked

[spilledkaleidoscope]

Tbh Kim probably only seems put together bc he's standing next to Harry. He keeps licking his pens. He has a million things in his pockets including several trash bags, rustling everywhere he goes. He spent two days staring into the lobby of a hostel instead of investigating. He's in historic pilot cosplay and calls it his uniform. He does crosswords for fun. He can say anything with a straight face. He starts randomly taking notes during normal conversations. He never takes off his gloves. He thinks he can impersonate a junkie. He talks to his car. He's Kimball. He's the weirdo from the 57th

[stil-lindigo]

I have so many thoughts about how, in a world where so many in-game companions are barely tolerated or even outright hated, kim kitsuragi is universally beloved. How much it speaks to us that in our worse moments, we all hope to deserve the begrudging kindness he provides. He will not coddle you. He will tell you to get your shit together. But he will support you when you sing karaoke, off-key and mournful. He will play a board game with you in the middle of a murder investigation. He may dance with you inside a church. And in the end, when you leave this waking dream of an investigation to face the smoking wreckage of your life, he might go with you.

[zkyeline]

Something small n silly <3

[spindlewoed]

Look, listen. The smoker on the balcony is obsessed with beauty and the fine arts while Cindy the skull is a contemporary artist all about activism and I need them to interact so badly because they would have THEE most heated art debate of the century. Cindy would eat him alive but that's not the point their back and forth would be legendary you don't even know. Lesbian on gay man violence.

[matchbookstory]

I do think it's really interesting that Harry can say the same things to Kim that he said to Jean before Jean left him in Martinaise, but I think it speaks more to Harry and his current state than it says about their dynamic. Sure, it's contentious, we know this. Jean is clearly upset and bitter about it, but it really has nothing to do with him, does it?

Harry can run the same script on Kim because these are his weapon words. This is the self isolation script. These are the words that demonstratively WORK to drive people away from him. So he can finish killing himself. Even if he doesn't remember that's what he's doing.

Because it's about spinning the same tape again and again. Cycles he can't break. Dream the same dream over and over. Obliterate yourself, wake up, remember, obliterate yourself again. Drive your partner away. Now drive your new partner away. Decide to kill yourself. Change your mind, embrace the world. Be beaten down and decide to kill yourself again. Wake up. Remember.

After life--death. After death--life again.

He is the infernal engine, cycling eternally.

Unless, somehow, this time, he can escape. And this starts here, maybe. Kim will not fuck off. Kim would be glad to cramp his style. He actively enjoys style cramping, even.

(It starts in other places, too, of course.)

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[blood-teeth]

E N T E R T H E L A B Y R I N T H

In the Labyrinth, they talk of gods.

They whisper between their fingers and sweeten their breath with the tales of titans of old who once stood so tall that a single breath would cause earth-tremors, their steps reshaping the ground trod beneath them. Their fingers were the tools that smoothed the mountains into points, shaped and carved the ridges and valleys in between. If you hike far enough, one woman claims, if you travel to a point where the oxygen is thin and your vision blacks, you can make out a partial print against the mountainside. You can run your own fingers along its length and still feel the titan’s warmth as if his palm were pressed right against yours.

The woman says, It is a thing of worship. It is a thing of devotion.

In the Labyrinth, they ask you to make your body anew before the King of the High Hills. They say that you are alive because you must suffer for the life and love of the Lord, that you must open your body and let him lick along your flesh so that he may taste the endlessness of his perpetual reign.

In the Labyrinth, there is no escape from his touch.

“You have a heavy burden upon you,” the headmaster was saying, teeth and eyes all a glitter under the amber cast candles. “I am not unsympathetic to the arduous path ahead of you—but please understand that this suffering must be experienced for the longevity of the king, for the beautiful life ahead of him. Only he is the one who can shed mortality and raise to the gods, because he is the only one strong enough, courageous enough, to count the cost of living forever. You must succeed where others have failed. You, this class, this is our last chance to mend what has been made broken. You must. You must.”

The Mouths of Elysium is a dark-academia fantasy created with Twine where your choices matter to the story. You live inside the Labyrinth, a maze that hates to become known with walls and paths that change every hour. The center of the Labyrinth sits a university that has been there since the beginning of time; its only purpose is to recruit students who can solve the puzzle of life, who can create an elixir that would allow the King of the High Hills to live past the length of forever. Failure means a fate worse than death.

You are one of those students.

Althea Callaghan - You know her in death. She has been the taste of rot against your tongue, the anger and hurt in your palms. You see the nice, beautiful lines of her teeth and become a creature of grief unfolding unto yourself. Debase yourself with the fervent want of her. Bend at your waist and beg for forgiveness.

You hate her. You want to watch her bleed. She feels the exact same about you, but what she doesn't know is that every waking moment of your life is dedicated to her.

The Princess/Prince - The forgotten child of the throne. The 405th child of His glorious reign. Divinity runs through their veins, the heir to so much power, but they will never see themselves rule the unforgiving landscape of the Labyrinth. Their fate is to die and be buried amongst the endless graves of their dead brothers and sisters. They must do this so the King may live forever.

A fully customizable MC including gender, appearance, and sexuality

A landscape of horror. A landscape that hates you and everyone who might try to understand it. Go beyond the walls and be witness to a reality worse than death

Key choices that will influence your game and experience. Will you succeed or fail?

Learn what it means to be forgiven. Learn what it means to suffer. Become devotion. Become loyalty. Make your body anew before the King of the High Hills

DEMO (updated 6/10/24)

[suresne]

dolores dei + joyce messier on harry being uniquely "insane"

[satelliteaccident]

hi there i recently read main and perdition and i just wanted to say (again) how much i liked it. you said that you may have some pointers on how to write in the style of the game and i actually wanted to come back to that because i want to try to write some myself soon. if you've got any tips i'm all ears. hope this isn't weird or anything 😅

hi em! not only is it not weird, you've made my day. thank you for the kind words, and thank you for giving me the chance to blather about writing and (hopefully) be useful.

*clears throat* *takes off "just chillin" hat and puts on "guy who sometimes knows what he's talking about" hat, which mostly means remembering how to find the shift key*

Hi! I'm Six. I'm an editor who has worked in the publishing industry for about ten years across print, web, radio, podcast and television.

I also write Disco Elysium fanfic. In the process of planning and writing Main and Perdition, I worked hard to craft something that I hoped would play, intelligently, in the DE sandbox.

I didn't wholly succeed. Time permitting, I'm happy to grab a figurative highlighter and point out spots where I failed, why, and what to do differently if you don't wanna do the same dumb things I did.

But this post is not that post! Instead, it's...

How To Mimic Style: Tips For Writing Your Disco Elysium Fic

Pick your playthrough.

One of the most beautiful, epic, fascinating things about DE is its multivariance. That trait extends to Harry. Is he a pacifist sober Sorry Cop who throws his gun into the sea, or a fiery anti-racist who throws hands and roundhouse kicks, or a ~mystic visionary~ who hears voices and does pyrholidon about it?

Yes! And no. Which is phenomenal to experience as a game player, but it's table-flippingly antithetical to writing a fic with a coherent emotional through-line.

So decide which Harry you're writing. It'll help you narrow down what your guy might or might not do, and it'll also help you write characters (Kim, Jean, Judit, Garte, Sylvie, and so many more) whose responses greatly depend on how Harry behaves.

It'll also help you spot places where the game, in its richness, has left space for you to write into questions it leaves unanswered -- but more on this when we get to tolerating discomfort.

Embrace the skillset.

It's daunting at first, but working with it rather than avoiding it helps you understand who's in Harry's head, what they do, and how mighty they are. (It also helps to pay attention to how they talk, but that's less about writing DE fic and more about honing an eye and ear for dialogue -- yet another possible future post.)

To help me with who and what when I was drafting M+P, I made this spreadsheet:

It was my zero-draft bestie because it helped me figure out what skills might comment in any given moment, which I suspect contributes to the places where the fic succeeds at feeling similar to the game. Feel free to use/share if it helps you, too.

As for how mighty, that's where stats come in. I didn't do a full stat sheet for M+P Harry, but I did decide his base attributes (INT-PSY-FYS-MOT). The game lets you put a total of 12 points across them; a base of 3 is average, with 1 being shithouse and 6 being HARDCORE TO THE MEGA. I also chose his signature skill (Inland Empire, which is my favourite one to write because I too am a middle-aged white bi-sexual sopping-wet-dog guy who never became a poet or an entroponaut).

I could then do the maths when deciding, "How hard would it be to succeed at [thing happening in the story]? Is that something this Harry is capable of? If so, is it obvious to him that he'll succeed, or would it *Princess Bride voice* take a miracle?"

And then, when I'm on my A-game, I follow up with my favourite DE-writing question: Regardless of whether Harry *could* succeed, would it be a chewier, more compelling story if he failed? (Yet again, more on this when we talk discomfort.)

So. Difficulty levels: know 'em, check 'em, put 'em in a stew fic. I worked from this screenshot, though I don't remember where I took it (this was at least a year ago, ack). Apologies to whichever wiki I have failed:

Let shit go wrong.

This is hard. It requires tolerating discomfort -- which is already hard -- in a situation where you are at the keyboard and can make it stop, which makes it that much harder.

But shit going wrong is the absolute beating heart of DE.

Let's weave some threads together. In the first section, I mentioned writing into spaces the game makes with unanswered questions; in the second, I mentioned making space in your fic-writing process for skill checks to fail.

Letting shit go wrong is how we as fic writers can expand into those spaces -- and when we do, sometimes, something beautiful is allowed to happen.

While I leave it to each reader to decide whether anything beautiful did in fact happen, here's one example of how this process unfolded in my practice.

I hated reading the solution to "Rigorous Self-Critique." *Hated* it. I hated what it showed me about Harry's callousness, his violence, his utter disregard for boundaries. Most of all, I hated this:

You held a young woman by the arm and kept her in your apartment for 20 minutes against her will. 

What the fuck. What the fuck? Who *does* that? (Harry.) *Why?* (Because he wanted to.)

*Fuck*.

This section, you may have noticed, left me feeling kind of a lot of discomfort.

I could've pushed that feeling away. I could've made excuses. ("I mean, the pale makes people confused about which memories are theirs and which are someone else's, right? That must be what happened, because Harry would *never* do that.") I could've done mental gymnastics to avoid the conclusion that what Harry did was wrong. ("Well, maybe he was *helping* her, and he just doesn't remember!")

I wouldn't have been -- and you, person reading this, wouldn't be -- bad for doing any of those things. Life is hard. Sometimes, elective hardness (shush) is too much. That's okay.

But I sat with the discomfort. I followed it into the space in the game: what happened in those 20 minutes? Who was this young woman -- did Harry even know or care? How did she escape? I followed it into the space in my story: what would happen if Harry, as he is post-Martinaise, failed a check (in the fic, he "succeeds", but the outcome of that success is failure #justlittleelysiumthings) and recalled what happened?

And I ended up with M+P.

It's not a perfect fic. It may not even be a *good* fic; I've spent too much time with it to have an opinion on its goodness. But it is absolutely an answer-through-story, and I feel less discomfort and more satisfaction, more joy, for having written it. I hope this post helps you have that experience, too.

[swamp-cryptids]

I love how intentionally Kim and Harry are written to contrast one another down to the detail of Kim being an absolute skeptic who doesn’t entertain the idea of the supernatural vs Harry having actual real prophetic visions one of which is required to complete the game

[spilledkaleidoscope]

Several people have pointed out that they haven't seen art of Kim doing this, so I am fixing that today

[juniesfairies]

saw an artist draw Kim with forget me nots and Harry with apricots and now I need to run laps around my room. Past life vs past world, the desire for change in ones own circumstances that may affect the world around them. Ideology as a placeholder for want. Symbols and objects that humans attribute to complex things and reminders, appreciative and revolutionary statements, as messages to others. I think apricots and forget me nots grow in the same garden in a miraculous patch of fertile soil in Revachol West somewhere, where the ground is kinder.

[artandlurking]

REACTION SPEED [Medium: Failure] - With a swift motion, the lieutenant snatches the cigarette from your fingers.

LOGIC - He's already smoked his one a day. He's breaking his rule.

KIM KITSURAGI - The lieutenant's face is ever so stoic. He does not break eyes contact as he take one long, slow drag out of your cigarette.

YOU - "Kim, your cheating. You already had yours!"

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] He grins down at you in the low light. The ember of the cigarette is reflected in his glasses and wisp of smokes slowly curls from his lips.

KIM KITSURAGI - "Doesn't count if it yours, detective."