The art of storytelling is in development, not fact sheets. There are posts you have to hammer into the ground from the start just to get going, but if they don’t hold up the house you build, you can change them or take them out. Karen Traviss Read Quote
Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it’s a flat experience for the reader. Karen Traviss Read Quote
Whether I build a character from the ground up or develop one, whether within my own copyright or in licensed work, I can step into that character’s mind. It takes a kind of voluntary dissociation akin to method acting, military planning, marketing, or detective work: to think like the other guy and work out what he’s going to do next. Karen Traviss Read Quote
I’m still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events. Karen Traviss Read Quote
I’m a visual person – when I write, my input is always visual. I worked in television for several years. Karen Traviss Read Quote
The thing about games is, players often say they don’t care about story, but then if you took the story out, what would their reaction be? If no one cared about story, we’d all still be playing Pac-Man. There’s nothing wrong with Pac-Man, but the point is, there’s a genre of games in which you want to become part of that world. Karen Traviss Read Quote
People lose it when I say this, but I’m a novelist who doesn’t read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I’m also a game writer who doesn’t play games – I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately. Karen Traviss Read Quote
I’d probably play games obsessively if I didn’t write, although I admit I don’t read novels partly because I don’t enjoy it, not just because it’s the wrong side of the creator-consumer barrier for me. I’m a visual writer. I think in moving 3D images and write down what I observe. Karen Traviss Read Quote
If you go back and look at the early promos for Gears 1, you’ll see just how different the characters were from the actual first game, both in appearance and background. And it’s an evolutionary process. Karen Traviss Read Quote
My books deliberately provide no answers or messages. I’m drilled in the habit of objectivity and also aware that the steady drip of fiction has more power than facts to shape opinion, so I handle it with caution. Karen Traviss Read Quote
