Welcome to the writing diary for Secrets of Sweettooth. In this article I track my process. It talks about problems and solutions, why I made certain decisions, or anything interesting that comes up while developing the story.
Which forces me to start by admitting a mistake: I forgot to write this diary until the book was already nearing completion.
Long story short: I’m currently going through strange times, working on this book at weird moments and weird devices, on little sleep. So my usual habits are somewhat unreliable, and the final version of the book will probably have a few more typos/mistakes than I’d like.
Because yes, even months after finishing the book, I am still in that strange and unreliable situation. So I have to accept, with pain in my heart, that I can’t be a perfectionist and have to release the “best I can do” for a few Wildebyte books.
So most of the below is an attempt at a reconstruction of what happened for the first ~11 chapters. And then some closing thoughts about things I learned and how difficult it remains to completely finish and self-publish a book.
Obviously, SPOILERS for the fifth book (and very light spoilers for others).
What’s the idea?
The general approach
This book takes place in so-called “match-three” games, like the famous Candy Crush.
That’s one of the reasons for writing it: most people know that game and would recognize it on sight.
The other reason is that it focuses on a recurring character (that popped in and out the previous few books) that was just too fun/interesting to leave on the backburner for too long.
The title “Secrets of Sweettooth” just sounded cool, so I planned it as the fifth book.
As the fourth book was nearly done, I had to flesh it out further. “Just write a story in a Candy Crush-like game” obviously isn’t much to go on. I also already made the cover (or a first draft, at least) for the silly reason of “my graphics software had already booted and with my broken laptop that’s a miracle, so let’s use that to our advantage”
I had several ideas or “requirements” going into this one.
- I wanted Wildebyte to take on some really weird forms. (Otherwise you quickly default to giving them some vaguely humanoid or animal form, which isn’t unique or interesting enough.) So, for example, they could accidentally enter the game being a candy.
- I wanted the “matching” aspect to be the core thread through the entire thing. Everything happens by matching. The story is about matching with another person (i.e. Wildebyte + Sweettooth) figuratively. => This makes it unique, fitting and streamlined.
- I wanted to end with them being sort-of-friends, to allow myself to use them both in later books. Which, in storytelling land, means we start with them hating each other and having no shot at being friends :p
Making it more specific
This is a fine general approach, but how to make it more specific?
I’ve learned that my hyperactive brain likes writing (and experiencing) stories broken into smaller “chunks”. For example, chapters 1-5 might be focused on one particular goal, then we get a new goal for chapters 6-10, and so forth. This basically turns a longer story into several short stories, which are easier to write and to focus on something (hopefully) cool.
For this book, I had the idea of creating a “loop” of Wildebyte trying to find their match.
- First few chapters, they try to fit in with the candies.
- Next few chapters, they try to fit in with the Native Entities.
- Then they try to get the researchers back into their life
- Until finally taking their last shot at Sweettooth.
This breaks the story into chunks of 4 or 5 chapters, which is small enough that I don’t really seek further structure or planning.
A first chapter
We need to start at chapter 1, so what will the “inciting incident” be? What is the specific, concrete start of this novel?
I like starting with a dilemma. End chapter 1 with an impossible choice between two things, or a hard choice that you know will have consequences. (This is a good idea in general, but especially to kick off a story.)
So I leaned into the idea of “Wildebyte is accidentally put into a horrible spot in this game”.
- This is a mistake and severely restricts what they can do. They hate it. The Memory Police admits to the mistake and tells him “come, I’ll get you out and move to another game”
- But then they see Sweettooth, and they desperately want to become friends with them. Walk between games together and not be alone anymore.
So they make the tough decision to stay in the game—accept the big challenge or the horrible consequences—just to have a change at befriending Sweettooth.
This felt like a big decision to me. One that shows just how desperate the Wildebyte is for companionship.
Chapters 1–6
These chapters are all about introducing the game rules and the fun new characters or ideas that will have a role in this novel.
Sweettooth, of course. The idea that everything moves through swapping and that everything can be matched.
But Ad Brad was also planned from the start. Ads are basically everywhere in mobile games, especially match-three games, so I wanted to include it early in the Wildebyte Arcades. Making it a character who constantly tries to sell weird products just felt fun.
Because the researchers and native entities will have their own “match chunk”, they also needed to be hinted at or introduced in some small way early on.
The one thing that wasn’t planned, was the rivalry and attack from Bluetooth.
For this book, I didn’t want to immediately start the same way as the previous books. (By introducing Wildebyte’s Lost Memory that they want, and/or introducing some roadmap or campaign for the game to follow.) They’re great ways to start and structure a story! But we obviously want to diversify and try different stories.
So I knew that all those things had to come later. I didn’t know how or when.
I wrote and wrote. Chapter 5 was coming along. I had introduced things nicely, had some interesting things set up, but just felt that it was time for action. The story needed a bigger sequence at this point, either action, or a big mystery, or something. In a pirate-themed game, a minor sea battle made sense.
So I took some time off, exercised, and then came back with a eureka moment. We could do all of that at once in chapter 6!
- Make Sweettooth a little more mysterious, show their distrust for Wildebyte again
- Add a nice action sequence and introduce a main “villain” or “danger” => otherwise a lot of the story going forwards lacks urgency or threat
- Actually show something valuable being stolen (from Sweettooth) + Lost Memory => this is better than vague allusions like “oh yeah I believe your Lost Memory is at Island X!”
Notice how chapter 6 roughly aligns with the 25% mark of the story. Such a big scene marks the end of our first “chunk”. That’s probably why it felt like the right thing to do.
Chapters 7–12
As expected, this is now the second chunk. Trying to have Wildebyte “match” with the Native Entities was a bit harder, as they’ve been quite hostile all this time, and also clearly separated themselves from WB. (They are more powerful, they could “erase them whenever they want”, etcetera.)
When I had that thought, I realized I could lean into that as the reason the match will not work. The Native Entities are like the Gods of Ludra. And how could a god be friends with a peasant like Wildebyte?
This is also why I called back the Graphics Mover. In a previous book, they were by far the friendliest and most helpful to Wildebyte. It felt natural for them to joke around or “be there” for Wildebyte, which makes them believe that the Native Entities might be a match.
As usual, as we near the middle of a story, it became a bit messy.
At first, chapter 8 already had Wildebyte enact his plan of “from now on, I will do as Sweettooth commands and don’t make any decisions myself anymore!”
But … at this point, they’d just learned the lesson that “giving the Player no choice in your game is bad”. So that is a bit of a weird step.
Additionally, the next “lesson” I planned was the opposite. “Giving the Player too many choices—all equally meaningless—is also bad.”
Putting that after chapter 8 was even more inconsistent and weird.
I had to take another breather and rewrite/shuffle some sections. The eureka moments here were …
- I wanted to introduce the “social aspect” of games like these from the start. I’d left them for later in the story, but I could move them forward!
- Why? Because then I don’t need vague paragraphs like “I feel the Player’s frustration” if I can have actual messages from the real Player to friends show up in the game. That’s a natural way to communicate this information directly.
- Which allows us to move the second lesson (too many choices is also boring) forward too!
- WB realizes this upon reading the disgruntled messages from the real Player.
This now felt like a logical step for the Wildebyte to realize there has to be some middle ground. Perhaps total freedom and “I do whatever I want all the time” isn’t great either.
Once I untangled that knot, the story continued at a good pace. Because Wildebyte is forced to follow commands, you can get funny jokes and eventually tense scenes where trust is truly tested. It’s just a good setup for drama later.
I did move the “big sequence” (which usually means action) a bit forward as well in this chunk. Why?
- To change it up. If you write your big reveal or big action scene following a predictable pattern, well, it becomes boring and predictable.
- To solve the recurring issue of “urgency”.
Many stories lose momentum because there just isn’t any urgency to the actions. For chapters on end, characters are like “a big danger is coming!” or “I want to escape this game!” … but if there isn’t a specific deadline or timeframe, then why act now?
And indeed, those chapters are usually filled with people talking and talking, doing nothing, moving at a glacially slow pace.
That’s why I combined the danger of being uninstalled with the sequence of reaching the Codeheart and learning about/modifying how matching code works behind the scenes.
Maybe it’s a bit too much. We’ll see in the revisions. Those usually mean streamlining and cutting superfluous ideas in my case.
But now the story was ready to head into the usual pattern of “here are the levels/campaign/goals for this game, let’s follow them to reach the end”. This is simply how almost all games work, though some more clearly than others. So I can’t escape that many of the Wildebyte stories will resemble that structure, but I can change up the approach or timing—as I did here.
So we have our cast of characters. We have the campaign unlocked. We have a common enemy who sailed away holding precious items of theirs.
The story is at its middle point, but it has all the momentum in the world to go on a pirate adventure.
Chapters 13–18
For the most part, this chunk is about progress in the game. We finally get new items, new rules, tougher levels. It’s a quick chain of progression that builds to something, as most good games are.
But because it only spans one half of the story, it’s more condensed than usual. I was fine with skipping between islands and replaying levels rather quickly.
We also finally get to know Sweettooth better, but not too much yet.
Because I wanted this chunk to end on two major ideas.
- A dilemma again: does Wildebyte ask the researchers (whom they hate, who put them in here and controlled them) to come back, or stay lonely and in the dark?
- A clear crack in Sweettooth’s armor. He’s been portrayed as someone who does a lot of good. Wildebyte is constantly afraid they can’t live up to them, they’re not good enough to be their friend. But now they suddenly find proof that he has a lot of … dirty secrets. Yes, that’s how I decided to implement the random title I came up with months ago :p
Doing Research
I had basically planned to write the story based on my memory/understanding of match-three games from when I played them quite often … which was 10+ years ago :p
I decided to download a few of them again, check the current market, see if I could find some more ideas. This showed me that parts of my memory were incorrect, and that these games had changed considerably since that moment in time.
For example, match-three games had always been about points. That’s how I started this story and never even considered using a different objective.
But Candy Crush, for example, hasn’t had a single level with a points objective in almost 3 years now. Many popular match-three games have switched it up by introducing more varied objectives.
And I can understand that.
- This variation keeps the game fresh. (This is how you reach thousands of levels and many people still want to play them, because the objective also keeps changing.)
- The other objective types make a lot of sense: clear all X squares off the board, help all Y squares fall down and off the level. In fact, they are more direct and intuitive than points, which adds an extra layer between the core game loop and the objective.
- It is a bit harder to explain, so I can see why most match-three games start with simple points-based levels. Such varied objectives are also harder to code, because points are controlled by you (you can set the perfect numbers so levels are usually solvable), but you can’t ensure the other objectives are even reachable as easily. Let alone how hard or easy it is to reach them.
Anyway, I used my free Sunday to do some research and play some more of these games. Surely, the point of my Wildebyte books is not to recreate the games (just go play the game itself!), I was just looking to …
- Properly represent / parody this type of game.
- Gain ideas for the later stories about what new ideas or items level 3, level 4, etcetera might hold.
In the end, I created a list of the ideas I really wanted to include, and left the remainder of my research in a backup file. The included ideas were mostly based on how simple they were to explain, and how much potential they had for some fun action sequence or puzzle in the story.
Turning the research into chapters
In the end, I decided to fill the chapters with 1 or 2 progressions at a time. Find a new island + level, discover the new mechanic, overcome the challenge. (This also teaches some more details of how to code such a game along the way.)
And while doing so, throw in a few paragraps here and there to slowly move towards my 2 big dilemmas to use for this chunk’s end.
This was a pretty solid plan that I could execute in almost a single day.
My only worries were about timing. When you’ve written a lot of stories/books, you feel when something should take longer or it’s not the right moment yet to start the climax. That doesn’t necessarily mean you know with what to fill the space or what changes to make.
After taking a break for the rest of the day (writing 4 chapters in the morning), I realized one major element that would be interesting to tell the reader more about: Sweethaven. The mythical heaven/hell-type-place that matched items want to go to.
So chapter 18 became a “breather” where Wildebyte accidentally ends up here and learns some interesting rules about the game and Sweethaven. (Some of which were known before I started the story, some of which I invented while writing this chapter.)
The fact that the chapter lacks action or big stakes, and merely reveals some interesting facts and ideas, is actually a perfect fit for that moment in the story.
I do try to keep a nice balance between tense, action-packed chapters and more quiet, dialogue-heavy ones. Which means I decided to make chapter 18 lead into a big disagreement (that turns into a battle) between Sweettooth and Wildebyte.
At this point, I’m writing these chapters at 11 PM and making a lot of stuff up as I go.
Which means, once I was done and went to bed, I already knew I had to do a major rewrite for these specific chapters. (The rest of the story actually requires almost no big revisions, or at least far fewer than usual.)
The biggest issue was Sweettooth’s character and motivations. Perhaps by default, because I’ve seen this so often in other stories, I wrote the following dynamic: Wildebyte is wild and reckless, which scares Sweettooth and makes them hesitant to work together.
But that’s not actually how I wrote Sweettooth before. It’s not what fits his pirate form and behavior. And it’s not the most interesting or what I would actually want to write.
Which is why I realized it needed to be flipped on its head. Sweettooth is disappointed that Wildebyte actually follows the rules quite a lot and plays it safe. So, we start the story with Wildebyte thinking “I need to be more careful”, until it turns out that Sweettooth is actually the wild and reckless one here.
Wildebyte does care about rules and consistency because they used to be a real human—Sweettooth would kill the entire device just for fun. Why would he care? He’s having fun, right?
It took me a while to put this into concise, meaningful dialogue to spread across the final chapters. Because at this point, it’s really a debate between two different philosophies, which doesn’t necessarily make a gripping story :p
So I basically continued writing as if this was the plan all along, then changed a few of these middle and later chapters to fit this ending during revisions.
Chapters 19–24
The final chunk. The climax of the story. What was my general goal?
- Meet Bluetooth and have a big action sequence to steal back the treasure and Lost Memory.
- Use all we’ve learned here.
- In previous stories, Wildebyte always got their Lost Memory. So let’s do something different: they create a new Memory!
- From the start, I had a special trick up my sleeve to solve the biggest challenge in this final level/scene => Wildebyte realizes some of the islands are identical, so they push them around to match entire islands for a 3 in a row and make them disappear. Seemed like a nice reveal which seems logical in hindsight.
- Have the big reveal(s) about the “secrets of Sweetooth”. Wildebyte has finally become their friend and gained their trust, but now it suddenly turns out that Sweettooth is even worse than they are. What to do?
- These reveals include the fact that Bluetooth is the actual main character of the game, and Sweettooth is the invader.
As you see, I again worked towards a dilemma. Two dilemmas, actually.
- Whether Wildebyte is prepared to Gamewalk with Sweettooth, whom they now know is more unpredictable and dangerous than them. What to do?
- Bluetooth is connected to other devices / the outside world. They offer Wildebyte to transfer them to another device—one where they don’t hate them yet, one where they might get a fresh start. What to do?
Pacing a climax + ending
This is a bit much for one chapter, so I spread them out. In fact, they became 3–3.5 chapters. This is another wrong assumption I had when I wrote my very first stories. Somehow, I thought of the climax as one big “turning point”, which meant it was one chapter. In reality, though, the climax of a story is more of an event that usually requires around 3 chapters.
- One final half of a chapter is about preparing a plan to invade.
- One chapter is about doing the actual invasion, until Bluetooth notices them and interrupts.
- One is for the climax (Bluetooth’s offer, because they offer it to win the battle)
- And the final one for resolving the fight, employing the twist, winning the fight.
Of course, this is just the climax. So far, Wildebyte books always received 1 or 2 more chapters after it for the actual ending and resolution. But because these are episodic and they just jump to a new game, these can be rather short. (They are mostly filled with better improvements or fixes for the current game, which Wildebyte discovered by learning the lesson in this story.)
And even then, I felt this was just too short. The climax and the events inside are what you’re building to for the entire book. If I set up Bluetooth as a menacing enemy to be defeated—then he surely must put up a big fight. If I set up the social part of the game and how it made the Player play again—then the reveal about Bluetooth and his dilemma should get enough time.
So in revisions, the chapters became slightly longer. (I didn’t feel like the climax needed another whole chapter, that would just make it drag. Again, this is just intuition from writing a lot of stories. I’m sure lots of “writing formulas” have something to say about this, with all sorts of pretentious arguments about how long a climax should be and such. That never worked for me.)
Pacing myself in general
The Wildebyte Arcades are planned as a pretty long series. One getting longer every time, as I get new ideas or realize some very popular type of mobile game I hadn’t included yet.
I have the nasty habit of trying to change characters too soon or reveal mysteries too soon. Perhaps because I’m afraid readers will be bored, perhaps because this is just one more skill to learn if you want to write longer series.
As such, I had to constantly tell myself “when this book ends, Sweettooth and Wildebyte don’t have to be the best of friends already!”
They decide to Gamewalk, yes. That doesn’t mean they have transformed into besties and their relationship is now great and done and will not change again. Instead, over the coming books, they should keep trying to grow their friendship and learn more about each other. I should leave room for upcoming stories and/or reader imagination.
Similarly, I wanted to tell more about the Guild already. But then I looked at the current series planning and was like “no way we can keep developing that story thread for 10+ more books if I give away that information now”
It’s just another skill I constantly try to hone. Pacing a story arc, pacing an entire book, and pacing a series of many books.
What’s the right amount of information to give in each book? At what speed should overarching threads be pushed forward?
Maybe I’m being too conservative now, but my experience writing stories tells me that this is the right pace. And that is why this book doesn’t end with more messages from Ingar, or the researchers, or an actual Guild explanation from Sweettooth—it’s too early and would leave too little room to develop it later.
Conclusion
As stated throughout the diary, I already revised and rewrote parts as needed while writing. This meant the final draft was already quite final.
Some revisions were surely needed, but way fewer than usual. As stated, the biggest issue was nailing Sweettooth’s character and why they are initially opposed to Gamewalking together—and why they decide to give it a go at the end anyway.
That’s the benefit of having a clear structure for organizing the story, and eliminating any options you already exhausted in previous books. Barring revisions, this book took 7 days to write. Which is the fastest ever for me. (I do revisions all over the place, whenever I have some minutes to spare in the evening, so I can’t really track the time spent on that.)
As always, I use these lessons for all the next books. Taking the core of a game—such as “swapping” and “matching”—and pushing it to an extreme, so that the entire plot, characters, game world, rules, everything is centered around that. Both literally, such as entities only moving by swapping, and figuratively, with an emotional storyline about “finding your match”.
This gives enough richness to a story to sustain those 200 pages. This gives a clear direction that leads to over-the-top action or jokes, but also a streamlined plot that seems cohesive. (Which is why, after finishing this book, I shuffled my planning around again and rewrote some blurbs or initial plot ideas.)
And with that, the fifth book of Wildebyte Arcades (Handheld Disk) was done!
In a way … I also “chunked” the entire Handheld Disk. These first ~5 books could be viewed as one chunk. Because at the end of this one, all major players for the rest of the Disk are mostly set up. Sweettooth is now a potential second protagonist to join the adventures.
The next chunk (of 5–7 books) will mostly focus on a new story thread I already planned. Sure, each book is standalone and does something different, but the “overarching thread” to which each book contributes points in one direction for the entire chunk. As I hopefully demonstrated, this really helps streamline the stories and make decisions every single day about what path to take.
As of this writing, the Handheld Disk has 24 planned stories, of which a handful are “maybes”. So yes, chunks of about 6 stories each probably makes sense.
This pace of 5 Wildebyte books per year seems like a good one to hold onto, but we’ll see how it goes. I shouldn’t overwork myself and I should leave enough time to breathe and get new, fresh ideas.
Until the next book, keep reading,
Tiamo Pastoor
