Candle Craft 7: The Spider Test
By Royal McGraw
Royal McGraw has written professionally for film, television, comics, and games for over 20 years. He led development on the mobile smash hit Choices: Stories You Play and currently serves as CEO of Candlelight Games.
Welcome! This is the seventh installment of a multi-part series intended to provide you with 10 Quick And Actionable Adjustments that you can make to your own writing process to improve your storytelling. Some of these process adjustments will be strategic, offering suggestions to improve how you think about storytelling from a big-picture standpoint. Some of these process adjustments will be tactical, offering suggestions to improve how you think about tackling scenes or even individual lines of dialogue. In all cases, these lessons have been hard-won, gleaned from over 20 years of experience writing across a variety of different mediums.
In the previous installment of Candle Craft, we discussed the narrative paradigm of the Matriarch, Patriarch, Scholar, Fool. This paradigm helps you determine how each of your core cast members react to new scenarios, and ensures that their reactive tendencies don’t overlap.
But reactions aren’t everything… As the scene deepens, you might struggle to ensure that each line of dialogue and each action feels uniquely tailored to the character who says or does them. This is where the Spider Test comes into play.
First, Some Backstory
I don’t remember who gets credit for coining the term “The Spider Test.” The idea developed around 2012, in the writers’ room at Pixelberry Studios, while we were actively developing the narrative for what would be the studios’ debut title, High School Story. There were six writers in the room: Max Doty, Kara Loo, Andrew Shvarts, Jennifer Young, Eric Dean, and myself. We’d all previously worked together at Electronic Arts.
I cannot stress this enough: the writers in that room had been forged in fire. Those six writers had been responsible for writing, editing, and releasing one episode of Surviving High School and one episode of Cause of Death every single week. And I mean, every single week – that means getting ahead enough to eke out vacation time over the winter break.
Grinding out 6,000 published words – written, edited, and QA’d – each week is a grueling exercise, but it’s doubly so when you need those words to deliver a quality dialog heavy episode that slots into a bigger seasonal arc.
When it's live or die, and time is critical – you look for ideas that cut through. The Spider Test was one of those.
What is the Spider Test?
Imagine your friends are gathered together in a room. An enormous spider skitters across the floor and pauses in the middle of the group. How do each of your friends react?
Maybe one of them shrieks and jumps on a chair. Maybe another one runs away. Maybe another one is pretty chill about the whole thing: “Come on, guys. It’s just a spider.” Maybe another one leaps into action and stomps that dang spider into oblivion beneath his boot heel.
This is the Spider Test.
How does the Spider Test Work?
First, when you are conceptualizing your characters, make sure that each of them reacts to that spider scenario differently. And remember: even when your characters have similar high-level archetypes, there can be gradations of behavior that illuminate their inner lives.
Case in point: remember that one character who stomped the spider into oblivion with his boot heel. Clearly, this character is more aggressive than the others we discussed in the example.
What do we know about that character? Well, we now know that he wears boots. What does that say about his regular activities? Is he a hiker? Does he work construction? Maybe he just wants to look aggressive?
But of course, aggressiveness can take different forms. Maybe another aggressive character stabs the spider with a pocketknife. Now this second character clearly came prepared. Could he be a former Eagle Scout? Or maybe he’s just ready for the kind of trouble that always seems to find him wherever he goes?
Or maybe another aggressive character flattens the spider with a math textbook she has handy. Maybe she says, “Eh, it’s not like I was using it for anything else.” Or maybe she says, “Good thing, I’m taking Multivariable Calculus. This textbook is way heavier than the one I got for Calculus II.”
Look how much one tiny spider can say about a character!
Even within a single aggressive action, we’ve now excavated a dozen different expressive characters.
Writing with the Spider Test
After your characters are developed, it’s a good idea to have the results of your Spider Test handy. As you’re writing, or more commonly re-writing for polish, take a look at each line of dialogue and make sure that no other character could say that exact same line in that exact same way.
If you run into trouble, run the Spider Test again. Except instead of using the spider directly, test each character against the situation or line of dialog that prompted your character to speak.
Seeing the other characters in your cast respond can often highlight the differences that you have established between them. This path can get you to the unique line you need.
TIP #6: When conceptualizing your characters, use the Spider Test to reveal important differences between them.
When writing, use the Spider Test to ensure no two characters say the exact same line the exact same way.
Moving Forward
So far in Candle Craft, we’ve zoomed way out to look at theme and story structure. We’ve zoomed in close to look at unique lines of dialog. Now we’re going to begin to tie it all together.
Next time: Fractal Storytelling.