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Kurt Vonnegut is my fav author. I've been re-reading all his books including his workshops on writing. It occurred to me that his advice for creative writing was hilariously inline with rpg writing; which makes sense but still; interesting.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Be concise and obvious in writing. Maybe don't have umpteen pages of lore or walls of text or a "what is a RPG" section or purple prose or run-on sentences. "Have the guts to cut" (another Kurtism). Anything not necessary for running the game gets the axe; be ruthless! Get the reader into the action asap or risk losing them. Kurt's advice seems also to imply: keep the reader reading.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

As the reader of RPGs is a GM, this is essential, and perhaps better stated as: Give the GM one character they are dying to play. In a broader sense, give the GM things that make them REALLY want to run your shite for their table.

I just sat here for a minute thinking back and yes, it's usually an NPC that sucks me in. My mind immediately goes to Gus L's Prison of the Hated Pretender. I wanted to play the Pretender SO bad!

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Core RPG advice. Every NPC needs a want - it's the hook that makes them real and gives GMs friction to work with. When I built Rando, I initially ditched wants for three epithets (à la Named). Mistake. Epithets give flavor, but wants give purpose. Now I add wants that connect to the other moving pieces in the fiction. Want drives everything. It's what makes NPCs more than cardboard.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

In addition to character, I would broaden this to include setting or world. Bake setting into EVERY. THING. In fact, don't bake it in... mash it in there till setting oozes out of every word!

This also implies revisioning but of course you DO revise, yes? Honestly, I revise too much. It's a sickness and slows me down SOOOO much. Like Vonnegut, I am a "Basher": going one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. It's awful. I envy "Swoopers": write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

This is both part of #1, and good game-running advice: get the PCs in the action asap. I actually suck at this. I've caught myself having my PCs lollygagging around, walking to a door, relating pointless information along the way. DUMB. This is easy to catch in writing tho; especially when play-testing. Don't start them in the town and bate them to the thing... BOOM, you're at the thing!

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

I'm guilty of this one too. I mean, I am OUT on adventures that have MONSTER, MONSTER, MONSTER, MONSTER, MONSTER. But I find myself over-correcting sometimes and going a little light on my players. This is also easier to spot in writing/play-testing. To quote Tom Waits: "There's always some killing you've got to do around the farm"... so it goes.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

I struggle with this one. I don't write for one person. Kurt wrote for his sister... to my knowledge I don't write for any specific person. Maybe I do and I don't know it? I def write for me. I'm writing this post for me. I'm forcing myself to really think these through; which for my brain means I need to write them down. Obviously, when writing RPGs, we write for GMs, but that GM is also me.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

This is more classic RPG advice perhaps most famously from Chris McDowall's post Expose Your Prep. But for all I know, Chris stole it from Vonnegut :D