It's Dangerous to Go Alone

What Zelda Can Teach Us About Writing

Amber Sparks is the author of three short story collections and an upcoming novel, Happy People Don't Live Here. She is also a sometimes film and book critic. She lives in Washington, DC with two people and two cats.

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I grew up in a family of insatiable readers, and I was raised on a steady diet of fairy tales, myths, and classic children’s fiction. But it wasn’t until I moved a little pixelated green-clad hero into a little pixelated cave, and made him talk to an old man with the inevitable Sword to Aid the Hero’s Quest, that I realized you could participate in stories, too. It was the first time - but not the last - that I’d realize the power of changing a story, and how a story can change you, too.

I’d always understood stories to be fantastic but fixed, precious finite things made long ago, by people who were all long dead. I had written some stories, like most voracious kid readers, but they were poor attempts at imitating Hans Christian Andersen or Kenneth Grahame. 

When I was eight years old, and I watched that strange old man in the cave tell Link - the legendary strong-but-silent-type questing hero in green at the center of the Zelda games - that it was dangerous to go alone, my love of both video games and of messing around with stories was simultaneously kindled. I’d played and adored Super Mario Brothers, of course - who hadn’t - but that game was more Dada dream than story. From the beginning, Link was on a hero’s journey that would change, and grow, and expand the possibilities of narrative right along with it for me. 

I’ve been playing Zelda games for 36 years now, and writing fiction for at least that long. The two pursuits are weirdly inseparable to me, perhaps because I’ve learned so much about writing from the hours and hours I’ve spent moving Link around Hyrule, looking for Zelda and various magical objects, fighting moblins and Ganon alike, and rounding up the occasional cuccos, the annoying chickens of the Zelda world. (And perhaps because I frequently take long breaks from my writing to play long video games instead.) As my own confidence in my ability to reshape and to be playful with a story grew, so did the ability to reshape and be playful with the world of Hyrule. I’ve learned at least a few important things from playing Zelda games that can be applied to fiction writing, too.

YOU CAN TELL THE SAME STORY A THOUSAND DIFFERENT WAYS

At its heart, the Link story is a hero’s quest. Link is the hero - sometimes reincarnated - the gods have picked to save the kingdom of Hyrule from Ganon. Sometimes he has to save Princess Zelda, sometimes assist her, and he always has to gather a bunch of magical talismans and usually the pieces of the mystical Triforce. It’s a pretty timeless, simple story, and yet each Zelda game manages to make it fresh, to tell it slant, to change it up and incorporate new mythologies, new elements, new surprises. It’s both comforting and exciting to play a new Zelda game for the first time, because you know exactly what to expect and you have no idea what to expect. Contrary to my first, wrong ideas about fairy tales, Zelda teaches you that the tapestry of every old story gets unpicked and rewoven, again and again - and that you, too, can be part of the unpicking and the reweaving. Each time someone new gets their hands on a story, they transform it. Fiction is flexible that way.

IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE

It’s not just dangerous, it’s also boring! Your protagonist may be a loner, but they still need somebody to talk to, to bounce ideas off of, to help them when they get stuck. Link has always had plenty of help  - going right back to that old man with the sword, a sort of riff on Arthur’s lady in the lake.  He has also had traveling companions who were crucial to his story, from the fairies Navi and Tatl, to the Twilight Princess Midna, to a talking boat and a green-hat bird. One of the biggest mistakes I see in emerging writers’ fiction is being too much in the head of the main character. A companion gets you out of your head, and they may also help advance your story. In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien could have written Frodo’s journey as a solo quest, solitary and quiet, but then we’d never have had a fellowship of the ring. And imagine how much darker The Road would have been if we only had the man without the boy, making his slow way across a post-apocalyptic landscape and dying alone. Few stories can stand up to a solo journey, and few writers have the specific chops to keep our interest in a character without any outside perspective or interaction. One of the most interesting tensions in fiction is the tension between the way a character lives in their own imaginings, versus the way they live in the world with others. 

YOU CAN SOLVE PROBLEMS IN YOUR OWN WEIRD WAY

Zelda games, even before true open world design, have almost always given us the ability to do things in a different order, to wander around, to take care of tasks in different ways and with different tools. If I suck at fighting in Breath of the Wild, I can fell a tree and just cross over to the other side without conflict instead. If I want to do a few side quests first, I can - or track down some random items. I paraglide everywhere as a shortcut in Tears of the Kingdom. In writing fiction, I’ve similarly learned that where other writers might climb a tree, you can cut a door and fashion a portal inside. Some of the most interesting ways to find your own voice in fiction come from figuring out how to solve the most common problems of narrative in your own unique style. If you want to destabilize your narrative and you’re Denis Johnson, you might throw a highly unreliable, chemically dependent narrator at your reader. If you’re Joy Williams, you might have your protagonist become obsessed with a deer leg lamp. If you’re playing a Zelda game, you might set the grass on fire. Surprise, and how you make it, is a close cousin to voice. Solve the problem your way, and the story becomes unquestionably yours.

EVERY STORY NEEDS A DUNGEON

Not a literal dungeon, of course, though feel free to throw one in! But every protagonist has to face their demons, and fight their way through, be they actual or metaphorical monsters. Bonus points if the dungeon is dark, too, and you have to find a torch first to make your way through. Imagine Zelda games without dungeons! (And yes, I’m counting divine beasts.) You can’t, of course, because they’re the signature Zelda set piece. If Link didn’t have to make his way through obstacles in a cave or a shrine or a temple, solving puzzles and fighting monsters, he wouldn’t grow and advance in skills and strength and health. Main characters in fiction don’t stand a chance of being interesting if they aren’t tested in some way. And it’s more interesting if you can throw the worst possible thing at them, in true dungeon style.

SIDE QUESTS ARE GOOD

Does Link need to give toilet paper to the creepy hand in the Stock Pot Inn in Majora’s Mask? Absolutely not! Does it make the game more fun and weird and memorable if he does? Absolutely yes! Learning about the life cycle of herring is in no way critical to the Sebald stand-in’s journey in The Rings of Saturn, but the book wouldn’t be the same brilliant and discursive novel without it. You don’t have to find all of the haunted pieces of Jovani’s soul in Twilight Princess, but what’s more fun than hunting ghosts? The Odyssey is basically the story of a guy on a journey home who gets sidetracked by side quests for ten years. Sometimes the most interesting stuff going on in fiction and games happens when the hero gets distracted and strays from the path. And it’s okay to just wander around and look at interesting stuff. Some of the best books (see Sebald, or Walser) are exactly that.

MYSTERY MATTERS — DON’T OVER EXPLAIN

Beginning writers quickly learn that nothing kills a story faster than overexplaining: giving too much backstory, revealing all the details, wrapping up every mystery too neatly. The really great stories are weird and messy and leave you wanting more - like so many of the Zelda games. What’s Link’s whole deal? We don’t really need to know more than we do. Who are those old spirit monks in the ancient shrines in Breath of the Wild, the ones who hand you the orbs? Who the hell cares? They’re cool and mysterious and creepy In the best fairy tales, we’re given our characters, often with a minimum of backstory, and off they go to the wild woods. What’s important is what they find there, not some flashback that would tell us nothing except that the writer is trying too hard. In the biggest stories, keeping it simple is often best - it allows the reader’s imagination to run wild in the empty fields where you’ve left them. 

SOMETIMES, YOU JUST HAVE TO STOP AND CATCH A FISH

One of the things I’ve always loved about Zelda games, especially in comparison to so many other frenetic video games, is the pacing. Sometimes Link simply has to slow down and cook a meal, or climb a very tall mountain, or sail a boat a very, very (VERY) long way. Sometimes he has to catch a fish. In fiction, you certainly don’t need to write pages and pages about catching a fish (though, famously, Hemingway did); but you do need to figure out a way to slow the action down and give your protagonists a breather. They, and the reader, need space to process what they’ve been through, and to plan for what’s coming. They need quiet moments to talk, think, and make discoveries. And sometimes, they really do just need to eat. Eating scenes are some of my favorite scenes to read and write in fiction, and more characters should spend more time cooking in books! I firmly believe this! Food is foundational to our lives and our fiction should reflect that.

DELIGHT YOUR READER, AT LEAST OCCASIONALLY

When people are just starting out writing, they want to demonstrate seriousness, which often devolves into an exercise in masochism, a sort of “how much mire can I march my reader through so they know I mean business?” But even the most serious readers occasionally want to be simply surprised and delighted - by artistry, by vision, by absolute agency even in the face of disaster. Zelda games excel in the art of unparalleled delight. The breathtaking beauty of the Zoras’ palace; the sheer fun of flinging yourself around the City in the Sky; the labyrinth islands in Breath of the Wild; the first time you encounter the dark world in A Link to the Past; the giddiness of playing cartoon-style animation in Wind Waker; or how fucking cool it is when you get to the Hidden Village in Twilight Princess and get to play Clint Eastwood for a minute in a monster standoff, complete with a Morricone-esque score. The best moments in fiction are often like that - when Melville busts out a chapter of sheer gorgeousness on the whiteness of a whale, or when Mo Yan’s narrator finds himself reincarnated into a donkey, or the primordial narrator of Calvino’s Cosmicomics describes becoming a dinosaur for a while because it was the cool thing to do, or Eva flies out the window in Toni Morrison’s Sula, or Kelly Link turns a stone bunny into a fairy soldier’s mount in a suburban yard. Or (I would be remiss to leave out, in this video game essay) the slow burn realization of the brilliant structure in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

No matter the reason someone opens a book or starts playing a video game, they ultimately want an experience they wouldn’t have themselves, something they’d never  think of, or maybe be capable of. Everyone wants to be dazzled, to have seen the impossible for a moment. I’m glad I’ve recently finished writing my novel, and I have a long stretch available in my life to play the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom. I’ve been working hard on trying to delight readers in my own prose; now I’m ready to give myself over to awe. I’m ready to feast on the artistry of others. After all, it’s dangerous to go alone, but it’s always true in the black and white way of fairy tales that if you take the right book, the right game, the right story - you’ll find a new way home.