Alice's Nightmare In Wonderland

by Jonathan Green

  On 4th July 1862, Dodgson went on a boating trip on the Isis with the then ten year-old Alice Pleasance Liddell and her sisters, Edith and Lorina. That “golden afternoon” he conjured up a story about a little girl called Alice, who went on a fantastic adventure after following a white rabbit, wearing a waistcoat, down a rabbit-hole. Allegedly Dodgson even included a caricature of himself in the story, in the form of the Dodo.

  The young Alice begged the academic to write the story down and eventually, after much delay, in the November of 1864, he presented her with a handwritten manuscript. It was entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, and he had illustrated it himself.

  It was another year before the story finally saw publication, in July 1865, now called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (after the alternative titles Alice Among the Fairies and Alice’s Golden Hour had been rejected), with Dodgson going by the pen-name Lewis Carroll, a pseudonym he had first used nine years before. The illustrations were provided by the celebrated artist Sir John Tenniel.

  The book was an immediate hit, and counted Queen Victoria among its many fans. (According to one popular story, Victoria enjoyed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so much that she commanded that Dodgson dedicate his next book to her.)

  The massive commercial success of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland changed Dodgson’s life in ways he could never have imagined. With the fame of his alter ego spreading right around the world, he was inundated with fan mail and frequently unwanted attention. The book also made him a rich man, although he continued with his seemingly disliked post at Christ Church College, Oxford.

  Alice Through the Looking-Glass

  Late in 1871 Dodgson eventually published a sequel – Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Contained within the book is one of the most famous poems in the English language, Jabberwocky. After the Alice books, Dodgson’s most famous work is another fine specimen of the genre of literary nonsense, The Hunting of the Snark. All of these examples of his work display his skill with word play, his preoccupation with logic, and his love of fantasy.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its companion volume Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, are now considered to be prime examples of the literary subgenre known as Portal Fantasy. Other familiar fantasy tropes feature within the books, including physical transformations, anthropomorphic animals, and unpredictable – not to say, at times, nightmarish – dream-logic. But it must be remembered that when the Alice stories were first published, such elements, along with both books’ ‘It Was All Just a Dream’ endings, were not the clichés then that they are now.

  When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in the mid-19th century, there had never been anything quite like it, and as a result of it becoming such a huge hit, it went on to inspire generation after generation of readers. The story has been retold and reinterpreted again and again until its influence has become so ingrained within our culture and society that there is no escaping it. It has inspired artists, authors, film-makers, musicians and theatrical directors over and over again. These people have gone on to present their own interpretations of the tale to the world, in turn inspiring new generations of children.

  The thing about Alice Adventures in Wonderland is that everybody thinks they know the story; how one balmy, summer’s afternoon by the river, a girl follows a white rabbit down a rabbit-hole and ends up in the eponymous Wonderland. And perhaps they do, but how many of them have actually read Lewis Carroll’s original?

  I must confess that I didn’t read Alice Adventures in Wonderland properly for the first time until 2010, after I was inspired to write a Pax Britannia novella based on the classic children’s story, and thought I should make sure I knew the story inside out before putting pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard). I have, of course, read it many times since.

  It is impossible to assess the impact of Alice on our culture and society without making reference to its many alternative iterations. Each one draws out certain elements of the tale to create its own tone but the results have been startlingly different.

  Think of the good-humoured Disney animation from 1951, and yet before Mickey Mouse’s dad tackled a re-telling there had already been six versions of the story committed to film. Then there is Jan Švankmajer’s 1988 surrealist nightmare, which uses stop motion animation and live action to create a particularly unsettling mood. Meanwhile, Tim Burton’s 2010 reimagining of the story and its iconic characters could not escape the director’s gothic predilections or the influence of modern steampunk culture.

  As well as being realised on the silver screen, Alice has been presented in comic books, as stage plays, ballets, operas, even pantomimes, not to mention the many television adaptations. It has also become a staple of cosplayers around the globe. The story’s impact on the creative endeavours of others is incalculable, but among the more obvious homages are the Wachowski brothers’ original Matrix movie, the surrealist art of Salvador Dali, the TV series Lost, video games such as American McGee’s Alice and the gore-choked, survivalist horror, first person shooter, Resident Evil, and Alice in Sunderland, by renowned comic book artist and writer Bryan Talbot, who explores the origins of not only the Alice story but also considers the dream-like nature of story, myth and legend in his seminal graphic work.

  Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland

  So why attempt yet another reimagining of the Carroll classic, and in the form of an adventure gamebook at that?

  Well, first of all, no one had ever written a gamebook based on the Alice stories before, and second of all, gamebooks are my thing. On top of that, Wonderland is such a wonderful creation (if you’ll pardon the pun) that I felt it deserved revisiting. The fact that 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the book is very popular among steampunk aficionados, didn’t hurt either. Indeed, I am almost as well-known these days for my Pax Britannia steampunk novels as I am for writing adventure gamebooks.

  But it was important to me that I didn’t just retell Carroll’s original novel as a gamebook. I wanted to do something new with the source material and put my own spin on things.

  I knew that there were certain beats I would have to hit, and particular characters who would have to make an appearance, otherwise fans of the original would feel cheated and I would be in danger of making my work so unlike Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that I might as well have not bothered even attempting to connect it to the book in the first place. Hence we have appearances from the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, and the cast of the Mad Tea Party (although not as you would ever have encountered them before). I also wanted to give the setting a dark, steampunk twist, but equally didn’t want to just stick cogs on everything and make what was already nonsense, ridiculous as well.

  The beginning of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland is very like the opening chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but after that it starts to diverge and becomes much less predictable whilst still including favourite set-pieces inspired by the original. And so, as well as riffing off the original, Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland is also a sequel of sorts, to both Carroll’s Alice books.

  It was also important to me that we keep Alice as close to the character from the Alice books as possible, whilst also making her four years older and able to wield a weapon with aplomb. So it is that the Alice of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland is blonde, as she was portrayed in Tenniel’s illustrations, and not brunette, as was the real Alice Liddell.

  However, while I wanted to make my own contributions to the Wonderland mythos, if you like – such as the clockwork killers, known as the Tick-Tock Men – at the same time I didn’t want my adaptation to be marred by the influences of others’ interpretations of Alice. Everything in the book is either Carroll’s or mine (apart from a reference to a certain gamma-irradiated superhero in the second act, and some more horrific elements drawn from Victorian London urban legends). As a
result, in my version the Queen of Hearts is most definitely not the Red Queen – yes, I’m looking at you, Mr Burton – and the Jabberwock is called the Jabberwock, and not Jabberwocky (which is the name of the poem as opposed to the name of the monster).

  Alice travels through various portals in the original books, and so portals became an important feature of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland, particularly mirrors, along with anthropomorphic animals and bizarre physical transformations.

  When it came to actually writing the adventure, the tale grew in the telling, and would have kept on growing – rather like Alice, after scoffing a cupcake or two – had I not called a halt before it all got out of hand. And so, an adventure that was planned out to be 400 sections long ended up being 520 sections long, which is not so arbitrary a number when you consider that it is ten times the number of cards in a traditional deck of playing cards (minus the Jokers).

  “It’s My Own Invention.”

  When it came to creating the gaming element of the gamebook I was inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series I first wrote for back in the earlier 1990s, but I couldn’t miss the trick of giving the reader the option of using playing cards rather than dice to generate random numbers and determine the outcome of simulated battles. And when it came to naming Alice’s different attributes, once I had got as far as Agility, Logic and Insanity, Duelling and Fortitude went right out the window!

  However, I didn’t want readers to feel beholden to having to play the game aspect of the book, and so I made it explicitly clear from the start that you can ditch the dice rolling and card shuffling altogether, and simply enjoy reading through the story, although success is still by no means certain.

  But for many, the game part of the gamebook will undoubtedly be what makes reading Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland a unique experience for them. After all, playing games is how we test ourselves, how we discover how we might react or cope in certain situations. Playing games is how children learn about risk as well as how they fit with others in a social context. It is no different for adults, and playing a game with someone tells you a lot about their attitude towards life in general as well as their social values.

  People often ask me, “How do you go about writing a gamebook?” But for me, it’s no big deal. The first book I ever had published was a gamebook and I’ve had another fourteen published since, making Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland my sixteenth such title.

  To put it in a nutshell, the process goes something like this…

  Having settled on the initial idea – in this case, Alice returning to Wonderland in order to prevent the worst case of identity theft you ever heard of – I set about making screeds of notes, brainstorming the topic to see what ideas I can come up with, and doing a fair bit of research. As I make more and more notes I start to settle on a structure for the adventure as well as ideas for specific encounters and an overall narrative structure. I develop ideas for new monsters and whatever rules will work best with the adventure, and I start to make a lot of maps. These vary in complexity from scrappy spider diagrams, to pictorial charts covered with handwritten annotations. The making of the map – which is of the plot of the story more than it is of any particular place – helps crystallise the structure of the adventure in my mind and goes through several iterations.

  From there I set about writing the outline for the adventure itself, which is pretty much like a sales pitch for the book. It has to explain clearly and concisely everything that anyone would need to know about the gamebook, and is often the thing that will ultimately lead to the book being commissioned. As a result, it is important not to miss anything out – especially not the dramatic denouement.

  The outline includes an overview of the book, summarising the plot in a single sentence, a brief explanation of the rules, highlighting any unusual attributes, and a breakdown of the structure of the adventure. Because of the very nature of gamebooks, as well as describing what happens if you follow the correct path through the book, I also outline what happens on side quests and red herring routes. I break the synopsis into clearly defined areas and it is whilst writing this proposal that I often finalise certain areas of the adventure within my own mind. I find this such a useful part of the process that I would create an outline like this for a gamebook even if I wasn’t having to pitch it to anyone else to get it commissioned.

  By this point I have a rough idea of how many paragraphs each encounter will take up in the final adventure, although during the writing of the book itself this can change quite dramatically, forcing a detailed re-structuring of some sections. So with the outline complete, and with my maps and pages of notes to hand, I set about writing the adventure.

  People ask me, when I sit down to write a gamebook – or interactive novel, as some people prefer to call them – whether I write the ‘one true path’ (i.e. the correct route through the adventure) first and then add in all the wild goose chases and extra encounters later, or whether I write all the alternating routes at the same time. The truth is, the first thing I write is the first thing you will read. This means I’ll start with the introduction, followed by the rules, and then the background to the adventure – the bit that comes after the rules but before the numbered sections. This means that when I start writing the branching paths of the adventure, I have the setting and peculiarities of the book locked down in my mind and I’m already fully immersed in the world I’m creating for that particular adventure. Once I’ve set the scene for myself and the reader, I set about writing section 1.

  What makes a gamebook different from any other form of literature is that the reader is given the opportunity to alter the course of the story on a regular basis, as they progress through its pages. A personal bugbear of mine, when it comes to gamebooks, is when the reader isn’t actually given a choice. Either this is because the choice they’re presented with is a trick – the route through the forest and the path across the plain both lead to the town with no extra elements added to the journey along the way, no matter which route they choose – or the reader is presented with a series of paragraphs that end with the words ‘Now turn to’ and only give one option. In my opinion this is lazy plotting and isn’t what a choose-able path adventure gamebook should be. If you want to write a novel, write a novel. If you want to write a gamebook, make sure you give the reader plenty of opportunities to choose what happens next. Sometimes the structure of the adventure will inevitably lead to a series of single turn-tos, but if they’re just there to pad out the paragraph quota the gamebook’s author (and, by default, its designer) has not done their job properly.

  When I plan a gamebook I work out a number of scenes or encounters (roughly 20 in a 400 section adventure) so that when I come to write it, I do so scene by scene as well. These days I am very thorough at flow-charting these scenes as I come to write them. As I mentioned previously, during the planning stage I will have assigned a rough number of paragraphs to each set-piece but now I draw a proper flow-chart, making sure that if it’s meant to unfold over 20 paragraphs that I get as close to that target as possible. There is always the possibility that during the flow-charting process I will realise I have grossly under-estimated or over-estimated the number of sections required to do the scene justice. Again, this might change during writing – I’ll see that an extra paragraph is needed to make a particular mechanic work, or I’ll realise that with a little re-writing I can lose a paragraph altogether, making the structure tighter – but on the whole what’s planned at this stage is what ends up in the book.

  If possible, I will write all the concurrent scenes together. So if one route takes you to a tavern before heading into the mountains and the other takes you through a forest first, I’ll write the tavern encounter and the forest encounter, and only once both are done will I move on to the mountains. This helps me keep a track of how far through the book I am and how many paragraphs I have remaining. On the whole...

  That said, if a book has to fit into a certain number of paragraphs (whic
h doesn’t apply to every gamebook I write, most notably if it’s to be released as a digital app) I’ll leave a few minor scenes – such as a wrong route – to write right at the very end. I find it much easier to tailor such scenes to a particular length (especially if there aren’t many free sections left), than to have to bring the final, climatic battle with the Big Bad to an abrupt end just because I suddenly find myself on section 399 of 400.

  What other pearls of wisdom can I offer you about writing an adventure gamebook like Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland? Well, as I’ve learnt to my cost in the past, you need to make the adventure fair and not worry about trying to out-fox the cheaters (if that’s not too many mammals for one analogy). Cheaters will cheat, no matter what. You need to write the adventure for the person who intends to play fairly which means you, as the writer, need to be fair to them. After all, as a writer and games designer you’re in the business of entertaining people, not getting their backs up! Of course I embraced some readers’ desire not to play the game with Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland, giving them the get-out of not having to play fairly right from the start.

  Even though gamebooks, and more specifically their individual component sections, have a lower word count than most novels, if you can imbue characters encountered during the adventure with a bit of actual character it will go a long way to improving the story aspect of the gamebook. Speech is a good way of doing this quickly, and, when you think about it, you can describe someone effectively using only three adjectives – at least it’s enough to place a clear image of that character in somebody else’s head. Try to do the same for the world you’re building throughout your book, its landscapes, buildings, and more abstract cultural elements.

  But most important of all, keep things interesting. You have to ensure that the reader keeps turning the pages, so you need to go from one set-piece, to a growing element of intrigue, to a cool monster or fiendish trap, to another set-piece, and so on. You get the idea.