Matchwriting (Part 1)
By Gregg Gethard

The key to any good and successful FW league is to have the perfect balance between great roleplay and great match and cardwriting... turning everything that gets put into FW into one great story.

The art of good roleplay writing is something that is hard to accomplish... but over time, anyone can get good. Your imagination and creative impulses will eventually work their way through, and you can find the voice of any character you create, and from there you can take off. Good roleplaying comes from experience and from looking at other good RPers. It takes time, but it can be done.

Cardwriting, to me, is much more of a challenge. Think about what it takes to write a card-- you have a league that has, say, 20 characters in it. You have to try and balance all the angles and requests and what-not of your league members without causing any hardship, while keeping your league forward. Ask anyone who has ever run a league, and they’ll tell you how incredibly hard that is.

I’ve never been able to do that. Any league I’ve ever run, I’ve had to shut down because of my inability to keep things organized. Any card I’ve had to write, it’s been bogged down with delays and what-not. After almost 10 years of being involved in fantasy wrestling (next to 7th Heaven and mainlining PCP, my biggest addiction), I’ve come to appreciate how much hard work and dedication league presidents have to this hobby.

But I know in the CSWA, a huge league, veteran guys gotta help out when we can. So, I write a few matches here and there to get the cards out .

Since I started, for the first time in my FW career, to really write matches for the first time, I sat down and tried to think to myself how I would write a match. Before, in my younger days, I would write matches but never end up liking the finished product.

I looked at my stuff and looked at the stuff of good card and match writers (Jon Katz, Pete Russo, the NFW’s Jamar Nicholas and CSWA’s Chad Merritt all come to mind) and saw where I went wrong. My matches fell into what I’ve noticed is a bad (but understandable) habit that a lot of matchwriters get into-- the matches become simply a list of moves. The better matches have a lot more nuance, more depth to them. Good matches start slow and then build-- finishing moves and big stunts are at the end of the match, where the drama is at its greatest.

So, I sat down and asked myself how I would write a good match. Matches, even in “real” pro wrestling, should tell a story. And what makes a good story?

Good stories in any medium-- literature, film, tv-- have several items that make them good stories. The most important ingredient to good storytelling is to have good, interesting characters. That’s where the RP comes in. RP, in essence, is nothing more than character development. The RPer provides the details, descriptions and motivations of the character that has been created.

Another aspect in good storytelling is plot. If you’re in school and have studied English at all, you’ve all heard about plot structure. You have an introduction, then the plot rises until it reaches it’s climax, and then you have a resolution or denouement, if you’re a pretentious jackass like myself.

Good stories also should have some sort of conflict and theme to them. In literature, the conflicts are simple-- man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, or a combination of the two. In FW, the most basic conflict is, of course, man vs. man... wrestler vs. wrestler. And there can be several themes to back up the conflict-- one guy wants to be the best, the other does also; some bastard stole a girl, the other guy wants revenge; etc.

So that’s the essence of how to write a good match. By simply telling a good story.