In my story chactures are talking to each other in formus. I am not shure how to show this in writting and still make it look good. Also they are writting anominously about crimes they commited in order for other members of the formus to guess who they are. They also ocasionaly login and ask them selfs a question to prevent the others from guessing them by process of elimination.

Your title says "help" but I'm not sure what the problem is. I'll assume, since you say you're "not sure" about something, that that's it. I also assume that "formus" means "forums."

Okay. Simple rule of thumb. If you have a clear idea but you're having a lot of trouble expressing the idea in the format you're using, you're probably using the wrong format. It sounds like this concept would work well as a computer game, or at least as a subplot in a computer game. It could even work as interactive fiction. As straight fiction . . . probably not. Which is why you're having trouble.

Sorry, but after a while writing you'll learn which ideas translate best to which formats. A visual idea, for instance, probably works best in a visual medium. And some ideas won't work at all; that's the nature of the beast. Write it down, save it, maybe one day you'll use it in another form. Or maybe not. The important thing is not to give up on having ideas.

Would you clarify on what the problem is?

I want to point out is that a game story is not the same as a story from a book. The forum conversations that you want to include in your game can be from an emulated forum in-game. This is done in mission/quest/investigation based games, in which gathering such information is part of the game. It can be presented as a news article or a news from a TV in-game.

For example, if you play a criminal who is trying to figure who the other criminal was that stole what you wanted to steal, then part of the game might involve you browsing thru the in-game forum to gather information.


In terms of persenting it in the format of a book, the posts themselves can be treated as letters.

You can also present the entire content of the book as a collection of the posts. This is the raw data that one would usually refine before presenting. No one restrict you from presenting it raw however. The intriguing idea here is how what the criminals post on the forum are not necessary truth, but the job of the player is to figure out what really happened, what is happening, the identities of the forumers, and how to achieve your purpose.


Another presentation would be that you never mention that the characters logged on to a forum. You present it as if it is a real bar or a cafe where the characters are hanging out. However you give subtle hints that it is not a meeting place in the physical world. You can actually flip the world inside out and present the actual world like an arcade world where the criminals do all the surreal crazy stuffs. (the fake world is more normal than the real world)


* Personally I would refrain from using a futuristic or modern setting, because the association between them and forum and crime are too strong. If you think that none of the others have done this right then go ahead. But my objective would be to de-emphasize the cyber feel of the story, to destroy any association between this and the matrix and the internet.

We were posting at the same time I agree with cyberangel.