[quote name='Bigdeadbug' timestamp='1317926642' post='4869858']
Well saying that over the past X number of years I have developed worlds (often stemming from game concepts themselves) for games or stories to be set but the individual projects tend to get to the notes/draft stage and then something inevitably crops up which stops me going further.
What sort of something? Just curious. For me I repeatedly stumble at the step of coming up with plot events. This problem has been the main driving force behind my research into various theories of fiction.
For the past couple of years I have thought about entering NaNoWriMo, since I tend to need some form of outside interference to get me to sit down and write anything worth a damn. Never really had the time to put any effort into it though but with any luck this year I'll at least be able to give it a go.[/quote]
Good luck! I attempted it twice, and while I can't keep up with the official pace I did get some stuff written which I'm pleased to look back on. Some people particularly enjoy the local groups that meet in a coffee shop or something to write together. I like the forums, when they aren't slow as molasses.
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Well for the past few years I have been a student so I would think up a few ideas start to work on them and BAM crunch time comes. It's not that university projects have taken up a lot of time come the crunch period and thus stopped me being able to do anything else. If I am having to concentrate heavily on something else (like a project) my creativity just dissipates after a while. Generally I can sit for hours thinking up whole stories in my head and jotting down what I think is relevant but there comes a time when I literally can't do it. I guess it's simply the infamous writers block rearing its head but it does mean that I often don't get past the drafting stage of any personal projects. It probably isn't a coincidence either that I hit these blocks when I'm trying to expand upon a specific story or idea, e.g. adding the next stage of a characters journey onto a story.
Thanks. I doubt I will be able to hit the 50,000 word count but I am hoping I will get something out of it.
I may be late to the party (my other experiences with such software was years and years ago when quite frankly they never seemed to work) but I have started (about a week ago) using the software package "Dragon Naturally Speaking" as a way to get the bare bones of something down fast and easily. I wouldn't personally use it for anything more than notes and drafts of work since although accurate it still can't compare to writing something down. But it's nice to be able to sit back in a chair and waffle away ideas at the screen .
For me, writing is a thinking tool, a mean to solve problems. I tried writing fiction, but I get too absorbed in the imagination. In general I don't like losing the alertness I have when I am not tied up trying to complete something. The staple writing I do is a diary that I disclose to my family. In the diary (which I don't write daily), I identify present issues, analyze them, and solve them. When used this way, writing is a mean for me to know my true self. Writing fiction seems like a roundabout way of doing it. The following is the trend of my writing.
The Eye of Storm (2000) This is a tragedy about an damaged cyborg nurse and an innocent biometal wyvern stuck in an inertial stalemate between two ultimate weapons leading to the end of the world. The story shows a condition where due to the greed and ambition of some people in power, the world was driven beyond the point of no return. There is no solution. The tipping point had already happened before the story begin. In the hopeless world, the only pocket of genuine happiness exists for the nurse and a newly hatched wyvern she found from a wreckage. The scene that I like the most in the story was when the main character got past their emotional knots and came to a wheat field. They saw an automated harvester coexisting peacefully with some birds flying above it. At that point, the wyvern saw something flying for the first time and learned how to fly. It brought the nurse with it and they flew. This was their happiest moment, but by doing so, the wyvern was detected by satellites and the military soon came to retrieve it. The story was told through the perspective of the pilot that came with the wreckage. The pilot planned to betray the nurse to bring the wyvern back at first but changed her mind as the story continued, but by the time she wanted to help it was too late.
Albatross the Flying Caesar (2007) This is a life story about a huge hovercraft that was created to look after the deserted Earth in solitude that spends its last years and every remaining piece of its body rebuilding Earth so that humankind could return to Earth. The story is told through its crew with various backgrounds each with their personal struggles and aspirations. The scene that I like the most is about the recovery of a crew member who disliked the mission in the beginning. She got critically injured during a monumental struggle against nature when she had just lost the love from the girl she cared the most. During that struggle, she had lost all hope for her own future, but she continued because she knew that even she won't be there, the others would be, and it wouldn't matter if she was understood. After she fell and crashed along with her old patrol partner, she wanted to know that the world was okay, and that her struggle was not meaningless, but the circumstance didn't give her that assurance. The moment before she closed her eyes, she could only see her old partner, who was equally broken, telling her to hang in there just a bit longer. After a prolonged elusive dream about her facing her past and her fears, she woke up in a sick bed surrounded by cards and gifts that the fellow crew, the girl she loved, and that girl's classmates sent her. The door busted open and two of the loudest members of the crew rushed in to announce the news that she woke up. The scene that is stuck to me happens when she had recovered enough to put on her new wings to fly down a waterfall, looking over the lush area near the waterfall that was restored.
Ditch! (2009)
This is a light series about a witch that can go into people's minds to untie the knots of their inner selves. The story is told through a guy who knows her. The scene I like the most is their lying on a crop circle on a wheat field, detached from the daily world, yet on solving problems that bother people in their daily lives. I like this because there is no obligation to write anything long or anything with a plot. I feel free doing this.
@Wai Actually in that Woman's Book of Creativity I was just reading there was a case study of an artist who was telling a therapist that the source of her 'artist's block' was that she did not want the disruption of her life that was caused every time she started a new painting. She decided she wanted to accept the disruption and be at piece with it so she could paint more, but I think the other decision is reasonable too, like someone who quit online games because when they played them they couldn't think about anything else. I sometimes feel this way about any project which requires me to make a long-term commitment of time and effort; it often seems like a great idea before I start, but a week or two in I am feeling irritated by the disruption of my life. My own projects don't hold my attention like that though, I may spend all my spare time on it for two days but after that I've usually used up my burst of interest and set it aside for later.
It's true fiction is a roundabout and inefficient way of exploring issues and oneself. Still, that's what I like it for. Fiction always interested me more than journaling because my own life and thoughts about it mainly bore me; what catches my interest about a story idea is the escapism and wish-fulfillment that accompany the exploration of themes and identity. I've heard many people say they find writing a journal or diary very therapeutic or mind-clearing. Writers are more likely to describe writing fiction as amusing or exciting. So I guess it just depends what one wants out of writing.
It's interesting that your past work has a motif of metal life forms running through it. Does that have a symbolism for you? Something you are moving away from with Ditch! or just a coincidence? I have been thinking about theme this week because there was a thread about it over on absolute write, but it was not a satisfying thread because it was just everyone listing their own themes or discussing what theme is/whether it's important or good to intentionally put into writing. I would have liked to discuss specific themes but no one seemed interested. Also I got an amusing set of astrology-based fortune telling cards to play with, I often enjoy analyzing the themes underlying a set of cards or any system of generating messages.
I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.
[font="Arial"] A brief history of sunandshadow's life:
I guess I'll talk about me and my writing now. Some of the forum members who have been around a while are probably already familiar with some of this. I started writing fiction seriously when I was 13 or 14, because this was the first time someone gave me the idea that I could be one of those writers whose books I was always reading, and that writing was not very different from the usual way I made up stories and acted them out with my toy horses, or outdoors playing pretend with other children. There has always been a strong thread of romance through my writing (I can only think of one piece I've ever written where the main character was neither in a relationship nor looking for one), but it took me a while to decide that romance, especially anything labeled and marketed as an official romance novel, wasn't shallow sappy fluff inferior to "meaty" fiction like psychodrama and political struggles. Social programming I had to unlearn, I guess. I didn't start reading actual romance novels until I was almost done with college, and then I mainly did so because I was running out of science fiction and fantasy novels I wanted to read. Similarly I didn't recognize games could be a serious medium for writing until my freshman year of college when I played Final Fantasy 7. If it weren't for that game I might not be the moderator of this forum, lol.
Anyway, I majored in English with a primary interest in literary theory and criticism, especially structuralism and myth analysis. Over the years I started many novel-length projects but never finished any of them. I have at least finished some long-ish short stories, but the novel has always been the format I like best because it's got enough room to create a world and several characters and deeply explore a theme. I've wandered back and forth between original fiction and fanfiction, though I decided a few years ago to not write any more fanfiction. I've been a member of three different writing circles and learned a lot from that but decided that ultimately it wasn't what I wanted to spend my time on. I wrote part of a how-to/textbook on fiction theory, but by now I feel like I've pretty much learned all I can about that subject, and it's not very interesting to write about when I'm not studying it nor teaching it. Overall I feel kind of alienated by the fact that my viewpoint seems to have become regarded as unfashionable and it's not what anyone's clamoring for more of.
Recent projects:
Ok, fast forward to about three years ago. The subject in fiction theory that I've been interested for the longest, because I have the most difficulty with it, is plot. I've tried various angles from which to attack this problem. The thing I decided to do three years ago was write a short synopsis of every story idea I had. In such a short format it's easy to look at the basic plot structure of a story and try to fix it if it has a problem. So that's what I did, tried to figure out what plot structures my ideas typically have and tried to complete any that were missing pieces. Then, taking vague inspiration from the Snowflake Method, I worked on expanding some of these synopses to a more detailed level of plot. I found that not only was this helping me learn about plot, I flat-out enjoyed writing synopses more than writing actual fiction. I'm not sure whether I'll ultimately be able to do anything constructive with this or not, but I've been trying to just go with the flow. It might be the same kind of thing as those people who like to do just worldbuilding; there have been a few examples of worldbuilding books published as coffee-table books or faux encyclopedias or faux records of an archeological expedition or something like that. Writing a bunch of synopses might eventually feed back into the creation of a fiction theory textbook, or people keep telling me I should create my own Dramatica-like system or deck of symbolic brainstorming cards.
Themes:
I mentioned in my reply to Wai that I have been thinking about themes this week. Looking over all my past writing, these were the themes I identified, some of them showing up in multiple story concepts. As a personal exercise I was trying to phrase them in proper thematic statement format according to Lajos Egri (X leads to Y, phrased in a negative way because this expresses the conflict of the story). But since my stories are usually rather positive and low-conflict the actual "moral of the story" tends to be the more positive version I've labeled "flipside". Some stuff I couldn't figure out how to reframe in Mr. Egri's format so I left it the way I naturally think about it.
Theme: Blind loyalty to the past leads to infertility both mental and physical.
Flipside: Openness to new things leads to fertility.
Also: Excessively protecting something stunts that thing; allowing freedom in moderation to something nurtures that thing.
Theme: Excessive concern with morality and reputation destroys families.
Flipside: Willingness to disregard morality and reputation leads to healing/creating families.
Also: "Officially good" people can do great evil and "officially bad" people suffer mistreatment yet may quietly do a lot of good.
Also: A group of misfits can combine their diverse abilities to do something awesome. (This is such a widespread theme in anime, and it's in the trope wiki as "By your powers combined, I am captain planet!")
"What they don't know doesn't hurt them." and the morality of keeping secrets from different angles. (I mentioned this int he entries and voting thread.)
Theme version one: Braving fear of pain leads to earning a valuable prize.
Theme version two: Excessive selflessness increases overall suffering.
Flipside of version two: A healthy moderate amount of selfishness leads to happiness for everyone.
Also: A person has a right to children and should not let others infringe on that right. A relationship which starts to interfere with being true to oneself is a relationship which needs to be ended even if this is sad and painful.
Theme: Even in the context of love or friendship, one person's criticizing judgments or desirous expectations can lead to destruction of the other's inner self.
Flipside: Brave willingness to give up something loved and familiar can lead to healing the self.
Also: Real love is loving someone unconditionally for who they are. A love that is conditional on someone changing is false love.
When other people behave badly, causing harm to others, they not only give up their right to be treated civilly but put an obligation on any able person (even a pacifist or person who doesn't want to get involved) to use any available means (even forceful or manipulative means) to make the people stop harming others.Theme: Doing harm impels any available force to neutralize those doing harm." [/font]
I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.
The Final Fantasy games (well two of them anyway) also heavily influenced me. FF7 made me realise how much I enjoyed romance and how a game could get me so heavily invested in the relationship between characters. Looking back I got into that games story more than any other before or since. It also made me realise how a game's story is just as serious and effective a medium for storytelling as any other. I had played some story based games before (like beneath a steel sky) but none of them captured my imagination than FF7.
FF8 was the other game which really caught my attention. There was something about the Seifer Almasy character that really caught my attention. Since then similar plots of a character "falling to the darkside" have become a weakness for me. I have found myself liking a story simply because of said element even though the rest of it was close to awful.
The funny thing is that although both these themes are by far my favourite when it comes to reading, watching or playing whenever I have tried to write them myself they never seem to work out.
Overall I feel kind of alienated by the fact that my viewpoint seems to have become regarded as unfashionable and it's not what anyone's clamoring for more of.[/quote]
What viewpoint is that? Sorry if you said in the previous post but I couldn't figure it out .
What viewpoint is that? Sorry if you said in the previous post but I couldn't figure it out .
Oh sorry. I meant both my structuralist viewpoint on writing theory and my preference for happy 80s-style science fiction and fantasy; I often go to the book store and come out empty handed because no one's publishing what I want to read.
I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.
[color=#1C2837][size=2]because no one's publishing what I want to read[/quote]
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[color=#1C2837][size=2]What would you like to read?
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[color=#1C2837][size=2]I realized my last post didn't answer either question and I've been silent today; I'd post more but I've been occupied with the baby all day and quite a bit with work. I am reading the forum though.
It's interesting that your past work has a motif of metal life forms running through it. Does that have a symbolism for you? Something you are moving away from with Ditch! or just a coincidence? I have been thinking about theme this week because there was a thread about it over on absolute write, but it was not a satisfying thread because it was just everyone listing their own themes or discussing what theme is/whether it's important or good to intentionally put into writing. I would have liked to discuss specific themes but no one seemed interested.
Metal is an element associated with weapons. The symbolism comes from evolution of technology. People didn't advance from stone age to bronze age to iron age just because metals are interesting. It happened because people wanted an advantage when they kill one another. A metal life form symbolizes a person that was designed/trained for wars (i.e. a soldier). In Eye of Storm (2000), the wyvern is metallic because it is created as a weapon. In Albatross (2007), the hovercraft (Albatross) is a descendant of aircraft carriers, but it was not designed for war fighting. n the story, the Albatross is not compared to metallic boats, but to sail boats because it has a much closer relation to the natural world, making it more organic that its ancestors. As the misfit in its lineage, the Albatross transcends the momentum of conflicts on one hand and rebuilds lost lives on the other. In the story, the Albatross itself is not sentient, it is only "alive" because it carries the spirit of its crew and its designers.
The metal motif is already half gone during Albatross and definitely gone after it. What remains after Albatross is the symbols of the wing and of sails (canvas). The wing symbolizes freedom. The sails symbolize an intentional effort to be in harmony with nature.
Eye of Storm (2000)
Metal, Wing, Field,
Albatross (2007)
Sails, Wing, Metal,
Ditch! (2009)
Field, Wing, Sails
By the time I do Ditch! (2009), these symbols have shrunk. The wing only appears when the Author needs to look for Skyle, and canvas and sails are only hinted on Skyle's clothing. The intentional search for freedom led me to the wheat field. To me, the wheat field represents the problems that I was never able to solve since Eye of Storm (Eye of Storm itself is a symbol of the world being wrong). When I say I want to free myself, I don't mean to escape. I mean to free my mind so that I can solve the underlying problems once and for all. Writing is my tool of doing it.
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Themes
I am not writing down any themes because by the time I get to Ditch!, the design is not theme-based but problem-based. I start writing not with a message I want to tell, but with a problem I want to explore and solve. The writing is still very heavy in the meaning but I don't start with a defined message. The message is what I get at the end of the writing.
[color="#1C2837"]What sort of something? Just curious. For me I repeatedly stumble at the step of coming up with plot events. This problem has been the main driving force behind my research into various theories of fiction.[/quote]
[color="#1c2837"]I had this problem as well, for a very long time actually and have seen a lot of people give up over it. When I got into it, I found that I was working from the wrong angle. I'll go into detail since I think it is on-topic.
[color="#1C2837"]One problem is that a work longer than the outline itself must include a lot of important, relevant material that is not actually in the outline. These creates some potential points of failure if you intend to create a full plot-point outline ahead of time.
[color="#1C2837"]1) The little details fail to be important and are only there because one feels they're supposed to be there. When this is the case, the work is unparsimonious.
[color="#1C2837"]2) The plot itself is difficult to develop because you don't actually have all the details yet. This relates to the next point...
[color="#1C2837"]3) Plot points fail to naturally arise from circumstances (the details). If these details do not matter, than one is running into the 1st point.
[color="#1C2837"]Obviously folks meet & beat these obstacles all the time. But a lot don't and wind up giving up writing. [color="#1C2837"]It was John Gall who said [color="#1C2837"]"If a problem seems intractable, consider that you may have a meta-problem." An extremely pervasive meta-problem is when people adopt ideas because they have resonance but don't actually work for them.
[color="#1C2837"]A lot of people find that the idea of pre-structured plots are resonant. They sound correct (Stephen Colbert calls this "truthiness") and are treated as a kind of "secret sauce". Both people talking up the Hero's Journey and the morons telling you it's "cheating" are in this mental trap. Obviously it's actually quite hard.
[color="#1C2837"]I was stuck on it for a long time and then abandoned it. [color="#1C2837"]The process to producing a first large finished work that at least one person liked (and read all the way through) went a bit like this.
[color="#1c2837"]1) I had an idea that I liked the idea of the "home base", based on experiences playing flight simulators and how the most stressful part can be getting to home where it's safe. I also liked capability constraints. Muzzle loaded rifles & maneuver warfare were on my mind as well.
[color="#1c2837"]I came up with a fort in some woods on a road between two cities that was a sort of rest point, and there were researchers going into the woods. The story would be about those researchers. There were also golems, talking animals and "chi" powers and a second inhabited planet with more advanced people. And the protagonist was raised by golems or something stupid. Oh, and I think the golems were the bad guys.
[color="#1c2837"]2) For about a year I mulled over potential scenarios, plot points, situations, general feel of it, the implications of the setting on the protagonists and wrote tentative openings (about 10 to 20 wildly different ones).
[color="#1C2837"]I realized that the rifles were analogous to liquid-fuel rockets. LFRs were invented by Robert Goddard in the 1920s and were the key invention that allowed space travel. The fort could be analogous to the ISS, the protagonists' city to the Earth, and so on. [color="#1C2837"]The "chi", talking animals, golems, the road, the rest of civilization and maneuver warfare were thrown out. The protagonist's backstory was thrown out. The forest between civilization became a civilization isolated by forest. "Let's get home where it's safe" became "let's get out where it's not safe". Return journeys were omitted entirely. It was completely inverted.
[color="#1c2837"]3) I started writing. This took 3 months. Elements were made up on-the-fly as per the theory and points stemmed from that. I had a tentative semi-structure in my head and had visions of scenarios and plot points but several wound up not fitting, therefore they were not done. [color="#1C2837"]Key themes were realized partway through. Finished, the rewrote the first scene in order to better frame the discussion. Delivered to reader.
[color="#1C2837"]Result is 124,000 words. [color="#1C2837"]I am kind of OK with it, but it doesn't matter; it's a practice run, not a magnum opus. I am writing more and feel like I'm getting somewhere.
[color=#1C2837][size=2]happy 80s-style science fiction and fantasy ... [color=#1C2837][size=2] what catches my interest about a story idea is the escapism and wish-fulfillment that accompany the exploration of themes and identity[/quote]
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[color="#1c2837"]Do you mean things like The Neverending Story?
I attempted it twice, and while I can't keep up with the official pace I did get some stuff written which I'm pleased to look back on. Some people particularly enjoy the local groups that meet in a coffee shop or something to write together. I like the forums, when they aren't slow as molasses.
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