I took a creative writing class in college, and while I passed the class, I did get a few bruises from the experience. I''ve been writing ever since I was in about the 5th grade, and to me it has always been about reading and writing a good story. However, my college creative writing instructor (a Scottish Buddhist, if you can ken it) took a more poetry-reading, black-turtle-necks-in-coffee-houses sort of approach to writing, in that story was trivial and hackish, and writing was merely a tool to Make a StatementTM with Deeper MeaningTM. If you wrote a medieval style tale of inter-clan warfare (as one kid did), the teacher was likely to stand up in front of the class in your absence, and compare it to a homo-erotic orgy scene (which he did one day when the kid was sick.) I sat there the entire time going "WTF? That''s not what he meant!" and even confronted the teacher about it, resulting in a great deal of friction between us for the remainder of the semester.

Sorry about getting off track there, but the point of that story is that I learned a great deal from that creative writing class--not about how to improve my writing, as I don''t think that burdening down a good story with a whole mess of political or cultural statements is an improvement; what I learned is that to me, story is the most important thing of all, and I should write for my own reasons, and not to try to fit the stereotype engendered by the artsy-fartsy literary types who held me and my science-fiction and fantasy writing in such general scorn in that class.


One of my favorite books about the writing process is called On Writing, by Stephen King. I have always been a big Stephen King fan (much to the horror and disgust of the aforementioned creative writing teacher), and I identify with Stephen King in that he has experienced the same sort of hostile attitudes in his career as I experienced in that creative writing class (many of the students shared the teacher''s perspective), and even writes about similar experiences in both his non-fiction (On Writing) and his fiction (It; the character of Bill Denbrough experienced almost this exact same scenario, much to my endless amusement later in life when I read It.)


They say that there is no such thing as a new story, and in the most general terms they are right. The human experience is not so broad as to include an infinite number of discrete, unique story-lines. You pick up any given novel and study it, and it is possible to break it down sufficiently that you can identify the main story, and recognize that story in dozens of other novels. The trick is in taking one of those old stories, and putting your own particular spin on it. Setting, character interactions and development, inner monologue, pacing, voice, the ever-elusive "style"... these are the tools with which you take that story and make it your own. There are a thousand books out there that are basically a re-write of Sam and Frodo''s journey to Mordor, or Taran and Gwyddion''s trek to Annuvin, and the successful ones are those that take that story and make it their own.

So far for Golem, I have spent about ten minutes working on setting and backstory, just enough to fit the rough outline of the game I had in mind. In some respects, the game itself dictates the story. You see, I am a lone developer and upon myself rests the burden of the programming, the level design, and the art and asset creation. I decided from the start that, since drawing and modelling the human figure is such a problem for me, it would be best if I steered away from animating human characters and kept to the theme of non-humans, where errors in proportioning or movement are not so obvious. So, my artistic limitations set bounds on the world, and the still-tenebrous setting of Golem was born--a world in which humans have been nearly eliminated, and the few that are left are largely a non-issue in how history progresses. I avoid the necessity of having to model (and consequently screwing up) a whole mess of human characters, and at the same time have begun to create a world I find to be very interesting, and full of potential. The chief occupants of the world are the golems, magical servants crafted from wood and stone and steel and clay to act as slaves for mankind''s benefit. In a re-write of a thousand other stories, the slaves rose up against their masters and destroyed them, and now they haunt the once-magnificent ruins of the cities of men like ragged, forlorn ghosts, in a world that is slowly reverting to wilderness. It''s not necessarily a setting I would choose to write a novel in, but it works admirably for what I have in mind with Golem.

* * *

I''ve been jotting down stuff for nearly 18 years now, filling up countless notebooks, and endless megabytes of hard-drive space. I''ve finished two novels, and am working on a third. I may even make a try at getting this third one published. I published a number of short stories in the college magazine (thankfully, the creative writing instructor had no editorial control, or I never would have been published).

The biggest influences on my writing have been practice and experience. By practice, I mean writing every day, experimenting with different styles, playing out different scenes in my head and trying to get them down as accurately as I can on paper, etc... And by experience, I mean that I have been to a lot of places, met and observed a lot of people, and read a lot of books.

I remember a thread you posted recently, about your desire to take a trip and visit every state in the lower 48. You wouldn''t believe the profound effect that sort of thing can have on your writing if you let it. Taking the time to learn some history in each place you stop will give you endless ideas for place and setting, while the interesting people you meet and talk to will help you to add life and depth to your characters.

Anyway, sorry for digressing so far.


Josh
vertexnormal AT linuxmail DOT org

Check out Golem: Lands of Shadow, an isometrically rendered hack-and-slash inspired equally by Nethack and Diablo.

quote: Original post by Shotokan
What are some important elements of a story that you include in your work? Do you follow certain guidelines? What books have you read on story telling? Have you taken any classes on creative writing that involved story telling? What did you learn? How has your work improved since then?

Not really a thread for games, but for story writiing in general. I''m a beginner at writing, and I was just wondering who else here jots down stuff and makes something out of it.

Oh my, that could take pages and pages to answer... o_O *takes a deep breath*

Creative Writing Classes
Starting in elementary school I have been involved in a number of creative writing classes, although it did not really occur to me that I wanted to be a writer until eighth grade. But the elementary school exercises were formative for me so I suppose I should describe them anyway. I attended a Montessori school, where as soon as children can write (kindergarden or first grade) they are encouraged to write short (like one paragraph) stories. I don''t remember doing any of this, but my mom has them in a dresser somewhere, so I guess I must have written them. There''s one about how grapes become raisins and whether this is sad or not. And one where I made up a little myth for the origin of the constellation Draco. Then when we were in fourth and fifth grade the process got more organized - every kid was to write and illustrate a small (12-16 pages) book. Mine was about winning a prize at a horse jumping competition. I was actually more pleased with the drawings than the story, lol. At this point my writing had only two virtues: it was creative and my grammar/vocabulary was good for my age. I was actually reading adult novels at this point (hehe it freaked my teacher out when I not only read _The Clan of the Cave Bear_ but did it faster than she did. :D

So then, middle school, this time a public school. I was assigned to write my first poem, and I wrote a few more after that one. My poem somehow made my teacher or some other adult think that I was too lonely and my parents got called in to talk about it, but they managed to convince the school people that I was fine, and I never even heard about this until years later. I learned a lot more about grammar and how to vary my sentence length and type, and was taught how to do dramatic reading (one of the few major lacks of the Montessori elementary english curriculum imho). I learned that OMG I''m allowed to italicize words for emphasis! lol And I learned how to brainstorm and the beginnings of how to do library research. Finally the thing that really triggered my idea that I could write fiction was that for my 8th grade final English project we were given a choice: we could write a research paper or a short story. Naturally I chose the short story thinking it would be much easier. And it was easier, actually. I wrote something about a visionary who was trying to get a bill passed in congress - well, it was more interesting than that summary makes it sound, and it got an A, but more importantly I felt that I had run out of time in writing it and could have done better. So, that summer I started writing.

I wrote the first several chapters of an Anne McCaffrey Dragonriders of Pern Novel about a girl who disguises herself as a boy and gets chosen to be a dragonrider candidate. I attended a 3 week summer writing camp where I wrote a short story about virtual reality (starring a vr goldfish) and things that were doomed because they couldn''t evolve and could only use stopgap measures against entropy. This is the first story I was proud of as being ''literary'' - but most of the people who have read it didn''t get the point. The important thing I learned here was to work as an editing partner and part of a writers'' circle with other people of my own age and stage of learning to write. I still love the creative exchange that goes on in a writing circle - reminds me that I really need to find a new one to join since I moved away from the one I was in during college.

Anyway, now I was in high school. I wrote the first several chapters of an original science fiction novel involving lifebonding, communism vs. capitalism, genetic engineering, terraforming, and sleep-ship colonization. (Influenced in about equal parts by Star Trek and Mercedes Lackey''s Valdemar books.) I attended a 3 week summer creative writing camp, where I was told that my writing was both unusually technically mature and very enjoyable to read. Teachers have continued to point ''readability'' out as the primary virtue of my fiction, and I''m proud of that. I learned assorted story-idea-generating techniques, and also practiced my poetry a little more. I read for the first time a book where the author made up folksongs and encyclopedia entries and stuck them in her book and I thought OMG how smart and cool, I wanna do that! I got better at using the library. I was taught what literary devices are. I was assigned to write the story of my family, and my teacher liked it, so she submitted it to some school district contest and I won a savings bond! I thought Awesome, this writing stuff is making me money! o.O Man was I naive.

Anyway, in between my award and my mad english PSAT scores the powers that be decided to skip me a grade level in english so that later as a senior I would have a free year to take the school''s one creative writing course. I started competing in Academic Sports League, for which I was reading an additional curriculum of classic literature, and learning for the first time about literary criticism, plus writing timed extemporaneous essaies. I wrote one on the prompt ''tickle me elmo and capitalism'' of which I''m still proud, even though the judges disliked it. I never got a medal for an essay, although I got several for literature, and one for an interview in which I talked about the greek myth of Arachne.

My SWEP (talented and gifted) coordinator suggested that I apply to the Pennsylvania Governor''s School for the Arts, for creative writing. Just the application process was educational because I had to write so much and revise and polish everything to make up my portfolio, and then I had to go to the college where they were interviewing candidates and write a timed extemporaneous short story. I almost paniced because I had not expected to be asked to write timed fiction, ever, but I churned out a piece of pulp sf about colonists technology having funny interactions with native alien vegetation. I was accepted. And PGSA changed my life. For the first time, here were adults treating me as if I was not a kid, not a student, but that magic word ''artist''. We talked and talked and talked about writing, and did all sorts of writing exercises, and everybody group-edited each person''s writing very seriously, analytically and with helpful suggestions. We didn''t actually do all that much writing, but we did some, and we read a few authors'' writing and then got to talk to them about it. Also everyone there had to have a minor in a different art area; mine was theater, and I read several scripts and wrote my first one, as well as my first set of song lyrics. It was like living in an artists'' colony for 5 glorious weeks! I really wish I could live like that all the time...

Then back to high school for two more years. In senior AP english (which was junior english for me since I had been skipped) we again had the choice to do fiction for a final project - I and a partner did an illustrated book version of Winnie the Pooh doing Albert Camus'' _The Stranger_. I did writing excercises where I imitated the style of Poe and some other writers. I read middle english for the first time. I learned that there are magazines and books all about how to write. I learned about the concept of writing by roleplaying. Then in my actual senior year I was unfortunately unable to fit the creative writing class in my schedule, but I took an independant study with an english teacher instead. Lol that was the first time I turned in a gay romance and had the teacher say Uh... I don''t know if I''m allowed to let you write this stuff... I was proud of that one too since it was one of my first short stories which had a complete original plot and a cool moral. Since I didn''t have any classmates to work with for once, we practiced in-depth self-editing instead. Oh, and I wrote personal essaies for my college applications, which was the first time I''d ever really written as an introspective first person narrator; I liked this so much it became a permanant style choice for me. ^_^

Now, college. Well, despite my AP scores I was not allowed to skip freshmen comp. I took the honors version, but it was still a total waste of time. Pretty much every other english class I took was useful in some way or other though. And since I majored in English I ended up taking a hella lot of english courses. One in fantasy, in which I learned about the heroic monomyth; one in science fiction in which I learned about major eras in science fiction, from pulp through postmodernism. One class entirely on postmodernism which confused the hell out of me and I barely got a c in it (I have a solidly modern brain, hopelessly stuck in the 80s, and I like it that way But I learned a lot of good vocab like bricolage and dialectic.). I took a class on non-western mythologies which was awesome - this was the class that led me to study Vladimir Propp and folktale formulae. I studied British Lit both pre- and post-1800. I studied Short Stories post-1900. I had a class on Chaucer and contemporaries where we focused on love, marriage, and gender roles (with a gay professor! ). This is where I learned about occasional poems like epithalamions (wedding poems). I took several technical english classes in editing and article writing, which were totally boring but gave me an excuse to do research. Well, and one was useful because we did a word-for-word analysis of several pieces of fiction and practiced controlling our register and tone precisely. I took some linguistics classes which I used to teach myself about making up alien languages for science fictional worlds. The only things I wanted to take that I couldn''t were a class in modernism/structuralism/narratology (the university didn''t offer one because it was out of fashion) and a class in how to write scripts (only COMM majors could take it). I took a series of creative writing seminars which again were gruop editing interspersed with theory lectures and analyses of published fiction. I joined a writer''s circle and for the first time met somebody else who was writing a science fiction novel. ^_^


Phew... well, there''s my entire history of learning things about English, if anyone was actually patient/interested enough to read through it all. I think I''ll cover books-about-writing that I''ve read in a separate installment.

Sunandshadow Babbles On :D , Pt II: Books About Writing

Okay, this is by no means a complete list because I often neglect to add these things to my running bibliography when I read them, and there are some whole categories like Writing For Comics missing... >.< Anyway, this is the list I have.


Science Fiction
Bova, Ben with Anthony R. Lewis. Space Travel. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer''s Digest Books, 1997.
Gillett, Stephen L. World-Building: A Writer''s Guide To Constructing Star Systems and Life-Supporting Planets. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer''s Digest Books, 1996.
Ochoa, George and Jeffrey Osier. Writer''s Guide To Creating a Science Fiction Universe. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer''s Digest Books, 1993.
Schmidt, Stanley. Aliens and Alien Societies. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer''s Digest Books, 1995.


Myth and Archetype
Feinstein, David. The Mythic Path: Discovering the Guiding Stories Of Your Past--Creating a Vision Of Your Future. Los Angeles: G. P. Putnam''s Sons, 1997.
Feinstein, David. Personal Mythology: the Psychology Of Your Evolving Self, Using Ritual, Dreams, and Imagination To Discover Your Inner Story. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 1988.
Frey, James N. The Key: How To Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power Of Myth. New York: St. Martin''s Press, 2000.
Jung, Carl Gustav. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press, 1969.
Lesser, Simon O. Fiction and the Unconscious. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.


Romance
Estrada, Rita Clay and Rita Gallagher. You Can Write A Romance. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer''s Digest Books, 1999.
Falk, Kathryn. How to Write a Romance and Get It Published: With Intimate Advice From The World''s Most Popular Romantic Writers. New York: Crown, 1983.
Gallagher, Rita. Writing Romances: A Handbook. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer''s Digest Books, 1997.
Lowery, Marilyn M. How to Write Romance Novels That Sell. New York: Rawson Associates, 1983.
Pianka, Phyllis Taylor. How To Write Romances. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer''s Digest Books, 1998.


Plot and Narrative
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1984.
Bywater, Ingram. Aristotle on the Art of Poetry. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980.
Cooper, Lane. An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy With an Adaptation of the Poetics and a Translation of the ‘Tractatus Coislinianus’. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1922.
De Sousa, Ronald. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987.
Dibell, Ansen. The Elements of Fiction Writing: Plot. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1988.
Fludernik, Monica. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996.
Goldman, L. R. Child’s Play: Myth, Mimesis, and Make-Believe. New York: Berg, 1998.
Newton, Steven E. The Thirty-Six Basic Plots
http://www.io.com/~jlockett/RPG/HEGGA/Stuff/frp-plots.html 6/29/00
Pavel, Thomas G. The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama: Theory and History of Literature, Volume Eighteen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Pitkin, Walter B. How to Write Stories. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1923.
Prince, Gerald. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. New York, Muton Publishers, 1982.
Rossi, Terri. Wordplay Columns: Screenwriting Column 12: It’s Been Done http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp12.Been.Done.html
Schwartz, Ursula Verena. Young Children’s Dyadic Pretend Play: A Communication Analysis of Plot Structure and Plot Generative Strategies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1991.
Storey, Robert. Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation. Evanston, Illinois: North Western University Press, 1996.
Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

All stories take a part of you and show it off to the world. When you make a story, think of stories you liked, and try to use what you liked in them to your advantage. I like plot twists, so you''ll see them in things I do. I don''t like lots of charachter physical description, so I tend to steer away from that. I like stories with suspense and lots of plot, so I try to put that in more than the action element, although that is important, too. I prefer not to be distracted by constant cussing, sexual content, etc., so I try to steer away from that and steer away from details while keeping language use and actions consistent with what you would expect. I REALLY don''t like when people''s actions in a story are completely unbelievable, such as in the video game Parasite Eve (SquareSoft) in which the main character, an officer in the NYPD, takes her story of a mutated opera singer setting people on fire and mutating other animals to the press and to the rest of the department, and her story is unconditionally accepted. That is one of the most difficult ones in writing Sci-fi or fantasy when you introduce some concept such as magic to the unexposed. These are only a few things to consider as you write. Things you have experienced or been exposed to are easiest to write well with. When you are writing a story, try to think out a start and some major plot points at least before writing the first page. If you think of anything else, you can change it later, but I find spontaneous (SP) writing to work well, as it makes the writer think about how their characters will react to a situation without worrying about getting them immediately to some predetermined point. A very broad outline is probably best for organizing your story.

I say these not as self-evident truths, but as concepts that I find most helpful. If you try these and they don''t work, try something else. Writing is a process which comes from the inner self, and not something that can be put into a box for all people. You can''t find an algorithm for writing because one size doesn''t fit all in this case. Writing is a process of trial and error, and it could take your entire life to find the writing style for you, or it could just come to you overnight. All you can do is write and find out how you do it best. Good luck in your writing.
Richard Veysey

The default view in the forums shows only topics updated over the past five days, and this one hasn''t been updated for six, so I just wanted to revive it to see if we can get some more help for Shotokan.