Is this for a game? If it is, I don''t think you''ll be need very detailed stuff like, "He drinks from the cup". I would write an outline first. You learned how to write a story in 7th grade, right? Remember? Outline, then slowly build upon the outline, adding details such as "He drinks from the cup", and so on.


Quick Clickys: [ WiseElben.com | My Journal | nMagic | My Profile ]
"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he will eat for a life time."
-Chinese Proverb

Agreed. If you flood it with details before you get the skeleton down, there''s a much greater risk of inconsistency down the road. It also kills off chance for foreshadowing, since not even you know what''s going to happen. Your excerpt reads almost like a screenplay, and when it comes time to actually make cutscenes and whatnot, that''s exactly what you''ll want, but save that sort of precision for storyboarding. Making a game is more like making a movie than like writing a short story. You''re best off laying out the major events or characters or whatever will be the driving force behind it, and then working on the sequence and details.

You have a good portrait of a character here, but it has no context. This guy could walk out the door and fight ninjas, or rob a bank, or go to work editting a newspaper, or feed the chickens, or drive a tram, or fly to Mars and drive a Martian tram, or whatever. Six paragraphs won''t be enough.

You seem to be trying to tell a story in words that only exists in your mind as ideas. Your best bet here is to write down the ideas, and then figure out how to string it together into a story.

Do you dream? I find that keeping a dream journal is an excellent exercise for identifying elements of a story. Sometimes I''ll wake up and only remember a few images, or a brief snippet of conversation. Trying to recreat the entire story from that shows me what role that snippet plays in the story. If I remember a series of brief images spaced out over the dream, I can generally get it all eventually. On the other hand, if I remember in stark detail just a few seconds, as your excerpt presents, I can almost never figure out where the dream came from or went.

Try to write the story as you would find it in the encyclopedia five hundred years later. Something like this:

"Williard, Lethor (2167-2212): Chief Intelligence Officer for the New Cythera Governement from 2198 until his assassination in 2212, Lethor Williard first entered the field as an insurgent during the war of 2190. A graduate student in Computer Science at the time, Williard stumbled upon an encrypted transmission containing the details of the Earth Alliance invasion to take place later that year. In cooperation with Rella Huber, his future wife (married in 2197), Williard decyphered the transmission and brought it to the attention of the Cythera Parliament, despite multiple attempts by Earth Alliance operatives to recover the data and eradicate both Williard and Huber. As Chief Intelligence Officer, Williard instantiated safeguards and "smart" firewalls, obtaining several patents and overseeing multiple top-secret projects, until in 2212 the 45-year-old Williard was assassinated by Laura Briggs, who had defected to Earth Intelligence during the war. Evidence indicates that Briggs and Williard had been romantically involved prior to his marriage, and that they had cooperated briefly to expose the impending assault on Cythera."

Then you work on the period that the game will span, the individual relationships, and the plot of the game. Then you work on the individual scenes and actions that each character takes.

Wow. Ok, for this piece, my suggestion is get away from the machine for a moment. Get something to drink, stare out a window a bit, clear your mind. Then come back and read what you wrote. I mean really read it.

When your first paragraph complains loudly about ''feeling something missing'', and having ''a lost beginning'', then maybe your subconcious is trying to tell you something.

I mean, really. This isn''t the beginning of your story, this is your mind avoiding the story. Your subconcious says, "We don''t have a beginning" and so you write about not having a beginning.

Some part of your brain says "procrastinate, maybe the story will appear when we''re not looking," so you write the main character going to the bathroom. Hey, that eats up some words. And you can make it a space bathroom in order to mention the setting.

Then what does the character think about? Not the threat of an impending invasion. Not the on-again off-again romance with the leading lady. He thinks about recycling human waste into something consumable. Not unlike recycling stale plots into new text. Your subconcious is still trying to get your attention. It''s screaming "We don''t want to write this! This is just recycled crap."

So yeah, the other posters were right. Come up with a plan before trying to write the actual story. Maybe sit down and fiddle with the plot structure. Maybe just do some free-form writing not directly related to your main plot in order to get into the mood. What you posted just isn''t your beginning.

Hope this helps.