#story process

A Masterlist

This is a (mostly) comprehensive list of all the posts I've made about my dpxdc fic. I'll add any new story info i share on my blog here. Feel free to subscribe to this post if you want to check for updates :>

World Dumps:

Lore i - Infinite Realms

Lore ii - Infinite Realms

Who is Pariah Dark? (working on it)

Lore iii - the GIW (working on it)

How To, a Summoning Guide (working on it)

Story Hints/Process:

How it Started

Lore begun

the Title

the Diner

AU Curses 1, 2

little announcement after Months of Silence

Danny Curses

What's this damn Fic even about?

Pariah Dark has lore (woah)

Official Updates:

#1 Chapter length and briefest summary

#2 Chapter lengths adjusted and upload announcement

Chap 1, The Yawning Grave uploaded! (08/11/2024)

Chap 2, I’m Still Here uploaded! (08/25/2024)

Upload Announcement, Important

Chap 3, The Suburbs uploaded! (09/15/2024)

IMPORTANT - Holiday Hiatus

Extension...

Currently editing!

Hiatus over >:)

HIDBV Teasers:

Chap. 1, The Yawning Grave

Chap. 2, I'm Still Here

Chap. 4, In the Room Where You Sleep

Chap. 5, Pa Pa Power

Chap. 6, Sickly Suite Part Three: Gone

Chap. 8, Young and Tragic

Setting up the scene (building sets, decorating, etc),

Posing the sims (creating / find poses, and setting up the sims),

Styling the sims (cc hunting, time spent in cas),

Writing the dialogue/story,

Editing the photos.

Send to three other story simblrs and get to know more about each others favorite and least favorite part of this crazy process!

oooh! Such a good question

Writing the story

I'm here to write, people! I guess it kind of varies depending on how I feel, but writing is generally my favourite part of the process. Also the most challenging, but fulfilling etc etc.

2. Setting up the scene

WHEN I'M IN THE MOOD. I love sitting down and creating someone's house, adding all the details etc, but when I'm not bothered and have to then it's pretty rough.

3. Styling the sims

It's fine, I don't mind it, but I like to get in and out of CAS pretty quickly. I feel overwhelmed by the amount of content, and it's often not easy to find something that fits both the vibe and the era.

4. Posing the sims

It's fine. It doesn't kill me, and I have the process pretty streamlined, but it doesn't exactly spark joy.

5. Editing the photos

Bleh. I tolerate it. It's fun for like, one screenshot, but repeating the edit 30 times is so draining.

Make sure your scene does what a scene is supposed to do. Scenes need to focus on moving forward the plot or characterization and have a beginning, middle and end. This article here goes into that in better detail, including a lot on good scene structure. 

Each scene should propel the reader into the next scene and compel them to keep reading. While it’s great to end on a bang! -- a secret being revealed, a door being opened -- the satisfaction comes because that bang! resolves some issue you, the creator, set up in that scene. 

As always, structure is key. Setup --> Complication --> Crisis --> Resolution is one typical structure discussed here. 

1. Scenes are mini stories all their own.

2. Don’t fuck with centaurs unless you’re at Arby’s.

Yeah dude, you know we can’t do your research for you,right? You know you’re going to have to spend many, many hours doing thatresearch, right? So, how do you get started? And I hope I can assume this is a topic about which you are passionate because, done right, a project like this will by necessity consume you. 

Everything you need to know about what you need to know canbe found in this Goodreads summary about one of the best-selling historicalnovels ever, Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. It’s set in 12thcentury England and the overarching story is about the construction of thefinest cathedral ever. 

Sounds fascinating, yeah? No. Not to most people, at leastnot that they think. It’s the detail and research and craftsmanship – and oddly, the relatability – that’s madeit a bestseller for longer than most of you reading this have been alive. 

Follett, btw,began his writing career as a journalist; he got bored, went into publishingand began writing his own stuff on nights and weekends. The result: He’s soldmore than 150 MILLION MOTHERFUCKING BOOKS in not quite 40 years. 

But let’s break down the book summary into what you’ll needto know to write: 

1. It’s incredibly detailed, in both natural and humanscenery

2. It incorporates the Big Historic Events and People of thetime period

3. It incorporates the small, personal events of thecharacters – things that might be unique to the time and culture and yet areuniversal to the human experience

4. There are many intriguing characters. We get to knowtheir dreams, their labors and their loves.

5. Characters are shaped by details about their place insociety.

6. There’s a damn good plot – betrayal, revenge and love –which is probably why the dude’s sold 150 million motherfucking books; this onealone has sold more than 18 million.

You need to be organized. This post here has good ideas and a list for getting started. Everyone’s method is going to be different, but if you need a place to start setting up your system, you could do much worse. 

If you aren’t already, you need to familiarize yourself with the primary, secondary and tertiary sources for the information you need. Once you dive down this rabbit hole, you’ll be well along the way to being able to find what you need to fill out your descriptions and your characters. Take notes. Keep track of your research and your sources. 

Never, ever forget that you aren’t writing a textbook. Historical fiction author Lindsey Davis has this advice and it cannot be stressed enough:

“You are not writing history. You are writing a novel. This requires you to master plot, characterisation, dialogue, narrative tone and description. Note that nowhere in my list do the words ‘research’ or ‘history’ appear.” 

(quote found in this book, which you might also find helpful.)

This is discussed elsewhere at length, and this blog can help more than we can, but please for the love of the stars do not whitewash or appropriate the culture of your setting. Don’t get caught up in white savior nonsense, a particular pitfall about stories set in Colonial and soon-to-be-post Colonial Africa.  

As we’ve mentioned many times before, the best way to write a good story that doesn’t fall into these traps is to write fully realized, well-rounded characters in a setting for which you’ve given your blood, sweat and tears to research. 

Our tags can help you with the other nuts and bolts of writing mentioned above. Writing tools might help with planning ideas, too. 

Good luck! 

Does P/S/P/S not work? Depending on the length of the story, it might not even be obvious. More on that in a minute. 

The plot deserves the limelight, so add extra plot scenes, then punctuate them with a subplot scene. P/S/P/P/S for example. 

Once you reach the proper flow, your readers will get into it, too, and they’re not going to map out the meta-order of the scenes unless you’re in a writing class discussing the structure of the short story. 

Plotting a novel or a screenplay is a lot more structured, mostly because the length requires that the story be laid out on a framework that’s both logical and psychologically satisfying. And there’s more than one way to do that even. If what you’re really getting yourself into is a novella, you’re going to have to pay more attention to novel/screenplay structure. 

But for a short story, work for flow of the story you need to tell. Just tell it. Just write it. When you’re done, you can let it sit and then go back and get all meta on yourself. Beta readers can help, too. 

Warning: I was doing some internet searches for advice on short story structure not too long ago and honestly, I found a shit ton of shitty advice out there. Worse than any search I’ve ever done for this blog. I’m considering doing a critique of what I found, although I won’t be calling out any one site or author (or content mill???). 

(x posted from pillowfort)

I have so much writing that I've never posted because the story isn't complete. Literally dozens and dozens of stories, maybe even over a hundred to half written fic destined never to see the light of day. Sometimes I re-read these things and feel angry with myself for not being able to finish because the parts I have written are good enough to be shared. 

I've only posted one story in my whole life that I didn't finish and I got comments like this about it in my inbox:

Everybody must try to believe we never read this! I never hate a human like you! Please rid of it if you don't plan to go on! Ten years later, I'll still be here to remind you!

This is the actual comment trying to make me feel bad that I never finished it. And I DID feel bad. I felt awful. I knew I probably wouldn't finish it, but I had hoped that I might.

From then onward, I vowed never to post an incomplete story ever again. 

But I've given this one asshole so much control. I've shortchanged myself and everybody else that might have enjoyed what I wrote. (I don't mean this egotistically. I hope it doesn't come across that way.) It's just that comments and kudos and likes are so energizing! They reaffirm that my ideas aren't crap, that people are interested and would want to read the stories I come up with.

I don't think I'm alone in this but when I post something anywhere online and there are no hits, likes, kudos, comments whatever, my thoughts go exactly like this, Well, this is crap and nobody likes it, you talentless hack.

(Tiny PSA: Leave kudos on stories you like, leave comments on stories you like, leave both on stories you love.)

I'm going to be posting a chapter from a WIP story on Pillowfort soon and additionally, I have decided to create a WIP Story Workshop story over on AO3 where I can try out chapters from my various WIPs until I see fit to break them off into their own thing. 

I'll post them on Pillowfort first and then eventually migrate them over to AO3.