Story Writing - Tutorial By: XcuMaSoft "TLE"

[Reives]

A jerk can work if his/her reasons are communicated to the player in such a way that it makes them sympathize with him/her.

 

[RavenTDA]

Your game/story needs a good history, without this it?s just a bunch of events that will not blend as well as they could.

What does a history of the world have to do with the BLENDING of events now? That makes no sense. History has nothing to do with how you flow your transitions between major points in your story together.

Don't you just hate reading/playing a story when you cannot get engaged into it. This is mostly down to changes in style during the story.

Do you even know what style is? Style doesn't have anything to do with having a person be engaged in the beginning of a story. That has to do with the HOOK of your story not style. Your pointers confuse me as well as to how they have to do with style. Knowing your audience may be important on deciding themes and what TYPE of story. Setting rules for characters has to do with CHARACTERIZATION as well as what they would do in situations. What does graphical style have to do with a writing tutorial? :\

Base the characters on people you know with the same attitude.

Every where I have ever read that is a major writing no-no. And it makes sense; while you can be INSPIRED by others I would never base a character on a real life person for a variety of reasons. Majorly it has to do with the fact it's not real-life and entertainment and you don't know the character for years on end so it's important to exaggerate your character's personality to usher the audience into understanding the character further and at a much faster rate.

Before you even think about writing the events your story will portray get your characters down on paper. People can tell if you have done this the other way around cause the characters personality will not stay constant. Without knowing your characters

No. You don't have to and you shouldn't make a bunch of random characters before you think about plot. In fact there are stories out there that you can swap characters out for entirely different ones and the story doesn't even change in the slightest. This is called a Plot Driven story. But even when writing a Character Driven story you should have at least a vague idea of what you are doing for plot or else your plot will suffer. Best to do both vaguely and gradually build the details on both ends as you add more events and add more characters.

Your example baffles me as to why I am looking at a picture. Graphics really shouldn't be in a writing tutorial, they don't really add much. Maybe suggesting sketching a character to get a better understanding of how they look is fine. But we don't need to see this picture. Besides that your example is harshly stark. There is more to a character than extremely simple facts such as age, name, and gender. Even your little bio at the bottom does little to allude to anything in personality.

Further down in the posts I see you show an example of a "full bio". That's not a bio, that's a story. Maybe, you could say that's a history for her but you needn't be so detailed about it. Furthermore there is again zero portrayal of personality. Basically she's a perfect creature with perfect looks, special powers, and has had a tragedy happen to her that has nothing to do with any wrong on her part. Sounds like a perfect example of a Mary Sue.

This is also the one section no amount of reading tutorials, Ideas are in your head, only you can find the. This is also where you decide the start begging and end.

No tutorials on plot you say? I have an entire BOOK dedicated to plot sitting on my shelf. There's so much you can say about it... You only provided a sorta definition of it. Besides what is your history or intro? That's not plot.

Personally I think the most difficult part of this section is stretching out the story without it all being a boring "Filler".

There should be no filler AT ALL. If you are putting in sequences that are not moving the plot along or not helping characterization they need to be ALL REMOVED. You don't need to stretch a story. A long story doesn't necessarily equal a GOOD story. Stretching a story can destroy a perfectly good short story.

Your example is confusing. This is something I'd read on the back of a book/game not really good for exampling a story from start to finish. Can we maybe see an example outside of your game for once? That might help things a lot, considering you may not want to reveal something you are working on for the sake of teaching.

The more you rewrite the same story the more ideas you seem to come up with.

What are we drafting here? This is only true for a draft of an outline. I hope you are not coming up with new ideas in the actual writing the final product phase. This can significantly hurt a story because a change of events in the beginning can completely change not only the future of the plot but characters. New ideas should all be worked out and thought of in the beginning outline phase or else you could encounter consistency problems.

The details are what makes your story stand out from the rest. For this section I cannot really give an example. This is 100% down to the writer. So.. Good luck.

Er...good luck? Why bother have this section if you can't give advice for it?

In this section all you need to do is read the whole story again and again until you get to the point you read it and don't make a single change. Simple!

The fix... you mean editing. You're kinda vague here. What kind of changes should be made? You don't provide any examples of how to edit a story at all.

Overall I noticed you have quite a few grammar problems in this tutorial which I find kinda ironic considering it's a writing tutorial. Perhaps you, yourself need to brush up on your writing skills and have a better understanding of what exactly these terms mean before you write up a tutorial on them. You seemed to be confused on quite a lot of them. I hope that helps you for when you decide to write another.

 

[shannon]

A jerk can work if his/her reasons are communicated to the player in such a way that it makes them sympathize with him/her.

Yeah, I know. My jerk comment was not meant seriously. But Squall from FF8 is a good example of taking the jerk character too far. That guy was insufferable. Half of his lines in the game was "...whatever..."

 

[Dreamland]

your tutorial is awsome!:thumb:

And um...... I am such a noob, I don't know how to post threads:p
how do you post threads?

 

[Dyegov]

Though this is all common sense, it was good to read. It reminded me of things, and helped me decided to start working on my project right now. Congratulations

 

[Flashdance]

There should be no filler AT ALL. If you are putting in sequences that are not moving the plot along or not helping characterization they need to be ALL REMOVED. You don't need to stretch a story. A long story doesn't necessarily equal a GOOD story. Stretching a story can destroy a perfectly good short story.

Well for a book it might be true, but as far as games are concerned the "filler" lable can be put on nearly every event that doesnt concern the story, like dungeons or "random" battles.

 

[BunnyKinx]

AMEN!

lol, I agree. final fantasy 7 took me 55hours the first time... only about 10 hours of that is story

 

[SorceressKyrsty]

Squall from FF8 had a reason to be a jerk, he was keeping every one away because he didn't want to get hurt again by one of them leaving, like when he was kid.
It's an alright tutorial, but there are ways to describe something by imagining it yourself, like I do when I'm writing.
And normally with my characters there base comes from a real-life person, but I take their attitude and personality slightly away from that so there not exactly the same.
And sometimes after a major event, a character's personality will change dramatically, jsut like in real-life i.e: a close friend/ memeber of family dies, it's gonna leave you changed, isn't it? Something suddenly turns up, or goes away, etc. That's what happened to a few characters in my story (BTW, this story is 600 pgs long and NONE of it is filler. It's all story line, and it's still got another 30+ pgs to go)
BTW, sometimes being a jerk is the only way people will notice you. I have to be a jerk cause otherwise I get stood on. Life at it's very best :P