How do you come up with story ideas?

Most of my ideas come from wanting to write something about a subject I’d like to read about.

I haven’t finished a CS game yet, so you might want to take this with a grain of salt. Having said that, I’ve completed a few (pretty large) games and stories on other mediums.

As far as keeping yourself going, FairyGodfeather is absolutely right about breaking it down into manageable chunks. The trick is to keep advancing by inches and - by all means - never stopping for too long. Taking a “break” is pretty risky for writers, since we’re always inundated with new ideas; creative people are also the best at giving themselves creative excuses. Soon, a week-long break stretches into a month, and so on.

I give myself a small and achievable daily goal when I work on projects - so that even if I don’t advance by much on one particular day, I’m still constantly in the habit of working on it. And it won’t seem as insurmountable when you’re focusing on the trees instead of the forest.

I also separate different components of the game. Applying this to CS, that means I don’t try to write, code, and test run at the same time. I first write out a long segment, designating where codes go with shorthands. Then I go back and mechanically add all the codes. Then, and only then, I open it up in FF and do some troubleshooting.

I also plan, but I don’t do it meticulously. That is, I make myself have a large overarching structure in mind before I even begin creating a game/story - I know, generally, where we’re headed, if not the precise details or denouement. Then I tend to fill in the blanks as I go along. I like to give myself the luxury of organic development.

Ideas in my head as of late are mainly around settings, and that’s thanks to my shenanigans in EU3, Victoria 2, and Hearts of Iron 3.

Too bad I tend to forget them in a moment. :confused:

I usually find that ideas form more easily for me if I close the creative box for a while and go do something else.

Staring into the box doesn’t make ideas magically form. :frowning:

As for keeping ideas from getting out of control, I make a general map of important choices and set up the code for the choices before I even start writing. Then, I can expand on those choices within a more structured and limited range. Every once in a while I still have to go back and do some trimming and editing, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it would be if the limitations weren’t set up beforehand.

I seem to be the only chaos-style writer Here… I daydream until I get an idea and just let it grow and flesh itself out along the way. Of course, I’ve never written novels before, so maybe that’s why I don’t have to plan…

PS CS_Closet are you going to continue your story? Don’t worry, I’m not going to steal it, lol. Just a great fan of how you wrote fight scenes.

For novels and short stories I write that way, @Wyrmspawn. Or I should say that I wrote that way, since I’ve not been able to write for years. I just sat down and wrote and let my imagination run wild and the story would turn out as much of an unexpected surprise to me as to anyone else.

For Choicescript I can’t do that. I need the structure in place but it’s a loose structure, the actual content itself can veer drastically from what I had planned when I actually start writing. But plans are good to at least know where I’m starting and heading. Otherwise I just get overwhelmed and there’s too much choice.

@Wyrmspawn if you dare to steal my compatriot you has to fight my poison justice is a joke lol

Hahahahahahaha… All stories are mine once they die, for I am the story necromancer! I will create chaotic caricatures of what the original author wanted! Mwahaha!

Seriously though, hope you’re not giving up the project, closet. Enough ideas have died,and II’m dying to see one of those actually completed.

Was there too much death in the above post?

@Wyrmspawn
I have some weird, morbid curiosity about how anyone other than me would think Resonance should go. :-?

Anyway, still in the works. I’ll ask for the topic to be reopened once I have news.

Returning to the topic at hand, now that you and @FairyGodfeather mention structure (or lack thereof), my method of keeping an idea under control is (in the reality outside of my head) far less organized than I made it sound. Slap down a beginning, a few endings, and two or three plot points in between! The rest? Run rampant! Why not? :))

I think I’m just lucky my level of dedication to a project matches my level of ambition. Fully plotting out something would probably be the realistic answer for most people who actually want to get something done.

I love Resonance. It’s one of the games I’m most looking forward to seeing more of. The thread closing made me sad. I’m glad it’ll eventually be reopened.

I’m a really chaotic writer. I tend to have some vague idea of where I want the story to go, but I know that when I start writing something better comes up and I’ll just roll with that. It also doesn’t help that I think best while I’m writing, because that’s when I see the characters interacting with each other and that’s when I realise what is doable with them and what isn’t. So for stories I usually write the first few pages and then totally rearrange my plot. After that small details get altered, but the large red line stays the same.

As for getting ideas… I usually start stories with a concept or a character in mind. For example I have one short story that should be part of a series (but the rest isn’t written yet and probably never will be, or a long time from now). That story started with four figurines I have on my desk. While I was cleaning my room I decided that it would be fun to write a story using just those characters. By now I’ve sort of cheated on that, but that was the initial idea. Just a few days before that I’d had a conversation about challenges and that it would be fun to write a series of stories, each with a theme.
I’d already done something like that with a series of the main emotions, so each story focusing on one of those. Now I decided to use the seven deadly sins, so seven short stories, all in the same world with the same set of characters, with each story themed around one of the seven deadly sins.

So yeah, long story short: I usually get ideas from stories from little things. I start with a character, a concept, a name, a country, and from there I develop other characters and a plot line, sometimes a world and a culture, depending on the setting.