Let's talk about our writing strategies and approaches!

For writing, I actually have no specific strategy whatsoever hahaha woops because I tend to let the story write itself, if you get what I mean? While I may have some sort of skeleton, I usually only follow the first few guides and then my writing just… tends to walk off the path. This is because I tend to daydream while I write and sometimes I just get all these seemingly brilliant ideas and just go WOAH. That aside, I do set goals of 1000 words every time I try to write something. It’s always been my minimum, but it’s a bit different for when I’m writing with ChoiceScript :sweat_smile:
i do it all in notepad, actual, default notepad and i die a little each time. struggle

My ideas, on the other hand… Well, I like to daydream. I also ask a lot of questions-- for example: if the stars are the children of the moon and the sun, what happened between them that made the moon take them all away? I tend to ponder on silly questions like that, and that’s how I get my ideas. There’s nothing technical about it :laughing:
In fact, my latest project’s plot is actually from a dream I had last year :sweat_smile:

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Sure!

First off, a cosmetic thing, the UI theme and syntax theme I use:

And actual plugins — far from all the ones I use, but I dunno how much code you do and in what languages? If you could tell me, I could recommend more plugins!!

  • wordcount, essential for NaNoWriMo :stuck_out_tongue:
  • typewriter, makes the interface nicer for writing
  • project manager, so you can make “projects”, putting files from different locations into one accessible list
  • ChoiceScript syntax highlighting, so you can see what the heck you’re doing with the code
  • ink syntax highlighting I dunno if you write anything in the ink scripting language, but I do, so throwing this in anyway (also sneakily promoting ink!)
  • tasks, a to-do list plugin!
  • auto-update packages, an auto-updater, so you don’t have to remember to keep everything up-to-date manually!

Hope this helps. :heart:

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Oh jeeze, Like @RGH I simply daydream or take inspiration from articles I read or something I stumbled across and found cool. Though, I can’t say it takes years for me to develop stuff :sweat_smile: Sometimes I start with a plot, sometimes I start with a concept, sometimes I start with characters, sometimes it all begins with a design. For Nekomata, I had the cat’s yokai appearance thought up before anything. It wasn’t even going to be a yokai originally to be honest. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, only how it looked. At first I was going to do something like Fruit Baskets (a manga about the Zodiac) but somehow it didn’t exactly fit, so I went poking around and rediscovered the two cat Yokais: the bakeneko and the nekomata. I rolled with the bakeneko concept but also wanted to the nekomata. The more I read up on the lore and yokais in general, the more Be the Nekomata took shape. Everything else is developing naturally on its own (that’s not to say I don’t have a plot in mind though, because I definitely do).

I use Google Docs to draft everything, as weird as it sounds :slight_smile: The project extends across three documents for each different route and two additional documents; one for the notes and one for the raw code (which is to say, the second back up, but it’s also useful in keeping track of my word count). The many formatting options Google docs offers comes in handy when it comes to separating everything into arcs, chapters, pages (what I call each choice, after a choice is presented I start a new “page”, signified by the use of the third header), and sub pages (these are choices that pertain only to the route I’m working on and can’t be added to another route’s document). I write a good chunk, copy it over to notepad, and then code it. Of course, Google stylizes some punctuation so I have to then use the Find/Replace tool to fix that up.

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Thank you! I’ve looked at the plugins and they seem really useful! I already had the choicescript plug-in, though, since that’s exactly what hooked me to Atom.
As for other programming languages, I’m a computer science major so I code in a lot of languages but I already am satisfied with the IDEs. I was just looking for a good editor for CS, which I found thanks to your post.
Lastly, I know that Ink is another language which you just promoted. But I don’t know how good is it, will you recommend it?

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Ink is amazing and it’s my favourite IF scripting language! I wrote this (unfinished WIP, also NSFW) in it, if you wanna see what kinda thing it does.

The official GitHub repo is here; they have a tutorial! There’s an ink IDE but I prefer to use Atom and only use Inky for testing.

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I always love reading about how others approach writing.

Sublime Text is my go-to text editor: all the shortcuts and mass editing capabilities are a real time saver. The game files are synced through the cloud so I can resume where I left off on my phone or iPad (the app I use on iOS is Textastic, both editors are easy to setup for ChoiceScript syntax highlighting and Textastic is cool because it lets me test the game on the go, too). I write and code at the same time, I figured that out thanks to this invaluable thread. When I have an idea for the setting or characters, or anything I need to write down that doesn’t fit in the story yet, I use Evernote to keep all that organized.

During the day, all I manage to squeeze out are a few hundred feeble words. The magic really happens after I go to bed. I’m an insomniac, so I use the time between laying down and actually going to sleep to just write, when it’s just me and my thoughts in the dark. That’s when I crank out the most - and I think the best - writing. I guess when everything is calm and dark, it’s easier to both concentrate and let your mind wander, let go of the crippling doubts, and not obsess over word choice (leaving that until the editing phase later). When I finally manage to get to sleep - which isn’t every night, annoyingly enough - my characters invade my dreams and give me new ideas. (But then I have to write it all down before I forget, which eats into my sleep time… arh, writing isn’t healthy for me… =P)

For a new project, I start with a character, and some feeling the character has, maybe a situation. Then I basically question (torture?) the character relentlessly until they tell me where they’re from, what happened, how they think, what keeps them up at night, their beliefs and fears and doubts, their aspirations and regrets etc. Often I think I have them all figured out but they almost always end up surprising me.

My outlines are vague. When I try outlining in any detail, ideas elude me and I feel like the least creative person alive, it’s planner’s block. So even if I feel like I’m going in blind without an outline, I force myself to just start writing the first scene I have in mind, and then the ideas start flowing again as I go. Sometimes interesting details pop up unexpectedly, and I make a note of them because I might want to use them later on (either in the form of plot elements, or a new character or a plot twist).

I try to force myself to write in a linear way, I’m afraid that if I jumped around like @Lizzy, all I’ll have left to write at the end are the boring-but-necessary scenes. It’s easier to make “boring” scenes interesting when I have a future exciting scene to look forward to. (Interestingly enough, “boring” scenes in my mind are the action-packed ones. The “exciting” ones are the ones where characters are just sitting around talking. Go figure.)

This is my first time trying my hand at IF. I’ve only written short-ish stories up to now. I love coding and having conversations in my head, and what better way to marry the two, right? The fact I have such a basic outline for the project I’m working on does worry me since this is longer and more involved than a short story, but I guess I’ll figure it out as I go, as always.

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Honestly I kinda just make things up as I go along. I never really “plan” anything and I don’t go searching for information. I kinda just wait till an idea pops into my head refine it a bit and see where it goes from there

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If you’re talking about the curly quotes and apostrophes, you can disable them in Google Docs. It’ll save you the headache of find/replace. Go to Tools → Preferences → Untick “Use smart quotes”.

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That’s nice to know thank you so much :heart:

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@RGH I write CS in notepad, too. Default notepad. I understand the pain. But I actually rather like it. Except the lack of a spellcheck, it’s kinda perfect.

I’m the kind of writer who treats a story like an organic thing. I -mostly- have to write in a linear way. I may, for example, write the middle of a scene before filling in the beginning, but I won’t skip ahead and write something in the next chapter. That would feel like making leaves on a tree without a branch to them. Inspiration is hodge-podge for me- anything I see or hear or know or relate to might end up a little shard of story, transplanted into a soil of similar yet different context.

So far, what’s worked best for me is setting the foundation first. Coming up with the main idea, the overarching setting and story and characters, and the stats for the game, and how the game is going to be set up in a vague script sense, and game-structure sense. Then comes the meat of it- actually getting started on the writing and coding. Or perhaps I’ll do the coding before the writing. It’s like, if creating a CS game were like growing a Bonsai tree, the idea would be setting up the pot and soil and deciding what type of tree to grow. Then the coding would be the trunk and branches, and the visible story would be the leaves. And all together it makes art.

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I would encourage you to, at the very least, switch to something that gives you line numbers.

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It does list the line number the cursor is on at the bottom. Good enough for me. :wink:

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Lots of people here saying they have to develop characters and world before thinking up a plot - is it weird that I usually do that backwards? I think up a concept I like (a trope, a theme, maybe a cool scene), get the most skeletal of plots going from that, then think, “well, if i want this to happen, I need someone to do that. So what kind of person would do that?” That gets me an outline of a character, which I then finally flesh out through writing.

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I sometimes do this. For me it really depends on a story. I can write something based off of a place idea, concept idea, character idea… anything.

Once, I wrote a story who’s idea came from me misspelling the words “Also good” when texting my friend.
Talk about weird inspiration.

But I am very much in the “garden writer” section as @Eiwynn mentioned. I’ll come up with the very basics, maybe a point of tension or two, and then just go off for there. Often times revising as I go. Lots of times I have to separate an idea or combine two.

Like with my current project, I had just the very basics of the concept for it (well, half of it, now), and everything else was built up around it. But I didn’t actually write it for a few months because nothing fit right for me. I ended up splitting it into two ideas, but one of the ideas felt unfinished to me. I had a completely separate idea for a place in mind (a living city), that was floating around in a completely unconnected idea, and when I was going through scrapped plots to try and make this other plot complete, I had an idea and the two clicked together. From there, I formulated an entirely new plot, set of characters, conflicts, reasons, etc.

So my writing strategy is pretty haphazard, and a lot of times actually relies on the fact that things are going to collide and form some new, weird idea as I go.

However, if a character wasn’t what sparked the idea, I’ll usually come up with those last. Usually the situation of the plot births the characters as per need, and changes them so.

After I get the basic idea, and am happy with it, I create a skeleton ending, so that I at least have a place to end up at and won’t just be floating in the void of ‘Where is this heading?’

Once I actually start writing (which I do in both TextEdit and then copy-paste into Google Docs as backup) I’ll simultaneously plot ahead, coming up with the connections to previously disjointed ideas and creating new ones.

So… yeah, my strategy is very “seat of the pants”/“garden writer”. I find that if I keep strictly to something I’ve already completely plotted out, I get bored with the project. The fun and inspiration for me comes from having a beginning and an end, but taking the scenic route and figuring out the path along the way. If any of that makes sense.

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Despite the struggle, I do adore notepad. Takes me back to the days when I’d study basic HTML for school; I’m quite sentimental :sweat_smile:

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That’s pretty much what I do with characters too, start with a need (villain, love interest, whatever) then think about what a general set of characteristics the person would have to fit what I need them for, then I just kind of feel what the character would react like and write that.

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I’m not great at planning. Which is not a good thing.

Typically I begin a scene by writing the dialogue and then dump prose in the in-between areas afterwords. Trying to write in a linear fashion just makes me impatient and frustrated.

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Ah. Give me ages and I’ll quill one nonsensical metaphor. Yet I can write a prize-winning poem in five minutes. My process is all too oft born of a shattered freeform and I mix and match words like baubles. I am currently tapping my lavender nails on hundreds of pages of out of context bites and endless dialogue collected over years. O, my dialogue addiction. Since I was a wee thing, since I was a child of night, ideas spring late and I then must pen the wall, jot on mobile, write on hand–anything to not forget. I then tend to build the world and story around my saucy randomness. It’s quite the quirk and I often feel such an unorthodox approach does both spark and hinder me…

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I just looked up ink and it’s amazing! It is much more powerful than CS and much closer to common programming languages. Wow it’s so awesome, thank you so much. Though I guess programming is a little more difficult than CS, but I don’t mind, since with power comes difficulty to manage but the reward is sweet in the end. Thanks a ton.

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I’m pretty sure my strategy could be described as bullshitting my way to victory. :confused:

Mostly I just act as a sort of employer for all of my characters who come to me with backstories, family members and sometimes whole worlds and interesting plot ideas. Since I have too many ideas to count I let my characters pitch their ideas and if they are lucky they get put into eternal slavery… I mean get employed while being aware of certain risks, cough cough.

My writing style is peppered with a lot of parallels and symbolism, which kind of just jumps into my head so I write it down. I end up comparing crops to the soldiers of the sun that way, but I guess it works!

Really, I put a lot more effort into motivating myself to sit down and write than I spend time ripping my hair out for good plot threads. It’s mostly an organical growth and I let most of the characters and plots handle themselves, I’m more the interior designer than the building constructor.

It’s always the most fun to put an appearance to a character. Idea wise, I come up with mostly contradicting statements and go from there. I ask myself what if disabled people had superpowers? or this character carves bones, what could that lead to?. Mostly it’s just very ridiculous sounding ideas that pop into my head though. And then an army of characters all scream “I’M THE PERSON FOR THE JOB, PICK ME!”.

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