I don’t think there are hard and fast rules, and much of it depends on the tone you want to create. As you say, short snappy sentences are great for high impact or a stark feeling whereas longer ones will be suitable for more detail. What I’d recommend is playtesting on both desktop and mobile to get a sense of what feels “tiring” for the eyes. Sometimes I come across very long “pages” that contain more than one scene, which I feel could be broken up with a page break or choice. It’s worth keeping an eye out for that kind of thing as well.
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Hello all! I missed October due fifth wedding anniversary shenanigans! Here’s a newsletter all about it.
My goal this month is to finish Gloria’s and Pearl’s dates. A tall order, but I think I can do it!
Changing routine works for me. Right now, if I do something fun earlier in the day, I can write easier later. Yesterday, I watched a movie, Shanghai Express. Thinking that Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich should kiss fueled writing one scene and two #options.
Eep, best of luck on the surgery! Thank you for the WIP digest 
Writer’s block feels like I have to pummel my brain to make the words go. It’s not that I have zero ideas. I can mentally shape scenes. The words can get on the page, but very, very slowly. I’ve heard other authors’ writers block is a complete inability to form a story. One writer couldn’t form a sentence for two years after his father died. Block or fatigue is different for everybody, I suspect.
Goodness, your fantasy land must be very chill about death! No fear at all! That’s great Talking about world-building holidays and calendars reminded me of this Mark Darrah “Things that are harder” videos on holidays. I really recommend the whole series, very eye-opening. The water and door one especially.
I just learned through this blog how BL visual novel-to-stageplay adaptations work. I’d always wondered, given how different routes can be. Different nights feature different routes! But more commonly I’ve seen Japanese visual novels adapted anime or manga.
Happy November!
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i agree with this, especially the recommendation to playtest on both mobile and desktop! the only rule i follow pretty much to the letter is that i never have two characters speaking within the same paragraph, i always split their dialogue into separate ones for whatever character is speaking
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I mean, it’s pretty much just Viking Age Finland at this point. 
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I honestly have no idea, I have a real problem with having short pages and so I have a horrible habit of overexplaining or prolonging scenes.
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Absolutely. We’ve seen quite a couple of theses pass by here already. (Though to be fair, one was on the subject of interactive fiction.)
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That seems like something I would like to read. Although it’s very unrelated to my field.
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I'm writing so many hospital scenes for some reason.
You cross the threshold to the hospital room, to the beeps and huffs and clanks of machinery. So much technology needed to keep one person alive. So much effort to keep alive one person who most would say doesn’t even deserve to live. Five years ago it was a choice you had to make, when [K] forced your hand. You thought that would be the end of it.
You never thought you would find yourself here.
The figure on the bed lies horribly silent, more gauze than man, like a mummy kept alive only by the power of modern technology. You have to remind yourself this is [K]— even though you can see it you can’t quite believe it. [K] is dead. You know it, you saw it. You made sure of it. You killed him. Buried him. Mourned him. And yet, here you are.
You pull a chair and sit next to him. Look at him. It is not a sight of [K] you’re used to seeing. Too still, for one; he was never good at staying still, always moving that one. And in the later years— well. [K] who haunts your nightmares is crackling with eldritch energy, ready to drain the world for the last drop for his own power, defiant to the end. Not this broken thing at the mercy of others. This is [K], and yet he is not.
A [K]. Not your [K]— you’re not sure you’d be quite ready for him coming back from the dead, stopping him the last time was hard enough and that was when he wasn’t expecting that; a repeat performance might in fact turn fully in his way, and no matter what the faults in this world, you are quite fond of it. But this is another [K]. [K] from a different timeline, rescued from a dying world by [R] who was passing by, as one does at least when you’re [R] and gallivanting through multiverse.
The way [R] tells it, what he managed to scrape together, was that in that world, in its variant of that last confrontation between you, it wasn’t you who killed [K] and finished it all. It was [K] who killed you— and that gave him pause. And in that moment, that world’s enraged [R] had hit him like a freight train, beat him to an inch of his life, and locked him up in a way he would never escape.
Time doesn’t always progress the same way between universes, and in that world, the five years that had passed for you after that fateful battle, had been more something like five thousand, although no-one actually knows the number for sure, because there was nobody left to tell. [R] had landed on the world in its death throes, the universe itself in process of wiping itself out, and found no life signs left. No life signs but one, from that inescapable prison that was still keeping its inhabitant alive.
[R] had found [K], who had been abandoned in darkness and essentially frozen in time straight from the battlefield, unable to move and unable to heal but fully aware of everything happening around him. When the stasis was broken, his body couldn’t take the strain, and he started flatlining soon after. [R] stabilized him, and brought him here to your universe, to this hospital, where he’s being kept in medical coma probably both to give his body the chance to recover, and to buy time to decide what to actually do with him now that he’s here.
You slip his hand out of the soft restraints and take it to yours, lacing your fingers with his, and then just stay that way for a moment. His skin is warm, and you can’t help the sudden surge of relief — [K] always hated the cold. And, oddly less importantly, it proves you without a doubt that he is alive.
Whatever else he may have done, he stopped. When you got hurt, he stopped. So maybe, just maybe this [K] is different.
“Hey,” you whisper. “I don’t know if you can hear me — the doctors say you could, but they don’t always get people like us, do they? You might not even be there, for all I know, and now I’m rambling, so, uh. What I was trying to say is, I don’t blame you. What happened was horrible, and I hope it won’t happen again, but I’m not holding it against you. And I’m sorry too. I hope we can talk when you wake up. Please, wake up.”
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I have finished writing the fully new material for the next and last public update to Westbound Travel (after that I guess I…ask how the publishing process works once it’s finished? Never done this before, so super nervous lol). I still need to rewrite some of the early material I wrote before I fully had the tone or ideas of the game fleshed out, so that will be in the public update, and I need to playtest a few times. Looking at a week or so left before the update. But still, hopefully before the end of the month!
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thats so awesome, congratulations!!!
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Congratulations!!!
My report for the day is that it’s way too much fun coming up with puzzles and riddles. 
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I’m nursing a headache, so that’s all I’ve been doing today, but I have made the baffling discovery that I can spout more words in a day when I’m not focusing on a single story only.
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Having a hard time logging into choice demo to upload my 5th chapter, anyone know why it might not let me log in? Just goes to a blank white screen when I attempt to do so. Haven’t had the issue previously, though I’m doing this on a new laptop.
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It was updated today, so it might not have been an issue before. Although I seem to be able to log in normally. You might want to drop a message in the support thread?
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Gotcha! Yeah I’ll pass it along there as well! Thanks.
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I am back at Sense & Sorcery and All the Way now, as far as my progress report. Kind of exciting to get back into the swing of these, and I find that sometimes stepping away to pursue other projects for a while helps me return with more energy than when I left. Hope everyone’s writing for November is going well!
I don’t know if I will get to it any time soon, but I was wondering the following – would writers that work in a genre space be interested in threads for that given genre? Been toying with starting a regency writing, reading, and appreciation thread and the same for Sword & Sorcery where people could post exciting articles for that genre, ask questions from those with similar writing and reading interests, and discuss the current trends. If its left to me I probably won’t get to it for a while (read probably sometime next year as with most everything), but what do you guys think?
- Really great idea!
- Great idea!
- I mean . . . it could work?
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Hi all, I was a little undecided whether to post here or in the Halloween Jam thread, but as the jam is over and this is more a writing support request I figured here might be just as appropriate.
Simply put, I’m looking for feedback on my entry The Telling.
I’m happy for any sort of comments or suggestions, critiques or praise although I am more interested in technical discussion than personal or market preferences. To avoid cluttering the thread please DM me.
Talking points (just for ideas, it's not exhaustive or exclusive)
Story: Was the concept interesting? Did the setting fit? Length and pacing ok? How would you describe the genre?
Characters (including MC): Were they developed sufficiently? Believable?
Environment: Sufficient description? Consistency?
Mechanics: Did the stats make sense? Feel consistent? Branching too much/little? Replayable? Choice presentation, frequency?
Writing: How did you feel about the style? Pacing, complexity, variation?
Marketing: Did the intro blurb and warnings set/meet expectations? Too much/little? Missing something?
What would YOU do next?
*choice
- Develop into a WIP, I want more!
- Polish it up, leave as a short
- Fine as it is, move on to something new
- Time to move on and not look back
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I will genuinely not be offended by anything, I would just really like to hear some feedback for learning purposes! Any questions? Just ask!
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Hey, so this might be really confusing of a question and maybe I’m asking in the wrong area, but I have always wanted to try to write a IF, not even to publish it (maybe one day) but like how do you guys think of ideas and keep the story to those ideas without going off track? hope that makes sense lol.
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i think this area is ok!! usually i work through allllll of that stuff in the planning/outline phase. when i’m just coming up with ideas to see what i like or don’t end up liking, i honestly write everything i think of down as an option for how the story might go. as i get a clearer and clearer picture of what i really want from the story, i cut the stuff that doesn’t fit out of the outline. rinse and repeat until it feels solid!
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Really appreciate the reply, I actually just saw you wip thread just a few minutes ago and I’m going to play when I have enough time and concentration to read properly lol.
Anyways back to another question, when you are writing and planning do you think about how the writing style is percieved to a reader? If so, how does that influence the story and writing style?
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