The Art of Sims Storytelling
Hi guys! @CathyTea and I were talking, and we thought we'd try making a thread that would be focused solely on writing, especially Sims story writing. The writers' lounge thread is great for being ...
Forum Discussion
"CitizenErased14;14329118" wrote:
I liked reading peoples' thoughts about showing "mundane" life moments in stories.
It's interesting -- I enjoy reading about those things, but I have a hard time WRITING them. D2D was so plot-driven that I felt anything that did not contribute to the main plot was just "filler". I think that's the big difference between SimLit and non-SimLit stories. The everyday moments don't really get shown in "regular" stories, but since The Sims is a life simulator, it makes sense to feature these moments in SimLit!
I think my struggle was that I didn't really think of D2D as a "SimLit" story... Just a story that happened to be illustrated by sims :lol:
I definitely see the beauty in showing those "mundane", everyday moments of life. I'm a huge fan of character development and introspection and I feel like chapters that feature these sorts of moments are great for that!
PNN, while light-hearted, will still be very plot-driven. When I start my Legacy in the new year, I plan on keeping it more casual and exploring more of those everyday moments in my writing :)
Most of the literary fiction I love centers around mundane moments: Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," a lot of Faulkner's work, a lot of Erdrich's and much of Austen's and Munro's. I love the little descriptions of sunlight tracing patterns on the floor or the sound of silverware on bone china. Most of the fiction I write, too, makes heavy use (symbolically, and otherwise) of mundane moments.
What I loved about Dust to Dust, Citizen, is that even though it has a tight plot--and it's beautiful the way no moment is wasted, and every single event moves the plot forward--you aren't constrained by plot. You were able to let the characters and theme develop fully, so that when we reflect on D2D, the plot becomes the MacGuffin and it's the characters (and for me, the themes) that become what we truly, deeply care about. That's what lifts it into art, for me.
