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
Well, I will admit... at the time I started writing Sim stories, I actually didn't know that they were really "a thing." Therefore, I didn't exactly have any preconceptions about them... which I suppose could be considered a good thing. I sort of explain this on my About Me page, but I'm actually pretty new to The Sims compared to most SimLit authors (I've only had Sims 3 since last New Year's Eve) and my first exposure to the game as a story-telling device was through video Let's Play on YouTube. I knew I didn't have the equipment or personality to ever do anything like that, even though I had lots of thoughts and ideas for storylines floating around in my head that I really wanted to share. I found the story Alice and Kev by accident when I was researching Runaway Teen challenges, and that was my first exposure to telling a story using screencaps and the written word. When I saw it, it totally changed my perceptions, as I realized then you could tell a story needing nothing more than the in-game screencapture command. I could do that. I started up my site shortly after that. I didn't actually find the community of SimLit authors, and the huge body of work that was out there, until after I had a decent amount of parts of both of my stories under my belt but no readers and needed to find the proper, acceptable place to promote them.
Though in retrospect, after seeing all the other SimLit out there, now I look back at my own stories and can only see myself as "doing them wrong." My word counts are very low compared to everyone else. I tend to screencap and then write around what happens rather than the other way around, composing and then going into game to get the imagery, which seems to be the standard, so now I've become really critical of myself when I hadn't been before. When I started, I didn't really think of there being any "right or wrong" way of doing things, but now I feel like my eyes have been opened and I'm "doing things all wrong," heh.
However, ultimately I do believe one should write for themself, and what makes them happy, so I'm not so sure I'm going to second-guess myself and change everything now. Of course I will always strive to improve -- I am very new to this particular kind of writing (my background is in play-by-post writing -- but I also kind of like doing things how I do things... I definitely love reading the plethora of stuff out there, and will read anything. I don't care the game, I don't care the genre, I don't care if it's by a brand-new author or an old pro, I love seeing all the different styles and formats out there. Currently I've been really enjoying a story which is mostly all images, with very little dialogue at all, which I've really been enjoying. On the flipside, I have stories in the Stories and Legacies Index which are text-only that I can't wait to sit down and read, too. I think not having preconceptions and being open to exploring all sorts of different formats in the genre can only be a good thing.
Though in retrospect, after seeing all the other SimLit out there, now I look back at my own stories and can only see myself as "doing them wrong." My word counts are very low compared to everyone else. I tend to screencap and then write around what happens rather than the other way around, composing and then going into game to get the imagery, which seems to be the standard, so now I've become really critical of myself when I hadn't been before. When I started, I didn't really think of there being any "right or wrong" way of doing things, but now I feel like my eyes have been opened and I'm "doing things all wrong," heh.
However, ultimately I do believe one should write for themself, and what makes them happy, so I'm not so sure I'm going to second-guess myself and change everything now. Of course I will always strive to improve -- I am very new to this particular kind of writing (my background is in play-by-post writing -- but I also kind of like doing things how I do things... I definitely love reading the plethora of stuff out there, and will read anything. I don't care the game, I don't care the genre, I don't care if it's by a brand-new author or an old pro, I love seeing all the different styles and formats out there. Currently I've been really enjoying a story which is mostly all images, with very little dialogue at all, which I've really been enjoying. On the flipside, I have stories in the Stories and Legacies Index which are text-only that I can't wait to sit down and read, too. I think not having preconceptions and being open to exploring all sorts of different formats in the genre can only be a good thing.
