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
Hahaha, well at least you guys try to make me feel better. ^_^;;
I'd only read one story (Alice and Kev) before I started writing my own, as I said. So that's really the only comparison I had at the time. Come to think of it, I guess the way I started writing (only a few sentences/short captions) for each image was typical of that story (Alice and Kev... and that is still one of my favorite stories, so... I guess take that as you will.)
It was after joining this community and starting to read so many other stories that I started to feel insufficient, because they were much wordier, used fancy screencaps using pose-mods (at the time I was using all "vanilla" images straight from the game), etc. Though I think I've always read a pretty even split between Sims 3 and Sims 4 works. "Frenemies" was my first Sims 4 story, and it was written with lots of dialogue, using a script-format, and my stories had no dialogue at all, which immediately made me start to feel like, "Oh... am I supposed to be doing that?" And I think just over time I started seeing more and more works with high word counts and so I started thinking that having little captions like I was made me look like "less of a writer". The funny thing is in my typical writing style, play-by-post (I have an ongoing story with a co-author over Google Documents that we've been working on together for over a full year now, and between the two of us, we've netted somewhere around 600 pages or something like that!) I'm actually quite wordy, and write posts of around 1k-1.5k on each turn-around. Back when I used to do play-by-post forums I was considered one of the "wordy" posters of the forum, heh. Of course, that is a "text-only" medium... when I read Alice and Kev, and started writing Sim stories, I guess I just felt that the images told so much of the story on their own, that it wasn't like many words were needed. I didn't think anything of it... until I started seeing other people doing it differently, which made me question if I was "doing it wrong." And this especially settled on me hard because I had a "reputation" in play-by-post as being a "wordy poster."
But... it is true. There is no right or wrong way to do things. The truth of the matter is an author is always their worst enemy and is going to question themselves no matter what. ^_^;;; I found tonight I went to great lengths to make sure my new Yandere Diaries post was much longer than what I usually write, and I added in dialogue, which I don't normally do... basically, suddenly I have this post that is a totally different style than the rest of the story. Because I've started to doubt myself because I've become more exposed to other (better) Sim stories through a wider variety of reading than when I first started writing them myself. Am I just trying on the style, or will it stick? I don't know, hahaha!
I'd only read one story (Alice and Kev) before I started writing my own, as I said. So that's really the only comparison I had at the time. Come to think of it, I guess the way I started writing (only a few sentences/short captions) for each image was typical of that story (Alice and Kev... and that is still one of my favorite stories, so... I guess take that as you will.)
It was after joining this community and starting to read so many other stories that I started to feel insufficient, because they were much wordier, used fancy screencaps using pose-mods (at the time I was using all "vanilla" images straight from the game), etc. Though I think I've always read a pretty even split between Sims 3 and Sims 4 works. "Frenemies" was my first Sims 4 story, and it was written with lots of dialogue, using a script-format, and my stories had no dialogue at all, which immediately made me start to feel like, "Oh... am I supposed to be doing that?" And I think just over time I started seeing more and more works with high word counts and so I started thinking that having little captions like I was made me look like "less of a writer". The funny thing is in my typical writing style, play-by-post (I have an ongoing story with a co-author over Google Documents that we've been working on together for over a full year now, and between the two of us, we've netted somewhere around 600 pages or something like that!) I'm actually quite wordy, and write posts of around 1k-1.5k on each turn-around. Back when I used to do play-by-post forums I was considered one of the "wordy" posters of the forum, heh. Of course, that is a "text-only" medium... when I read Alice and Kev, and started writing Sim stories, I guess I just felt that the images told so much of the story on their own, that it wasn't like many words were needed. I didn't think anything of it... until I started seeing other people doing it differently, which made me question if I was "doing it wrong." And this especially settled on me hard because I had a "reputation" in play-by-post as being a "wordy poster."
But... it is true. There is no right or wrong way to do things. The truth of the matter is an author is always their worst enemy and is going to question themselves no matter what. ^_^;;; I found tonight I went to great lengths to make sure my new Yandere Diaries post was much longer than what I usually write, and I added in dialogue, which I don't normally do... basically, suddenly I have this post that is a totally different style than the rest of the story. Because I've started to doubt myself because I've become more exposed to other (better) Sim stories through a wider variety of reading than when I first started writing them myself. Am I just trying on the style, or will it stick? I don't know, hahaha!
