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
@ra3rei I actually wrote a My Little Pony fanfic when I was 18. I didn't finish it, but I think it was the first thing I wrote and shared in public online.
What do you mean by "cheap and mindless"? We might be working from different definitions here.
I guess to clarify - I know it might have come off as judge-y, because it usually does when we talk about things that other humans do that we don't understand, but when I read essays and blogs online where people defend their "guilty pleasures" it doesn't make sense to me. Like any of it, including why they'd say they were "guilty". I don't get why people would feel the need to defend their choices of entertainment, but I think that's because there's a lot of social status and external expectation stuff there that I just don't get because that's not how my mind works. And again - that's probably coming off as judge-y to people outside my mind, but I really just honestly can't wrap my brain around it no matter how much I try. I can intellectually understand that there's stuff going on there that I don't get, but I don't think I'm ever actually going to be able to get it.
And then on the Big Five personality test I score 100% openness, so when I read people defending what they call "mindless" and "genre" because it's predictable and ends all nice and snug and happy, I guess my brain doesn't grok that because it likes new and different and unexpected.
Realism doesn't have anything to do with anything for me. If it helps, if you forced me to define what I mean by cheap and trite, much of what I read when I try to check out literary magazines and also most of the books cranked out by MFAs would be examples. I can't force myself to feel anything about a middle aged professor having an affair with a student other than maybe disgust.
But I guess I just want to reiterate - this is all just me and my brain and my experience, and after years of wandering the internet I have realized that I am not like most other people.
Also Surreal Darkness does not at all feel like a chore. I'm going to keep writing it. It's just that for me, reading and writing is a relationship, not a one-way thing. I grew up in a small Southern Appalachian town where the culture was more collectivist in nature than individualist, and so I tend to see myself as being in relation to others and as having a place in a community that is very much a part of my identity. I don't write to please myself or for numbers on a stats page or for social status. I write for my community. I was kind of feeling like I'd lost my community, although I am trying to find one here and the short story challenge has definitely helped with that, since people who aren't willing to read Surreal Darkness are at least reading the short story and commenting on it.
And there's really not as many readers as there once were. Or if there are, they've moved somewhere in the community where I either can't find them or I am too scared to go after all the bullying and hate I went through with Valley.
Actually the other day I looked through my referrers on the WordPress and went to two of the forums where people came from on my busiest day ever. One was completely gone, and the other had not been posted on since 2012. Also I used to post an ad on Sim Storytellers on LJ and start watching the clicks roll in. These days I'm doing good if one person clicks on that link.
Anyway, I have to go to work. But I do think we're coming from pretty different assumptions and ideas here, and if we work through them we'll probably find that we don't actually disagree on that much.
What do you mean by "cheap and mindless"? We might be working from different definitions here.
I guess to clarify - I know it might have come off as judge-y, because it usually does when we talk about things that other humans do that we don't understand, but when I read essays and blogs online where people defend their "guilty pleasures" it doesn't make sense to me. Like any of it, including why they'd say they were "guilty". I don't get why people would feel the need to defend their choices of entertainment, but I think that's because there's a lot of social status and external expectation stuff there that I just don't get because that's not how my mind works. And again - that's probably coming off as judge-y to people outside my mind, but I really just honestly can't wrap my brain around it no matter how much I try. I can intellectually understand that there's stuff going on there that I don't get, but I don't think I'm ever actually going to be able to get it.
And then on the Big Five personality test I score 100% openness, so when I read people defending what they call "mindless" and "genre" because it's predictable and ends all nice and snug and happy, I guess my brain doesn't grok that because it likes new and different and unexpected.
Realism doesn't have anything to do with anything for me. If it helps, if you forced me to define what I mean by cheap and trite, much of what I read when I try to check out literary magazines and also most of the books cranked out by MFAs would be examples. I can't force myself to feel anything about a middle aged professor having an affair with a student other than maybe disgust.
But I guess I just want to reiterate - this is all just me and my brain and my experience, and after years of wandering the internet I have realized that I am not like most other people.
Also Surreal Darkness does not at all feel like a chore. I'm going to keep writing it. It's just that for me, reading and writing is a relationship, not a one-way thing. I grew up in a small Southern Appalachian town where the culture was more collectivist in nature than individualist, and so I tend to see myself as being in relation to others and as having a place in a community that is very much a part of my identity. I don't write to please myself or for numbers on a stats page or for social status. I write for my community. I was kind of feeling like I'd lost my community, although I am trying to find one here and the short story challenge has definitely helped with that, since people who aren't willing to read Surreal Darkness are at least reading the short story and commenting on it.
And there's really not as many readers as there once were. Or if there are, they've moved somewhere in the community where I either can't find them or I am too scared to go after all the bullying and hate I went through with Valley.
Actually the other day I looked through my referrers on the WordPress and went to two of the forums where people came from on my busiest day ever. One was completely gone, and the other had not been posted on since 2012. Also I used to post an ad on Sim Storytellers on LJ and start watching the clicks roll in. These days I'm doing good if one person clicks on that link.
Anyway, I have to go to work. But I do think we're coming from pretty different assumptions and ideas here, and if we work through them we'll probably find that we don't actually disagree on that much.
