Where do you start from?

[celebkiriedhel]

Pardon me if this is in the wrong section... to be honest, I wasn't sure what section this should go in, if at all.

I'm having a chaos moment, and could do with some advice.

I don't know where to start. So I was wondering how you folk started with your stories. Especially ones that are writing/playing/writing. i.e. the story influences the game that influences the story.

You see, I haven't written properly for a long time for lots of different reasons, so I've gotten rusty.

I have a story that wants out, but I don't know whether to put it in Sims2, Sims3, Sims1, or even make it just text. Whether to write it for myself, or put it on my website, or make a blog for it.

So how did you choose the media that you set your story in? What came first - the game or the story?

And how did you choose where and how you'd put it on the internet?

[thelunarfox]

Ooh, interesting question.

Well, in Ruin's case, the story came much earlier. It was my own play story I'd tell myself before I had sims. (Or a computer with a CD drive and proper sound card. Hello 486!)

I have my earlier sims 2 story I started from play. The idea was just that I was rusty, and I wanted the story, my writing, and all that to have a chance to evolve. So I let myself experiment without fear, just reminding myself that it was a start and I would improve.

For the "experiment" I chose Blogger over LJ even though I've had an LJ for years now, and I'm not quite sure why. I think it was just because I know LJ has a large group of roving Sims players, and I actually didn't want to be a part of that for various reasons.


After my experiment phase, I started to get back into this story I'd put down. I selected Sims 3 for a couple of reasons. It was new and fun to work with because it didn't come with expectations. (I call them poseboxes.) There's also something inherently creepy about sims 3, maybe it's the way the sims are so realistic. Plus it was something to do with my game since I still don't really play, lol.

[laura]

Wow, this is a hard one to answer, lol! The oddest thing is that once the story gets going, it sort of evolves from itself, to the point where it's really hard to remember just where it started in the beginning.

In the case of the whole of LH and all its story parts, in general, the game came first. The characters I write about in my stories are inspired by their Sim counterparts, who have long since grown a life and personality outside the game. I played with those Sims for two years before their character counterparts, in my head, became so big and complex that I decided to write stories about them.

I chose Blogger because I'd had other Blogger blogs for years and years, and was already familiar with those tools - I really didn't know much at all about the Sims-writing community at that point. I found Isle of Thyme, and Mao's Boreal Springs (oh how I miss that story!), and decided to tell my own neighborhood story. Like Lunar said, I'm kind of glad I never got involved with the whole LJ circle. Too much like high school for my tastes.

So then, in that case, the neighborhood, and Sim/characters came before I started writing a story about them. I think in all of my writing, the characters come before the story. Because when I write, it's the characters that are the story, really. It's how they interact and conflict with the world and people around them. I don't think I have ever started a story without first having a character in mind to tell it.

But you know, that's just my style. If you were writing more of a concept-type story, or mystery, or action-driven story, you'd probably want to think up the story idea first.

About what media? Funny enough, I do have a couple stories that were prompted by my game, that I chose not to tell in my blog with images from the game. And why? Because I want to write them for a traditional market, and have them grow up to go out and make me some money, lol!

But really, the events that made up these couple stories were concise and complex and unrelated to any of my ongoing stories in LH, so they were perfectly suited to stand on their own as short stories. These stories will not be blogged though, but will hopefully get to live in a real publication somewhere, some day... when I get around to revising them and sending them out.

And after LH is finished, I fully plan on swiping a couple of those characters to live in my second novel.

OMG, this got long, lol! Basically, where you start, I think has to do with whether you plan to write character-driven or story-driven. I don't think it matters what version of Sims you use - except that a lot of people won't read a Sims 1 story. A lot of people, in the Sims community at least, even refuse to read Sims 2 stories these days. Bah to that though, lol! Use whatever form of media that inspires you!

[drew]

Hi Kiri, I chose Sims 2, because I needed the ton of retro CC to create my world for Crime Story. I too, use Blogger, it is much easier to navigate, at least to me. I opened a LJ account, had no idea what to do with it. I hardly use it. I found it difficult. Never tried wordpress.

I write as I go, I am someone who has plots swimming in her head constantly, I go in the game, take the shots, THEN I write the text to accompany the shot. A lot of people write the story first, then go in the game and take the shots. Try both ways and see which one works best for you.

You will be surprised after you create some characters and start moving them around in the game, how they will take you in directions you could never imagine.

It really is fun. That's the bottom line, have FUN. Don't agonize over the writing, or getting the right shot, it's not worth the stress.

Remember when we were small, and maybe we played with a dollhouse? That's what sim stories reminds me of. Only on a bigger, gritter more adult scale.

Kiri, hope this helped. Have fun. I have been doing sim stories since 2006, haven't tired of it yet!

[mdpthatsme]

Hmmm, there are many ways to start a story as we all know. I started The Shadow with Nova walking out into the world as an introduction. WALA! Type of thing...The Gang started with vigorous typing...AU started right with action, killing, kidnapping...

It really all depends on the mood of the story and where you want to take it. I started The Gang with conflict of a main character because the story is about emotional distress of the characters through experiences.

I started the story looooooooooooooong before the Sims came out.

As for websites/blogs/whatever, I have been around the community...LJ, blogger, freewebs, and with the help of Carnaxa I found wordpress and have been there since.

I hope you share your story either it be Sims or just prose. It doesn't matter to me, but as for you, if you want to spend time to explain the small details as in character looks, setting, blah...sure write in prose. If you want that all covered then post pictures with the Sims2 or 3. I like both. There's more stuff and options out there for Sims2, but there's more ways to customize with TS3. So that decision is yours.

Have I answered the questions...? Or do I need to expound?

I mean the only advice I can give you about starting the story is to just trust your gut. That's how I do it.

[Stacy]

This is very much the correct section.

With Valley - okay, when Sims 3 came out I wanted to get back into Sims stories and I thought I'd do a legacy - I started writing Sims stories with a Sims 2 legacy back in 2005.

So I looked at the few Sims 3 legacies that had gotten started (*cough* checking out the competition *cough*) and read around the community some. I read a post in which someone complained about first-gen spouses that were already being over-used.

I thought "How can I have a first generation spouse that no one else has used yet?"

The answer was "Push the game ahead a few generations."

And so Valley was born.

I figured I'd do a prologue and then cannibalize a save I'd already played through three generations for the actual legacy. I needed to explain the passage of time, so I thought - hmm, have the founder go and investigate the villain's house, he kills her, awesome chapter with lots of edited pics where she's a ghost (LOL), three generations later she eats his ambrosia and comes back to life and everyone she knows is dead and gone and she has to start over and find a new guy and have kids while the villain hunts her down for eating his ambrosia.

So I went into CAS and I made Seth and Sarah. Put them down in a lot and played them for a bit. Seth set the stove on fire twice in quick succession and rolled the wish to see Sarah's fiery ghost. Oh, and I fell in love with him. I remember playing and saying to John "My villain is so adorable! Maybe he should be the legacy founder instead."

While I was playing him to get his gardening skill up and get him some lifetime happiness points, he rolled the wish to see Emma's fiery ghost. I was like "Dude, Seth, that's cold even for you."

Other than the wish to see Sarah's fiery ghost before I started writing, gameplay didn't really influence the story. Game mechanics and game scenery certainly did - Valley's themes and ideas grew out of the waterfall, the idea of life fruit and ambrosia, the withered dead tree object, the statue of Death, how pretty the fire in the game is...

OH!!!!

Bella's whole thing came from gameplay! While I was shooting...was it Legend, maybe?...I set Seth's house on fire and Bella and her older brother and Mortimer all came to watch and I took a lot of pics, and that's how Bella's story happened.

I honestly cannot remember how I picked WordPress. I actually uploaded a few pics to the Sims 3 Exchange and decided I was definitely not going with that.

10 - there was a contest on a writing forum in January - with the new year, the theme was 10.

The deadline has long since passed, lol. But I had the idea to try full text - and of course it would have to star my darling honey baby. And I decided to fit the number 10 into as many places as I could - at first Seth was going to be 10 years old, but then I was like "Nah" and went with 10th grade.

I vote sharing it with us! Yay sharing!

[persephonetree]

I've actually had the idea for my current story for a while now. I wrote it down and kind of planned it out a bit, but I wasn't really feeling it, so I dumped it before it ever even saw the light of day.

Then a while later, I was looking through some old notebooks and I found it again. I added and tweaked quite a bit, but a little of the main idea is still there. I naturally chose Sims 2 because that's what I was used to and I could do far better work with it. I will say that most of what I'm doing is a learning experience. I learn something new everyday, be it about writing or taking pictures, sometimes even the game in general! I have quite a few plot points in mind, but I'm also going to just let things flow and let the characters take me where they want to go.
I've already seen this happening actually, with me having to rethink and rewrite certain things to fit certain characters.

When it came to putting it up, I experimented with Blogspot for a while, but ultimately found it not to my liking. Wordpress was a better fit for me and what I needed, so Wordpress it was.

[celebkiriedhel]

Thankyou all for your replies. I really appreciate it!

My stories tend to be character driven, and often with an end in mind.

I've been playing Agnes Crumplebottom in Sims3 for the last couple of weeks while I try to get my head together, so I might experiment with her first. That sounds like a great idea.

I'm not really a legacy player as my hoods rarely get past the first generation. Although I do love populating a hood with all my characters. And everyone gets a shady past!

I think I'll start with Blogger seeing as I've got you all to help if I get my knickers in a knot with it.

[rad]

I used WordPress because I already used it for my personal blog and I like the way it works.

As for starting... with my first legacy, I saw a few other people blooging theirs up and decided it'd be fun to share mine, and what I posted was just inspired by gameplay events. With the apoc, I saw Ashleigh doing a first-person survivor account and yoinked the concept, but then I used the story and world I'd created to shape the game play (though the gane play also shaped the story). With my WYDC I stage a few shots for story purposes but mainly just focus on game play - although I sometimes play the game in order to fit what I want to happen in the story. My second legacy is purely observational. I liked the idea of documenting what happens in the game when you use certain interactions, functions etc, so they do that. Taken was a story idea that came to me and I just use sims to illustrate it.