Thread: Need Help From Experienced Writers

Hello, I'd like some advise if you would....

For starters, I am diffidently NOT an experienced writer. I'm pretty good at writing if I have a report or something that I'm required to write at school, but I am not one of those people who writes stories for fun. However, I want to have a career in video game design when I'm older and for that I need to know how to come up with a great story to put in the game. My problem is that I have all these amazing ideas for characters, settings, events, etc. in my mind, but I don't know how to turn them all into a story. I've tried to start doing so one my own by writing down the basics for my character(For example: Who is he? What does he want? What conflict does he come across?), but even after doing that I still need help. I can't think of enough details, like why he is who he is, why he does what he's doing, or why he's presented with the conflict that he's presented with. I hope this makes since... if so, please help me!

You don't need to know how to write a story. What you need is to learn how to outline, to think of the sequence of events and cast of characters that the story would reference. Is easy. Start a list. Person A has this happen, then this happens. Just like that.

You might have an idea of what a character will be, but until you put them on stage, you probably won't know what they'll do. Like, you might not know how they interact until you make them interact on page, on camera, etc. Try writing a short story about them first if you want an idea of how they act. As moderan said, write everything down, that way you don't lose something. The ideas might be rejected, accepted, or recycled later, but in any case it's good to have an archive.

Characters, setting, world, technology, all these things are great but plot is what brings it all together. I might get some jeers but I'll say my opinion anyways: plot is fundamental. Ask yourself what events set everything in motion or what events need to be stopped, then you can start working the connections.

A story is basically what you get when you combine characters, a setting, and a plot, in an interesting manner.

If your characters aren't interesting enough, hurt them. Doesn't have to be during the story. Could be at some point in their past. Whatever. The new Deus Ex does this during the prologue, when the player character gets the snot kicked out of him by some big metal maniac.

If your setting isn't interesting enough, throw something out of whack. Again, this doesn't have to take place in the story. The entire Fallout series depends on a nuclear war, Rage is set after an asteroid impact, Left 4 Dead has its zombapocalypse, and so on and so forth.

If your plot isn't interesting enough... Man, I gotta tell you, I hate plotting, and so do most video game developers. Crysis, Serious Sam, DOOM, and... about four billion other titles make good examples for this, and don't think this is just limited to first person shooters. In fact, most *exceptions* I can think of for this rule ("Plot? I hate plot!") are actually based on preexisting intellectual properties (The Witcher, for instance, is based on a series of novels in the developers' native language).

In video games, if your plot isn't interesting enough, blow something up. Either that or take away all the player's gear. Maybe we can make that into a hint: "take away something that the characters, the reader, or the player, have depended on." Of course that something may not be a favorite rifle: it may be the idea that we are alone on this planet, or in this universe.

...Wait. That's Crysis, and I know that didn't have a plot.