Sorry to double-post, just wanted to type my response to @haneul here separately for clarity's sake (another text-wall... XD)
- I'm glad you like the array of characters, thank you ;-;
- I think 'legacy' even for a story with no legacy rules is fine, it's not a throw-off for me since the story is still about the founder etc. carrying on his legacy in his children and such (hope that makes sense : P ). Plus I think it's just an easy. recognisable catch-all term at this point for a Sims story revolving around the antics of one family and their eventual descendants. I've read plenty of legacies where rules had little (or nothing) to do with it. For me personally, those are the more fun ones to read- more focus on the characters and their relationships and less so on the goals of the challenge.
- You make a good point about both the character interview-style questions. The trouble with answering those questions is you have to try and pick a sort of 'snapshot in time' to answer them from, since a character is going to change and so will the answers over the course of the story. I used to do loads of those character interviews as a teen and as fun and as helpful as they can be, that is one of the drawbacks. Also trying to find good ones with useful questions was difficult; I ended up making a lot of my own, IDK if I still have them on a USB somewhere.
- You also make a really good (and often not spoken about) point on relatability and likability. Sometimes people obsess over a character absolutely HAVING to be relatable and likable in some way, but I think it's sometimes a bit overrated to think that way about all characters. Like it helps, but it's not absolutely necessary- well, not to me.
Likability: It's less about liking the character as a person, and more about liking the thought that's gone into creating them, and their physical/mental journey if that makes sense. I think a lot of us can call to mind a character, in SimLit or otherwise, whose morals slip during the story (or are otherwise completely backwards from the beginning), but the 'likability' is in seeing the passion/depth/though that's gone into creating/writing the character, and in seeing just how far that character will go down the rabbit-hole of 'What on Earth are you doing?'-ness. The entertainment is in the sheer lengths a character will go to, to get what they want.
As for relatability, for me it's not about being able to connect a character's situation to my own- it's about being able to see through their eyes, and as such, you can then see why they think/act the way they do. Writing blogs that insist on all characters being relatable forget that no one character (or even group of characters) is going to be relatable in some way to everyone, because everyone is completely different.
i decied to stst over again. its easier thantrying to explain the time jump but the biggest reason is the kids loo like sims 3 kids. in this case that means not mixed. back in 2015 when i started i got bored with all white. so out of pure curiosity i took a white man and black woman and put them together and the kids came out cute. it was also new yrs eve and i hate fire works soo it was a great distractions and i got the look i wanted for the kids but because the genetic system changed the look of the kids did too.this is me on no coffee but it doesn't change the post cause genetics is one of my favorite parts of sims 4.
What kind of process do all of you have for developing your characters or allowing them to autonomously develop? And are you happy with how well this process works for you?
OK, the process happened like this...
First, I decided to write a SimLit story and set it in one specific period in time, the 1960s. Then I decided that the story would be about a community, not focus on one specific individual so that shaped my character creation process. I was looking for archetypes that suited that era so I have, so far, created the Everyman, the Dolly Bird, The Man of Action, the Bookish Nerd, The Busybodies With Dark Secrets and The Teenager Trying To Get A Girlfriend. Those were the basic characters so I had some ideas of what they would look like, what their personalities were like and what their goals were. That could be done in CAS but the specifics were to come out in gameplay. So I have my Everyman, Jeremy Saint, and I've made him Good, Outgoing and all that. Then I put him in a blazer and slacks with a short back and sides haircut to show he's not a "swinger" of the 1960s which is a visual clue. What followed was borne out of gameplay: Who did he meet? How did he react to them? Who are now his friends. His up and down romantic life at the start of the story was pure gameplay: One woman came on the scene but she blew him out, he was sad, and then met someone who did love him back but before she came along I didn't know how his romantic life was going to pan out. Now she's a major character...a townie no less...and I've had to develop her based on what the game randomly created and how she interacts with the world.
The key thing when playing the game with SimLit in mind is to look out for the storytelling possibilities in every game session. Who does the Sim interact with? What's the tone? Can it be interpreted to be interesting when written up? And then look for the hanging plot hooks that you can follow up. Sometimes things need to be set up: Inviting a specific NPC sim to hang out somewhere or creating a building or room specifically for one plot point. Other times, and this is when I have nothing particularly in mind for the plot, I let the Sim get on with things autonomously. And I'm still convinced the game co-writes the story as it throws up interesting visitors, incidents and encounters I haven't planned on.
Agreed with most people here in that the biggest advantage SimLit has as a genre is the AI-aided storytelling aspect where the characters have agency, and how it's interesting to let them drive their own characterization! That's where all my favorite characters and plot lines were from in the very, very beginning. It's also useful to know how to fast-track development if you need, for example, 10 new characters feeling fully formed right out the gate.
Haha, stories that would be tragedies if not for the total oddball characters? Sign me up!
I think a lot of us can call to mind a character, in SimLit or otherwise, whose morals slip during the story (or are otherwise completely backwards from the beginning), but the 'likability' is in seeing the passion/depth/though that's gone into creating/writing the character, and in seeing just how far that character will go down the rabbit-hole of 'What on Earth are you doing?'-ness.
Yep! THIS IS 100% MY FAVORITE DISASTER MAN. Xiyuan, you are bonkers but you got me through the pandemic. I even learned to draw for you.
Catastrophe Theory: If, through loose ends, we could resume/Unrav'ling defects from the loom/And soften as the shuttle mends---/Then save for me a few loose ends! Haunted: Picture Oscar Wilde dating Willy Wonka, also Oscar Wilde is still dead
I think a lot of us can call to mind a character, in SimLit or otherwise, whose morals slip during the story (or are otherwise completely backwards from the beginning), but the 'likability' is in seeing the passion/depth/though that's gone into creating/writing the character, and in seeing just how far that character will go down the rabbit-hole of 'What on Earth are you doing?'-ness.
i used to write total comedy then the story went dramatic cause of morals.
It is so interesting to see how many thoughts lie behind the constructions of the stories and the characters. I can pretty much recognize them all, even though I use fewer words.
On one level, it makes me feel like an illiterate, or perhaps intellectually less gifted, because long English texts still require quite a lot of work for me to decode.
Thoughts are not a scarce commodity behind my skull, but we probably all have some ghosts of the past we struggle with.
I do not have to feel stupid. I have gone through more crises than average without ending up in depression.
I have now moved far away from the topic of character development and it makes me want to ask a question. Where do you find your motivation to write?
Personally, is my motivation to write solely driven by a desire to touch on some ethical and human dilemmas mixed with a reflection on the life I have lived, or perhaps a reflection on the life I could have had? It's probably a mixture of both.
I think I tend to fall into some fixed tracks. Maybe this is what several of you call the limitation of archetypes?
Jung mentions 12 archetypes and I think few of us choose to describe them purely. This does not mean that they do not appear in some compound form.
One of my critics calls me a hopeless romantic and I think: What !?
It is not my desire to write romantic stories. I want to hold on to the hope and desire to live.
It leads me to another important part of my motivation, namely the desire to play and the desire to develop new skills.
Where do you find your motivation to write?
I write because I enjoy it. If I didn't like it, I doubt I'd do it. I think that I'm really motivated by writing being challenging. There are so many things to consider. English has hundreds of thousands of words. I have to balance picking words that are well-known with picking those that I like or that fit the situation perfectly. There's also inside jokes, allusions, subject matter, length, pictures, general style, and other things to consider.
It may be too negative to say that I'm manipulative or that I enjoy manipulating people, but sometimes I want to elicit a specific reaction or type of feedback from my teeny tiny audience, so I act with that in mind and challenge myself to see if I can accomplish it. For example, the feedback I want could be as simple as "that's pretty," and then I'll move on to try to elicit another reaction… To be clear, "that's pretty" is not my current goal.
@MonaSolstraale I hope you don't feel illiterate at all. You have unique characters and I think everyone has fallen for Trix at least. I also don't think being intellectually gifted is a virtue. I tend to admire people who are passionate and thoughtful and who put genuine effort into what they do.
@MonaSolstraale I’ve always been amazed at your ability to convey thoughts, feelings and even your stance on complex topics in a language that is not your own. Trust me when I say that your comments and writing have never once made me think you are less gifted. The fact that you’re able to do all this through self-study and google translate makes you more amazing than many people I know. 😊
I think archetypes can be an obstacle and an asset in equal measure. There is nothing wrong with sticking to archetypes – they are popular and relatable for a reason. They can even work as a way to ground the reader in a world that is otherwise alien to them. Your stories have always made me feel hopeful, especially A Turtle’s Journey.
Where do you find your motivation to write?
I’m going to sound insane 😬 But the motivation finds me. I get new story ideas from everything – playing a game, watching events happen around me, driving home from work, taking a walk in nature, even while in the shower. I can do absolutely nothing and my head will still be filling itself with ideas and story hooks anyway. I can’t ignore it, either. Once an idea is in my head, I need to do something with it, or it will stay up there forever. It is very much a compulsion 😅 I sometimes joke that there’s a muse in my head that has no off-switch.
Regardless of how good the things I make are, I’m happiest when I write. Not making anything for a prolonged period of time messes with my head. I remember writing a story with a very fleshed-out villain a number of years ago. Life got chaotic and I stopped writing it for a while. The villain actually ended up showing up in my dreams and yelling at me for cutting off their moments of glory. 😂
Hosting D&D sessions on the side. Interested in playing through some fantasy-themed shenanigans? Send me a message 😘
I hope you don't feel illiterate at all. You have unique characters and I think everyone has fallen for Trix at least. I also don't think being intellectually gifted is a virtue. I tend to admire people who are passionate and thoughtful and who put genuine effort into what they do.
Yes to all of this! I agree @MonaSolstraale you aren’t illiterate, your story is great! I finally caught up on it last night. I’m still behind on a few stories. And yeah when you think about it, the English language is pretty weird. I found a great meme on the matter the other day, I’ll have to see if I can find it! That’s a good point @haneul. Sayings/idioms/jokes in one’s native language might not come across well translated, so sometimes I imagine it’s hard to find an equivalent phrase to use instead- and sometimes it’s almost impossible to find a direct translation with more complex languages. Japanese comes to mind for me, as far as I know there’s a lot of phrases for very specific feelings or situations that are hard to translate succinctly into English. As someone who plays a lot of Japanese games translated into English, meaning gets lost in the translation pretty often.
As for motivation, it’s not really something I personally can find easily, if at all- if it is there, awesome, but if it’s not, it’s mostly a case of either a) waiting around until I find I want to write again, or b) trying to plan ahead in the meantime. My fixation on hobbies is always impossible to plan around. One day I can be obsessed with writing and the next day I just don’t want to think about it!
I missed two questions, and probably my answers will also be quite long
What kind of process do all of you have for developing your characters or allowing them to autonomously develop? And are you happy with how well this process works for you?
I've been working on two very different Simlit stories, and also the character developing a characterization process was definitively not the same.
The first one was a Hogwarts-themed fan fiction, for which I started by listing the main points in the plot and imagining the characters, then I wrote the text and only at the end I played to take the screenshots describing what was happening. I've never managed to stick completely to the initial project, also meaning that often I returned back to the first chapters to add or change details to match my new ideas for the following development, The story has four protagonists, one for each house, and several other characters (other students, their relatives etc..). The Hogwarts setting definitively made me think on this more than usual, because it obliged me to reason like the sorting hat and to focus more on their character, their strong and weak points, their backgrounds and also their future goals. The story also covers a quite long period of time, from their arrival at Hogwarts to when they enter their 20s, so there is definitively some character growth in their story.
On the other hand, I would not say that I let my sims to choose much on their own. Mostly, so that TS2 had an attraction system, I used that to decide who to couple some of the characters with.
The other story instead is a TS4 legacy which I'm playing day by day and for which I'm writing the chapters one by one after playing. In this case, the sims traits and aspirations play a way bigger role in determining my plans for the future development of the story, and quite often I had to come up with some last-minute explanation for something unexpected happening to them when I was playing.
The other difference in this save in comparison with the previous one is also that, in this case, I'm playing using the normal life length setting. Very often I feel like this obliges me to develop my character way too quickly (for example when they find a partner, or when it's time to set up a family. It's a legacy, after all), or also to cut whole parts of the character development I had in mind because my sims were about to pass to the following age stage and there was no time left. This is a bit annoying sometimes, but for the sake of the challenge I want to finish it at this point.
Where do you find your motivation to write?
I like a lot to read, and also to invent and write down my stories. In combination with The Sims, it's also a way to motivate me to explore different kinds of stories and to keep my saves more interesting, because if I was playing just for the sake of playing I would probably just be repeating the same kind of gameplay over and over again.
Recently I'm often wondering where do I find the time for writing, but that's another story and shall be told another time...
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 8.16 posted on the 14th of April 2024*
Oh, from some of the other comments I read that English is not your first language either, is it true? I've just started to write Simlit in English too, sometimes it is so frustrating to don't be able to describe effectively the sentence I have in mind just because I'm not sure about some grammar rule, or my vocabulary is not large enough to know the word that would perfectly describe all the nuances of the concept I have in mind! And don't get me started with translations, even if my first language is another European one (Italian) there are still so many nice expressions that can't be translated at all, and so many paragraphs I have to completely rephrase to make them readable...
I admit that writing and reading in English for too long still gives me some headaches sometimes, and I'm sure that my writing is not the best, but I still think that we should we proud to be able to be able to be part of a (sim)writing community in a language is not our own, and still do a quite good job!
(P.S. I'm also adding your blog to the sim-stories I want to read, the premises look very interesting!)
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 8.16 posted on the 14th of April 2024*
I hope you don't feel illiterate at all. You have unique characters and I think everyone has fallen for Trix at least. I also don't think being intellectually gifted is a virtue. I tend to admire people who are passionate and thoughtful and who put genuine effort into what they do.
Yes to all of this! I agree @MonaSolstraale you aren’t illiterate, your story is great! I finally caught up on it last night. I’m still behind on a few stories. And yeah when you think about it, the English language is pretty weird. I found a great meme on the matter the other day, I’ll have to see if I can find it! That’s a good point @haneul. Sayings/idioms/jokes in one’s native language might not come across well translated, so sometimes I imagine it’s hard to find an equivalent phrase to use instead- and sometimes it’s almost impossible to find a direct translation with more complex languages. Japanese comes to mind for me, as far as I know there’s a lot of phrases for very specific feelings or situations that are hard to translate succinctly into English. As someone who plays a lot of Japanese games translated into English, meaning gets lost in the translation pretty often.
@SnowBnuuy It's odd to say this, but I really like English. I can do a lot with it and a lot of people understand it. Sometimes I'm lazy with translations because it's not just a phrase or word, but a whole way of thinking that has to change. I can't be bothered and I give up on translating. I notice that professional translators often give up too (and entire concepts just disappear from works or the opposite happens and alien concepts that weren't there before appear). In general, I'm a fan of thinking so I think that if it's not a huge burden, it's great for people to have more than one language at their disposal because that allows them to think and categorize things, etc. in different ways, which improves writing in any language. ETA: I'm a native English speaker (whose English is still okay) and to me, it's best to write in the language you're currently thinking in and not to translate because that will create problems/great frustration.
The other difference in this save in comparison with the previous one is also that, in this case, I'm playing using the normal life length setting. Very often I feel like this obliges me to develop my character way too quickly (for example when they find a partner, or when it's time to set up a family. It's a legacy, after all), or also to cut whole parts of the character development I had in mind because my sims were about to pass to the following age stage and there was no time left. This is a bit annoying sometimes, but for the sake of the challenge I want to finish it at this point.
@HermioneSims I felt similarly about aging, so I cut down my number of Sims and am okay with letting some of them be in the background. I also let my Sims stay in the main household forever. And I think a sweet spot for aging for me is somewhere between normal and long. To be fair, I also don't follow any legacy rules...
I admit that writing and reading in English for too long still gives me some headaches sometimes, and I'm sure that my writing is not the best, but I still think that we should we proud to be able to be able to be part of a (sim)writing community in a language is not our own, and still do a quite good job!
@HermioneSims I was thinking of mentioning our common language challenges for you when I read your answer on page 63 regarding what you wanted to improve about your stories.
I recognize your frustration at missing a vocabulary.
I have been writing in English since August 2020 and my first story was a story I had already shared in a Danish Forum, so I only needed to concentrate on the language.
My passive English knowledge is large enough for me to eradicate the worst mistranslations from Google Translate, but there are definitely some mistranslations and the grammar I dare not think about at all.
My funniest example of a mistranslation is when Google translated the Danish word for facemask (mundbind) into sanitary napkins It at least gave a good laugh
Thanks for adding my blog to your list. I can see in your blog that we have certain topics in common.
Regardless of how good the things I make are, I’m happiest when I write. Not making anything for a prolonged period of time messes with my head. I remember writing a story with a very fleshed-out villain a number of years ago. Life got chaotic and I stopped writing it for a while. The villain actually ended up showing up in my dreams and yelling at me for cutting off their moments of glory.
@_sims_Yimi I can see that you have a pretty good reason to write
I recognize that at times I can have a hard time letting go of the thoughts about the development of my characters ... but that they should actually come to chase me in my dreams! Oh no!
Thank you for always supporting me. It's of great value to me
I hope you don't feel illiterate at all. You have unique characters and I think everyone has fallen for Trix at least. I also don't think being intellectually gifted is a virtue. I tend to admire people who are passionate and thoughtful and who put genuine effort into what they do.
@haneul and @SnowBnuuy Thank you for your encouragement. It means a lot
It’s funny how everyone has fallen for Trix. It's hard to keep giving him a prominent role after Tusnelda's circle of friends has expanded. I will continue to do my best
bed. it always seems to happen when i'm trying to sleep. which is jes2g fault she put a curse on me. we were talking about why she wasn't getting get together .and she said to many ideas .so i got she didn't and i had to many ideas, see her fault.
On one level, it makes me feel like an illiterate, or perhaps intellectually less gifted, because long English texts still require quite a lot of work for me to decode.
Awww, @MonaSolstraale, this is heartbreaking. English is way harder than it needs to be, and this is coming from someone who thinks it's funny when an author sneaks a phrase like "postprandial quiescence" into their work. It doesn't reflect poorly on you, especially given how heartfelt your work is.
If it helps to know, it's not any better on the other side of the spectrum. I hate character archetypes (or the desire to box people in to fixed groups, which is going to be possible every time someone comes up with broad enough boxes and wants to argue peoples' memberships in one box or the other, so it's not an argument in favor of doing so), am certainly not a hopeless romantic, stan David Foster Wallace & study English in order to push the boundaries of what the language can do---and it's a very lonely existence.
Yes, I've also had a challenging life and write mostly to unpack life's complexities. And I don't buy into the "all good ideas have already been written" nonsense, either. I write because not just some, but the vast majority of things I want to explore haven't been covered to my liking by any other artists I've found.
You know what impact that has?
It hurts execution and isolates your message. Someone writing a love story where one person is not a vampire and the other person is---gasp! a vampire!---and at least one is a conventionally attractive red-headed white lady has centuries worth of vampire love stories to go back on and a pre-built readerbase of other people who like vampire romance and have their own conventionally attractive red-headed white female main characters. There's nothing wrong with that! It's okay to want to expand in your own way to a story that already speaks to a ton of people. And it leaves more energy to focus on presentation. For sure, the people who take this approach have a writing style that is much more appealing than mine to most readers, and their visuals are better done.
If you try to write something you can only describe as "post-postmodern metafiction" that barely anyone reads because it has "too many words" (REAL feedback I've gotten), boom! No readerbase because no one is initially getting into SimLit for that pretentious-jargon-y-sounding nonsense. Massive blips in execution compared to others because you're intentionally cutting from whole cloth. Because thinking outside the box comes at a price, and that price is being able to swing your arms around and not hit anyone while you watch people hang out in/near their nice warm box. (Also, people getting annoyed at you for drawing attention to the box's existence.)
And it used to hurt to write things like "The Watcher" and get ignored by the larger fandom in favor of pictures of pretty people; it used to hurt to come up with plotlines tying DV to emotional deaths and deconstructing the trauma Sims would feel after bouncing back from a temporary death, then get ignored again. It doesn't hurt anymore. I'm happy that other people are having fun and connecting to stories, even if I'm always going to feel like an outsider looking in. I've just completely given up on any attempts to promote my work or any hope that it'll reach mainstream acceptance.
Anyway, my point is because people's taste in stories or idea of what is considered "good" varies, it's more important to remain true to what you want to write. The range SimLit has just makes us stronger as a community.
Catastrophe Theory: If, through loose ends, we could resume/Unrav'ling defects from the loom/And soften as the shuttle mends---/Then save for me a few loose ends! Haunted: Picture Oscar Wilde dating Willy Wonka, also Oscar Wilde is still dead
We can support awesome ESL authors without trashing people who like playing with language. There's room for both.
Catastrophe Theory: If, through loose ends, we could resume/Unrav'ling defects from the loom/And soften as the shuttle mends---/Then save for me a few loose ends! Haunted: Picture Oscar Wilde dating Willy Wonka, also Oscar Wilde is still dead
You have a very thriving vocabulary that can give me some challenges, but do not take that as a criticism. That's just an explanation that I might be missing out on some of your message.
You know what impact that has?
For example, am I supposed to answer that question or is it more of a question that adds up to your own reflections?
Already there I am in doubt
SimLit is probably too narrow a genre for it to ever become mainstream. You may be able to discover a more suitable medium during your process.
I can imagine that you have been told that you use "too many words", but words are interesting.
I love playing with the language in my native language, rhymes and strips, words that express nuances, words that paint pictures, so there I follow you completely.
I have also seen that you are really good at creating strong descriptive images.
I am especially thinking of the gray images with the green plumbob in your contribution to the Monthly SimLit Short Story Challenge. The Plumbob Zone.
I have never forgotten those pictures and I just had to return to them earlier today. The whole story is an example that you can think out of the box while hitting a fairly wide readership. (As wide as it can get when it comes to SimLit )
Did I answer your question anyway?
Maybe I answered something completely different. I hope it is okay.
@Dollyllama108 I didn’t imply there wasn’t room for both, that’s why I said ‘for me…’ to show that it’s just my tastes and opinions- because my opinions and tastes in writing aren’t absolute. Folks don’t have to cater their writing to my tastes, or to anyone else’s, and folks can do things in a way I’m not keen on and wouldn’t do myself. That’s absolutely fine by me. There’s no wrong way to write a story.
EDIT: I’ve edited my original comment so it’s clearer that I’m discussing personal taste and opinion, for sake of clarity.
It hurts execution and isolates your message. Someone writing a love story where one person is not a vampire and the other person is---gasp! a vampire!---and at least one is a conventionally attractive red-headed white lady has centuries worth of vampire love stories to go back on and a pre-built readerbase of other people who like vampire romance and have their own conventionally attractive red-headed white female main characters. There's nothing wrong with that! It's okay to want to expand in your own way to a story that already speaks to a ton of people. And it leaves more energy to focus on presentation. For sure, the people who take this approach have a writing style that is much more appealing than mine to most readers, and their visuals are better done.
@Dollyllama108 I fully admit to writing like a lazy sellout XD, but I don't think doing so appeals to readers that much TBH because I think this community (while super small) is open to reading anything with heart behind it. I was kind of trying, but I'm not fully committed to a mainstream premise. I also think your audience is larger than mine.
My characters definitely look white and are conventionally attractive, so I get all the benefits of that and of having conventionally attractive characters, but if I were to write properly, it'd be a lot clearer that they are not white because they're not American or Asian or European etc. and don't have the baggage/privilege of imperialism or anything like that. I didn't want to have a lot of misbehaving POC characters, so I went with what a lot of people consider the "default" appearance and because they're a family, it snowballs and I don't have a lot of diversity in looks.
I don't mean to betray readers either, but I hope people aren't counting on me to write a romantic love story because that's a dangerous assumption. Maybe I can make it happen and I'll come through with that in the end, but I also have absolutely nothing against divorce or against characters who value stability more than romantic love.
If you try to write something you can only describe as "post-postmodern metafiction" that barely anyone reads because it has "too many words" (REAL feedback I've gotten), boom! No readerbase because no one is initially getting into SimLit for that pretentious-jargon-y-sounding nonsense.
I understand that, but at the same time, I've leaned a bit into pictures because I know some people don't read… I picked a bad genre with SimLit, but I think my story is largely an experiment in what people will tolerate. So far, I've found that while not everyone will read something (even if it's silly, short, and kind of simple) and some will just enjoy scrolling through pictures, this community is willing to tolerate a lot of experimental writing and gives great/thoughtful feedback.
ok i started the benders again but ihad the triplets age to toddlers so i could see what color they were so now i need a prologe i think thats what its called where i try and tell what happened before the story starts. never wrote one before. so what does it usuaally contain information wise?
i had put in the writers lounge this mornining and while the answer is mainly for me it might hrlp others too. i guess everyones either busy or stuck in the airport somewhere.
@friendsfan367 It depends how far you want to go back in the family storyline, I think. Maybe it’s worth outlining what life was like for the Benders maybe as an older teen/young adult, just before they started having kids?
I sometimes write a prologue and sometimes don’t, so I wouldn’t worry if you can’t think of where to start with one.
@SnowBnuuy Thank you very much for your feedback
I'm really glad I dared to admit that I sometimes feel like an illiterate person.
I can see that it was completely meaningless and only reflected the state of my mind at the time I wrote it.
My frustration at not being able to find words for everything that was whirling around behind my skull.
The loneliness and doubt hit us all in the writing process. It was just a silly remark from someone who does not like romance that made me fear that I was expressing myself too romantically. That it overshadows everything else.
I'm so glad you understand what I'm trying to say in my stories.
I am happy to find so many soul mates in this community and that we can reflect together on these essential questions regarding our writing process.
Now, I guess I said enough today. Thanks to everyone
@friendsfan367 It depends how far you want to go back in the family storyline, I think. Maybe it’s worth outlining what life was like for the Benders maybe as an older teen/young adult, just before they started having kids?
I sometimes write a prologue and sometimes don’t, so I wouldn’t worry if you can’t think of where to start with one.
welll i just started again. aparently i had a mod issue didn't catch, noel and lauren are married hes a chef but she doesn't have job yet she will be a doctor
but its my first attempt at a backstory with them so since there where everything starts trying to figure out what kind of information to put in it, i usually jump over this part.
@MonaSolstraale I wouldn’t worry, everyone has different tastes in reading and writing and that doesn’t mean the writer is ‘doing it wrong’.
Keep writing the way you’re enjoying writing it and what works for you, and if people consider it ‘too romantic’ and walk away then that’s up to them. Never feel you have to change your story for something like that!
Your story isn’t ‘hopelessly romantic’ anyway, not in my opinion. I think you can have romance in a story without it being the main point and without it being considered too romantic. Romance isn’t a focal point for my work either. I write more about family, both blood family and found family. I am trying to add romance a bit though, just to try and write something different.
Comments
- I'm glad you like the array of characters, thank you ;-;
- I think 'legacy' even for a story with no legacy rules is fine, it's not a throw-off for me since the story is still about the founder etc. carrying on his legacy in his children and such (hope that makes sense : P ). Plus I think it's just an easy. recognisable catch-all term at this point for a Sims story revolving around the antics of one family and their eventual descendants. I've read plenty of legacies where rules had little (or nothing) to do with it. For me personally, those are the more fun ones to read- more focus on the characters and their relationships and less so on the goals of the challenge.
- You make a good point about both the character interview-style questions. The trouble with answering those questions is you have to try and pick a sort of 'snapshot in time' to answer them from, since a character is going to change and so will the answers over the course of the story. I used to do loads of those character interviews as a teen and as fun and as helpful as they can be, that is one of the drawbacks. Also trying to find good ones with useful questions was difficult; I ended up making a lot of my own, IDK if I still have them on a USB somewhere.
- You also make a really good (and often not spoken about) point on relatability and likability. Sometimes people obsess over a character absolutely HAVING to be relatable and likable in some way, but I think it's sometimes a bit overrated to think that way about all characters. Like it helps, but it's not absolutely necessary- well, not to me.
Likability: It's less about liking the character as a person, and more about liking the thought that's gone into creating them, and their physical/mental journey if that makes sense. I think a lot of us can call to mind a character, in SimLit or otherwise, whose morals slip during the story (or are otherwise completely backwards from the beginning), but the 'likability' is in seeing the passion/depth/though that's gone into creating/writing the character, and in seeing just how far that character will go down the rabbit-hole of 'What on Earth are you doing?'-ness. The entertainment is in the sheer lengths a character will go to, to get what they want.
As for relatability, for me it's not about being able to connect a character's situation to my own- it's about being able to see through their eyes, and as such, you can then see why they think/act the way they do. Writing blogs that insist on all characters being relatable forget that no one character (or even group of characters) is going to be relatable in some way to everyone, because everyone is completely different.
OK, the process happened like this...
First, I decided to write a SimLit story and set it in one specific period in time, the 1960s. Then I decided that the story would be about a community, not focus on one specific individual so that shaped my character creation process. I was looking for archetypes that suited that era so I have, so far, created the Everyman, the Dolly Bird, The Man of Action, the Bookish Nerd, The Busybodies With Dark Secrets and The Teenager Trying To Get A Girlfriend. Those were the basic characters so I had some ideas of what they would look like, what their personalities were like and what their goals were. That could be done in CAS but the specifics were to come out in gameplay. So I have my Everyman, Jeremy Saint, and I've made him Good, Outgoing and all that. Then I put him in a blazer and slacks with a short back and sides haircut to show he's not a "swinger" of the 1960s which is a visual clue. What followed was borne out of gameplay: Who did he meet? How did he react to them? Who are now his friends. His up and down romantic life at the start of the story was pure gameplay: One woman came on the scene but she blew him out, he was sad, and then met someone who did love him back but before she came along I didn't know how his romantic life was going to pan out. Now she's a major character...a townie no less...and I've had to develop her based on what the game randomly created and how she interacts with the world.
The key thing when playing the game with SimLit in mind is to look out for the storytelling possibilities in every game session. Who does the Sim interact with? What's the tone? Can it be interpreted to be interesting when written up? And then look for the hanging plot hooks that you can follow up. Sometimes things need to be set up: Inviting a specific NPC sim to hang out somewhere or creating a building or room specifically for one plot point. Other times, and this is when I have nothing particularly in mind for the plot, I let the Sim get on with things autonomously. And I'm still convinced the game co-writes the story as it throws up interesting visitors, incidents and encounters I haven't planned on.
Read Sim 66 here:https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/978195/sim-66/p1
https://kelloggjkellogg.blogspot.com/2020/10/sim-66-prologue.html
Haha, stories that would be tragedies if not for the total oddball characters? Sign me up!
Yep! THIS IS 100% MY FAVORITE DISASTER MAN. Xiyuan, you are bonkers but you got me through the pandemic. I even learned to draw for you.
Haunted: Picture Oscar Wilde dating Willy Wonka, also Oscar Wilde is still dead
i used to write total comedy then the story went dramatic cause of morals.
On one level, it makes me feel like an illiterate, or perhaps intellectually less gifted, because long English texts still require quite a lot of work for me to decode.
Thoughts are not a scarce commodity behind my skull, but we probably all have some ghosts of the past we struggle with.
I do not have to feel stupid. I have gone through more crises than average without ending up in depression.
I have now moved far away from the topic of character development and it makes me want to ask a question.
Where do you find your motivation to write?
Personally, is my motivation to write solely driven by a desire to touch on some ethical and human dilemmas mixed with a reflection on the life I have lived, or perhaps a reflection on the life I could have had? It's probably a mixture of both.
I think I tend to fall into some fixed tracks. Maybe this is what several of you call the limitation of archetypes?
Jung mentions 12 archetypes and I think few of us choose to describe them purely. This does not mean that they do not appear in some compound form.
One of my critics calls me a hopeless romantic and I think: What !?
It is not my desire to write romantic stories. I want to hold on to the hope and desire to live.
It leads me to another important part of my motivation, namely the desire to play and the desire to develop new skills.
I write because I enjoy it. If I didn't like it, I doubt I'd do it. I think that I'm really motivated by writing being challenging. There are so many things to consider. English has hundreds of thousands of words. I have to balance picking words that are well-known with picking those that I like or that fit the situation perfectly. There's also inside jokes, allusions, subject matter, length, pictures, general style, and other things to consider.
It may be too negative to say that I'm manipulative or that I enjoy manipulating people, but sometimes I want to elicit a specific reaction or type of feedback from my teeny tiny audience, so I act with that in mind and challenge myself to see if I can accomplish it. For example, the feedback I want could be as simple as "that's pretty," and then I'll move on to try to elicit another reaction… To be clear, "that's pretty" is not my current goal.
@MonaSolstraale I hope you don't feel illiterate at all. You have unique characters and I think everyone has fallen for Trix at least. I also don't think being intellectually gifted is a virtue. I tend to admire people who are passionate and thoughtful and who put genuine effort into what they do.
I think archetypes can be an obstacle and an asset in equal measure. There is nothing wrong with sticking to archetypes – they are popular and relatable for a reason. They can even work as a way to ground the reader in a world that is otherwise alien to them. Your stories have always made me feel hopeful, especially A Turtle’s Journey.
Where do you find your motivation to write?
I’m going to sound insane 😬 But the motivation finds me. I get new story ideas from everything – playing a game, watching events happen around me, driving home from work, taking a walk in nature, even while in the shower. I can do absolutely nothing and my head will still be filling itself with ideas and story hooks anyway. I can’t ignore it, either. Once an idea is in my head, I need to do something with it, or it will stay up there forever. It is very much a compulsion 😅 I sometimes joke that there’s a muse in my head that has no off-switch.
Regardless of how good the things I make are, I’m happiest when I write. Not making anything for a prolonged period of time messes with my head. I remember writing a story with a very fleshed-out villain a number of years ago. Life got chaotic and I stopped writing it for a while. The villain actually ended up showing up in my dreams and yelling at me for cutting off their moments of glory. 😂
Yes to all of this! I agree @MonaSolstraale you aren’t illiterate, your story is great! I finally caught up on it last night. I’m still behind on a few stories. And yeah when you think about it, the English language is pretty weird. I found a great meme on the matter the other day, I’ll have to see if I can find it! That’s a good point @haneul. Sayings/idioms/jokes in one’s native language might not come across well translated, so sometimes I imagine it’s hard to find an equivalent phrase to use instead- and sometimes it’s almost impossible to find a direct translation with more complex languages. Japanese comes to mind for me, as far as I know there’s a lot of phrases for very specific feelings or situations that are hard to translate succinctly into English. As someone who plays a lot of Japanese games translated into English, meaning gets lost in the translation pretty often.
As for motivation, it’s not really something I personally can find easily, if at all- if it is there, awesome, but if it’s not, it’s mostly a case of either a) waiting around until I find I want to write again, or b) trying to plan ahead in the meantime. My fixation on hobbies is always impossible to plan around. One day I can be obsessed with writing and the next day I just don’t want to think about it!
What kind of process do all of you have for developing your characters or allowing them to autonomously develop? And are you happy with how well this process works for you?
I've been working on two very different Simlit stories, and also the character developing a characterization process was definitively not the same.
The first one was a Hogwarts-themed fan fiction, for which I started by listing the main points in the plot and imagining the characters, then I wrote the text and only at the end I played to take the screenshots describing what was happening. I've never managed to stick completely to the initial project, also meaning that often I returned back to the first chapters to add or change details to match my new ideas for the following development, The story has four protagonists, one for each house, and several other characters (other students, their relatives etc..). The Hogwarts setting definitively made me think on this more than usual, because it obliged me to reason like the sorting hat and to focus more on their character, their strong and weak points, their backgrounds and also their future goals. The story also covers a quite long period of time, from their arrival at Hogwarts to when they enter their 20s, so there is definitively some character growth in their story.
On the other hand, I would not say that I let my sims to choose much on their own. Mostly, so that TS2 had an attraction system, I used that to decide who to couple some of the characters with.
The other story instead is a TS4 legacy which I'm playing day by day and for which I'm writing the chapters one by one after playing. In this case, the sims traits and aspirations play a way bigger role in determining my plans for the future development of the story, and quite often I had to come up with some last-minute explanation for something unexpected happening to them when I was playing.
The other difference in this save in comparison with the previous one is also that, in this case, I'm playing using the normal life length setting. Very often I feel like this obliges me to develop my character way too quickly (for example when they find a partner, or when it's time to set up a family. It's a legacy, after all), or also to cut whole parts of the character development I had in mind because my sims were about to pass to the following age stage and there was no time left. This is a bit annoying sometimes, but for the sake of the challenge I want to finish it at this point.
Where do you find your motivation to write?
I like a lot to read, and also to invent and write down my stories. In combination with The Sims, it's also a way to motivate me to explore different kinds of stories and to keep my saves more interesting, because if I was playing just for the sake of playing I would probably just be repeating the same kind of gameplay over and over again.
Recently I'm often wondering where do I find the time for writing, but that's another story and shall be told another time...
Oh, from some of the other comments I read that English is not your first language either, is it true? I've just started to write Simlit in English too, sometimes it is so frustrating to don't be able to describe effectively the sentence I have in mind just because I'm not sure about some grammar rule, or my vocabulary is not large enough to know the word that would perfectly describe all the nuances of the concept I have in mind! And don't get me started with translations, even if my first language is another European one (Italian) there are still so many nice expressions that can't be translated at all, and so many paragraphs I have to completely rephrase to make them readable...
I admit that writing and reading in English for too long still gives me some headaches sometimes, and I'm sure that my writing is not the best, but I still think that we should we proud to be able to be able to be part of a (sim)writing community in a language is not our own, and still do a quite good job!
(P.S. I'm also adding your blog to the sim-stories I want to read, the premises look very interesting!)
@SnowBnuuy It's odd to say this, but I really like English. I can do a lot with it and a lot of people understand it. Sometimes I'm lazy with translations because it's not just a phrase or word, but a whole way of thinking that has to change. I can't be bothered and I give up on translating. I notice that professional translators often give up too (and entire concepts just disappear from works or the opposite happens and alien concepts that weren't there before appear). In general, I'm a fan of thinking so I think
@HermioneSims I felt similarly about aging, so I cut down my number of Sims and am okay with letting some of them be in the background. I also let my Sims stay in the main household forever.
I recognize your frustration at missing a vocabulary.
I have been writing in English since August 2020 and my first story was a story I had already shared in a Danish Forum, so I only needed to concentrate on the language.
My passive English knowledge is large enough for me to eradicate the worst mistranslations from Google Translate, but there are definitely some mistranslations and the grammar I dare not think about at all.
My funniest example of a mistranslation is when Google translated the Danish word for facemask (mundbind) into sanitary napkins
Thanks for adding my blog to your list. I can see in your blog that we have certain topics in common.
@_sims_Yimi I can see that you have a pretty good reason to write
I recognize that at times I can have a hard time letting go of the thoughts about the development of my characters ... but that they should actually come to chase me in my dreams! Oh no!
Thank you for always supporting me. It's of great value to me
@haneul and @SnowBnuuy Thank you for your encouragement. It means a lot
It’s funny how everyone has fallen for Trix. It's hard to keep giving him a prominent role after Tusnelda's circle of friends has expanded. I will continue to do my best
bed. it always seems to happen when i'm trying to sleep. which is jes2g fault she put a curse on me. we were talking about why she wasn't getting get together .and she said to many ideas .so i got she didn't and i had to many ideas, see her fault.
Awww, @MonaSolstraale, this is heartbreaking. English is way harder than it needs to be, and this is coming from someone who thinks it's funny when an author sneaks a phrase like "postprandial quiescence" into their work. It doesn't reflect poorly on you, especially given how heartfelt your work is.
If it helps to know, it's not any better on the other side of the spectrum. I hate character archetypes (or the desire to box people in to fixed groups, which is going to be possible every time someone comes up with broad enough boxes and wants to argue peoples' memberships in one box or the other, so it's not an argument in favor of doing so), am certainly not a hopeless romantic, stan David Foster Wallace & study English in order to push the boundaries of what the language can do---and it's a very lonely existence.
Yes, I've also had a challenging life and write mostly to unpack life's complexities. And I don't buy into the "all good ideas have already been written" nonsense, either. I write because not just some, but the vast majority of things I want to explore haven't been covered to my liking by any other artists I've found.
You know what impact that has?
It hurts execution and isolates your message. Someone writing a love story where one person is not a vampire and the other person is---gasp! a vampire!---and at least one is a conventionally attractive red-headed white lady has centuries worth of vampire love stories to go back on and a pre-built readerbase of other people who like vampire romance and have their own conventionally attractive red-headed white female main characters. There's nothing wrong with that! It's okay to want to expand in your own way to a story that already speaks to a ton of people. And it leaves more energy to focus on presentation. For sure, the people who take this approach have a writing style that is much more appealing than mine to most readers, and their visuals are better done.
If you try to write something you can only describe as "post-postmodern metafiction" that barely anyone reads because it has "too many words" (REAL feedback I've gotten), boom! No readerbase because no one is initially getting into SimLit for that pretentious-jargon-y-sounding nonsense. Massive blips in execution compared to others because you're intentionally cutting from whole cloth. Because thinking outside the box comes at a price, and that price is being able to swing your arms around and not hit anyone while you watch people hang out in/near their nice warm box. (Also, people getting annoyed at you for drawing attention to the box's existence.)
And it used to hurt to write things like "The Watcher" and get ignored by the larger fandom in favor of pictures of pretty people; it used to hurt to come up with plotlines tying DV to emotional deaths and deconstructing the trauma Sims would feel after bouncing back from a temporary death, then get ignored again. It doesn't hurt anymore. I'm happy that other people are having fun and connecting to stories, even if I'm always going to feel like an outsider looking in. I've just completely given up on any attempts to promote my work or any hope that it'll reach mainstream acceptance.
Anyway, my point is because people's taste in stories or idea of what is considered "good" varies, it's more important to remain true to what you want to write. The range SimLit has just makes us stronger as a community.
Haunted: Picture Oscar Wilde dating Willy Wonka, also Oscar Wilde is still dead
Haunted: Picture Oscar Wilde dating Willy Wonka, also Oscar Wilde is still dead
You have a very thriving vocabulary that can give me some challenges, but do not take that as a criticism. That's just an explanation that I might be missing out on some of your message.
For example, am I supposed to answer that question or is it more of a question that adds up to your own reflections?
Already there I am in doubt
SimLit is probably too narrow a genre for it to ever become mainstream. You may be able to discover a more suitable medium during your process.
I can imagine that you have been told that you use "too many words", but words are interesting.
I love playing with the language in my native language, rhymes and strips, words that express nuances, words that paint pictures, so there I follow you completely.
I have also seen that you are really good at creating strong descriptive images.
I am especially thinking of the gray images with the green plumbob in your contribution to the Monthly SimLit Short Story Challenge. The Plumbob Zone.
I have never forgotten those pictures and I just had to return to them earlier today. The whole story is an example that you can think out of the box while hitting a fairly wide readership. (As wide as it can get when it comes to SimLit
Did I answer your question anyway?
Maybe I answered something completely different. I hope it is okay.
EDIT: I’ve edited my original comment so it’s clearer that I’m discussing personal taste and opinion, for sake of clarity.
@Dollyllama108 I fully admit to writing like a lazy sellout XD, but I don't think doing so appeals to readers that much TBH because I think this community (while super small) is open to reading anything with heart behind it. I was kind of trying, but I'm not fully committed to a mainstream premise. I also think your audience is larger than mine.
My characters definitely look white and are conventionally attractive, so I get all the benefits of that and of having conventionally attractive characters, but if I were to write properly, it'd be a lot clearer that they are not white because they're not American or Asian or European etc. and don't have the baggage/privilege of imperialism or anything like that. I didn't want to have a lot of misbehaving POC characters, so I went with what a lot of people consider the "default" appearance and because they're a family, it snowballs and I don't have a lot of diversity in looks.
I don't mean to betray readers either, but I hope people aren't counting on me to write a romantic love story because that's a dangerous assumption. Maybe I can make it happen and I'll come through with that in the end, but I also have absolutely nothing against divorce or against characters who value stability more than romantic love.
I understand that, but at the same time, I've leaned a bit into pictures because I know some people don't read… I picked a bad genre with SimLit, but I think my story is largely an experiment in what people will tolerate. So far, I've found that while not everyone will read something (even if it's silly, short, and kind of simple) and some will just enjoy scrolling through pictures, this community is willing to tolerate a lot of experimental writing and gives great/thoughtful feedback.
i had put in the writers lounge this mornining and while the answer is mainly for me it might hrlp others too. i guess everyones either busy or stuck in the airport somewhere.
I sometimes write a prologue and sometimes don’t, so I wouldn’t worry if you can’t think of where to start with one.
I'm really glad I dared to admit that I sometimes feel like an illiterate person.
I can see that it was completely meaningless and only reflected the state of my mind at the time I wrote it.
My frustration at not being able to find words for everything that was whirling around behind my skull.
The loneliness and doubt hit us all in the writing process. It was just a silly remark from someone who does not like romance that made me fear that I was expressing myself too romantically. That it overshadows everything else.
I'm so glad you understand what I'm trying to say in my stories.
I am happy to find so many soul mates in this community and that we can reflect together on these essential questions regarding our writing process.
Now, I guess I said enough today. Thanks to everyone
welll i just started again. aparently i had a mod issue didn't catch, noel and lauren are married hes a chef but she doesn't have job yet she will be a doctor
but its my first attempt at a backstory with them so since there where everything starts trying to figure out what kind of information to put in it, i usually jump over this part.
Keep writing the way you’re enjoying writing it and what works for you, and if people consider it ‘too romantic’ and walk away then that’s up to them. Never feel you have to change your story for something like that!
Your story isn’t ‘hopelessly romantic’ anyway, not in my opinion. I think you can have romance in a story without it being the main point and without it being considered too romantic. Romance isn’t a focal point for my work either. I write more about family, both blood family and found family. I am trying to add romance a bit though, just to try and write something different.