@Lucy_Henley I would really recommend you to save your old saves. Maybe you will suddenly be inspired to continue the game later. My story about Tusnelda is written based on a game I played in 2018.
Since I often create a new Save while playing, my Saves folder can get very large. I have made a system where I store all Saves on an external drive. I sort them into folders and give the folder a name so I can recognize it. It can be the family name or something else.
If later I feel like playing with the family. Do I simply copy the folder to my Sims4 folder and rename it to Saves. (Remember to move the Saves folder that is in the Sims4 folder before adding a new Saves folder.)
I would like to illustrate it with some screen prints from my D drive.
NB: To save space, you can safely delete all extra versions of your save.
Your save has a number, e.g. slot_0000016.save, but a slot_0000016.save.ver0 and slot_0000016.save.ver1 are also saved. Maybe up to slot_0000016.save.ver4
You can delete these extra copies as they are just copies.
Incidentally, I have made a similar system with my screenshots, where I empty the Sims4 folder's screenshots folder regularly and save images in folders referring to a chapter or date.
NB: I would recommend that you ALWAYS save a copy of your Saves folder somewhere safe before experimenting with deleting folders. This way you can always recreate your current games. Best of luck with your deliberations
Ok, seems like everyone agrees! I will probably start a new version of the story but keep the old save. I can use it to refer back to if I need to.
Since I had a blog for the story, what should I do with that? Maybe similar, just unlink it from my signature and keep the original blog on my Blogger profile but start a new one for the new/revamped save? The new blog would have a different title.
I think that'd be a good idea. You could try to "copy" that blog to get the layout, or change all the posts back to drafts and continue writing there... but if a new layout wasn't too complicated to get I'd prefer the "clean slate". :)
I have a tendency to over-overstart saves... one I had done, then restarted to a clean slate, then restarted again as a challenge and then restarted that because of a lost save and now because of the update. I gotta stop or I'll never get anywhere! :D
So I’ve been planning this new version of my story, and one thing I’ve been finding difficult is character development. When I read other people’s SimLits, they’ve got really well-written characters with both flaws and virtues. Some are morally ambiguous. That kind of thing. Although my characters aren’t blatant Mary Sue types, they’ve not got obvious flaws. But then again, maybe it’s just because I’ve been focusing on the plot more than anything else.
@Lucy_Henley I read writing advice once that the most important aspect of a story is the characters - so much so that the plot is of secondary importance, but I think that everyone has got their own way of doing things! If you're concerned about your characters lacking depth then you could always do one of those character interview forms, run through the questions and consider how your character would respond to each one. What are their flaws? What lies do they tell themselves? How has their upbringing affected them? What's the thing they want most, the central driving force for them in your story. There's plenty of great resources out there that can help you - and I'm sure you'll figure out what works best for your story
@hellohannah2 I guess there’s no one, overarching plot in my story, it’s more a general chronicle of a family through the generations. Although it’s not a traditional “Sims Legacy” story in the sense of a single Sim starting out as dirt poor and ending up rich.
Question to all brilliant and lovely writers in this thread
About feedback, do you also wish to hear negative one? Or only the positive things. As not sure how person might take critique, I usually avoid mentioning if something bugged or bothered me, as last thing I wish to do is hurt anyone's feelings
My love, my love, my fearless love, I will not say goodbye..
Sea may rise, sky may fall, My love will never die..
My heart, my heart, My drowning heart, Oh all the tears I've cried
Oh I may weep forevermore, My love will never die..
I'll be honest, I don't think characters need to be super-complex to be good! Just having the odd flaw works fine, even if it's not something super tragic. As long as the flaw somehow gets in the way of their lives in a way that works with the story. And the Mary-Sue thing IMO I wouldn't worry about. I would never think that of your characters, and also I think nowadays it's a really inaccurate way of gauging character. Like Mary-Sue ended up essentially being applied to any female character who excelled in something or had coloured hair or supernatural aspects XC
I'm the opposite to you in that I focus on characters more than plot, whether reading or writing. For me, good characters can save a meh plot, but a great plot can't save meh characters.
@Ellupelluellu Sorry my response is a bit rambly (not surprising at this point I imaginE)
As someone who used to provide really annoying nitpicky critiques back in my FanFiction days, including incredibly minor grammar details (I didn't realise how unhelpful I was being) (I also didn't realise how rudely I wrote them) it depends on so many factors.
Mainly exactly what you said- you have no idea how someone's going to take it.
- This is going to be harder for you as a non-native English speaker, but it all depends on how you say it. So long as you do your best not to be rude about it, if you want to write critique. However, my advice would honestly be to not bother, because a lot of folks don't like or don't want criticism. (And whilst people will froth at the mouth about 'I HAVE A RIGHT TO CRITICISE!' 'BUT HOW WILL YOU IMPROVE???' it's literally just SimLit, if people don't want criticism I'm not going to give it.) I personally don't give critique anymore on anything drawn or written. I always focus on positives because I want to boost people's creative confidence. Mostly this stems from my deviantART days where a lot of the site was made up of younger people, last thing I wanna do is wreck a teenager's confidence.
If folks have an issue with my story, they can tell me if they want, just so long as they don't go having attitude about it acting like a 2007 wannabe Wordpress caustic critic- your snotty attitude will be reciprocated. XD I personally don't care to hear about minor grammar errors because I just don't care anymore as long as the story is legible. Unless they change the meaning of a sentence, then feel free to tell me.
Personally I'd want to say yes, I'd rather hear the negative feedback too. Not only the positive. If the parts of your story that can improve aren't pointed out to you, then you might never improve. Constructive criticism is important to grow as a writer and artist.
You're right that you never know how people take criticism, though. Some writers handle it better than others. Hurting people's feelings by accident is something I try to avoid too. Constructive criticism is very much a skill to learn and I don't always trust myself to say it gently. So even though I would prefer getting the negative feedback, I usually focus on giving positive feedback. I know that's very contradictive 😆
Hosting D&D sessions on the side. Interested in playing through some fantasy-themed shenanigans? Send me a message 😘
Thank you! I understand about the problem with the term Mary Sue. I just wasn’t sure of a better way to say it!
Funnily enough I have been thinking of character flaws. To make it easier I’m using some of the ones I have, things like self-doubt, a tendency to give up easily, anxiety. Now I just have to make sure that the characters don’t sound too extreme!
@Lucy_Henley Nono that's fine that wasn't aimed at you! < 3 It was aimed at the word itself, because its overuse online it's made so many writers wary of having characters with superpowers or unrealistic elements.
@Ellupelluellu I’m open to any feedback, positive or negative. All I ask with negative feedback is don’t be rude or make things personal. Otherwise I’m all for feedback of any kind.
@SnowBnuuy I didn’t think the comment was aimed at me, don’t worry!
And yeah, I think it would be pretty unrealistic to say “only good feedback please!” Like @DaniRose2143 says, you can be negative without being rude or personal. Of course, we have to mind our own preferences when reading other people’s work. Fiction is subjective. There are books I’ve disliked in the past which others have loved.
@Lucy_Henley A lot of readers prefer simple or unambiguously good characters, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. Write what works for you, whether that makes your characters simple, complex, morally ambiguous, or something else. If you're writing a legacy at the standard pace for legacies and trying to accomplish gameplay goals while also writing about those gameplay goals (ex. career progression or skill development), it's probably going to be challenging to flesh out all of the characters.
@Ellupelluellu I'm okay with negative feedback. I'm curious about what people think and don't want negative thoughts filtered out unnecessarily. I prefer negative feedback over silence.
So I’ve been planning this new version of my story, and one thing I’ve been finding difficult is character development. When I read other people’s SimLits, they’ve got really well-written characters with both flaws and virtues. Some are morally ambiguous. That kind of thing. Although my characters aren’t blatant Mary Sue types, they’ve not got obvious flaws. But then again, maybe it’s just because I’ve been focusing on the plot more than anything else.
All my characters begin with two things: A look and a voice.
I get a rough idea for a character and I create them in CAS, fine tuning their look. The physical features reflect the idea I have for them but the clothing and hairstyle is a representation of their character and that gives me ideas of how they are.
Next I develop a voice for each of those characters. The voice is partly about pitch but mostly it's about how they talk. What phrases and words do they use? How do they interact with others? How do they sound to themselves when they think? Once I have that voice sorted I find it becomes easier to write them and develop them.
Try imagining your character in a variety of situations. They go into a grocery store to buy milk so how would they approach the clerk or other customers? Or they come home and find someone in the shower. Or they have to confess to mum and dad that they've crashed the car. Just simple set ups and think about how they would go about resolving them.
One other thing...deeper characterisation isn't about lots of backstory; most of my characters' backstories are left vague and I drop little bits of background here and there. Also, I don't like weighing the story down with exposition so I find the characterisation comes from dialogue, interaction and actions rather than internal monologues.
So I’ve been planning this new version of my story, and one thing I’ve been finding difficult is character development. When I read other people’s SimLits, they’ve got really well-written characters with both flaws and virtues. Some are morally ambiguous. That kind of thing. Although my characters aren’t blatant Mary Sue types, they’ve not got obvious flaws. But then again, maybe it’s just because I’ve been focusing on the plot more than anything else.
You already got a lot of very useful answers, I don't have much to add. I'm also quite weird as a reader, often what draws me the most to stories is not the characters nor the plot, but having an original setting for the story. Characters are probably a close second, though.
In my case, what makes me like or dislike characters the most is whether I can relate to them and the choices they take or not. Actually, I would describe a lot of my characters as "good" and "without very evident flaws" as well (and I don't see it as a big issue).
I would also say that (in my opinion) one of the biggest points about making good characters is to ensure that their behaviour is coherent with their surroundings, and that the events in the story affect them to some extent (i.e. character development along the story).
Question to all brilliant and lovely writers in this thread
About feedback, do you also wish to hear negative one? Or only the positive things. As not sure how person might take critique, I usually avoid mentioning if something bugged or bothered me, as last thing I wish to do is hurt anyone's feelings
In theory, negative feedback (at least when constructive) can be very useful, but, on the other hand, in here everyone is always so nice with their comments and so I don't know how I would react to a very negative comment if I received one. I actually like quite a lot the chill atmosphere around this forum, and critiques would surely be a possible source of avoidable drama.
Anyway, there are a lot of different kinds of negative or critical comments. Above all, I always find it very useful when I notice that some points in my story were unclear for the readers (either because they tell me, or because I read it in between the lines of their comments). These comments can be seen as very mild critics, but can also help me a lot in adjusting the following chapter in a way that clarifies those same points.
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 8.18 posted on the 23th of April 2024*
If I ever miss anything in someone’s chapter, it’s almost never to do with their writing and almost certain to do with the fact I have one brain cell : p
I was thinking about this last night and realised it might be a nice question for the group. Partly because I'm genuinely curious how you all turned to the hobby 🤭
What caused you to dive into storytelling as a hobby? Alternatively (if you can't remember), what part of storytelling do you like the most?
I was an avid reader as a kid. Mini-me would read anything she got her hands on, partly because it was an escape from reality and partly because fantasy stories were just loads of fun. But if you read a lot, you pick up language and vocabulary pretty quickly too, and Dutch class was always boring because of it. I'd copy the authors I read and write stories during class instead. My teacher caught me, but instead of berating me, she read the whole thing. Even graded it for me and gave me pointers to improve. Then gave me permission to keep going as long as she got to read it. That really started things off. I still remember that teacher. 🥰
Hosting D&D sessions on the side. Interested in playing through some fantasy-themed shenanigans? Send me a message 😘
@_sims_Yimi I love this question - and your own story was so lovely, it's amazing the impact our teachers can have on us when we're young. I wonder if she knows the impression she left on you, and how she still sticks with you years on.
I was also an avid reader, I would devour books. Before I was allowed to have a phone I would read myself to sleep every night, and during the long summer break I'd read all day. In my primary school there was a real influence on creativity & culture, so things like classical music, chess and creative writing were very much part of the curriculum. Every week we'd have to turn out a story about something, it was really to practice our spelling and grammar but I used to absolutely throw myself into it. I always had an active imagination and I was always coming up with characters in my head (like giving backstories to my Bratz Dolls, haha). My stories often got picked as the ones the teacher would read out to the class, and that made me feel encouraged to keep trying and keep improving.
I briefly went to a "gifted child" weekend school (Bleargh!!) where I took specialist classes in creative writing that helped me improve more, and that's when I started writing for myself. I never showed anybody what I'd written until Sims 2 came along when I was like 11 and I saw how people were using their game to illustrate stories. I immediately started working on my first story and posted it for strangers to see (They did not like it very much).
Since then I've swung in and out of storytelling a bit, having years away from it here and there. I work in a creative industry surrounded by actual writers, people who write actual screenplays and win awards for them so it's easy to feel a little intimidated, but I enjoy doing it so much that I keep reminding myself that my peers being professionals doesn't make my work invalid. I think everyone has a unique perspective on life and their own interesting way of telling a story.
@_sims_Yimi Writing started for me about this time last year with a push from a forum friend. We share a love of the sims and cc, and I shared my creations with her in DMs. At that point I had just started posting here on a regular basis even though I set up my account way back in 2015. When I showed her my what I created I share a little backstory to go with it. She encouraged me to write stories and share them. I really doubted myself and my writing. I thought my words would be really corny and kind of childish. Instead I found a creative side I never knew I had. I still have moments of doubt about my writing, I suppose that’s normal.
I enjoy seeking out and finding my muse and connecting with her, feeling the words flow. I love the way writing connects me to my characters. No matter how stressful the real world gets I can sit down with them and it all melts away while I write.
What caused you to dive into storytelling as a hobby? Alternatively (if you can't remember), what part of storytelling do you like the most?
I was more of a movie and TV watching kid but I read lots of books as well; mainly non-fiction. After university I went into the film & TV industry and I worked on a lot of poorly written stuff that, for me, didn't make a lot of narrative sense but often looked visually impressive. I felt a lot of writers and directors I was working with (and I was quite low on the ladder at the time) understood visuals but not storytelling. Finally, I decided to give it a go myself, having learned scriptwriting from the books of John Truby and my script writing tutor at film school, Mike Sarne. I lacked the nerve, though, and drank a whole bottle of red wine in one sitting to alleviate myself from the fear and worry. It worked; I just sat down and wrote the idea I had into a script over the course of a week (only needing that one first bottle...I was tee-total the rest of the time).
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I wrote further scripts over the years but not prose or in novel form. This, SimLit, is my first attempt at writing prose instead of scripts and I'm enjoying the change. Sims 4 is the equivalent of that bottle of red wine: It's the way to get the ball rolling, overcome my doubts and it has the benefit of giving me a visual reference to the story and characters as well. The scriptwriting background goes a long way to influence my writing style.
Wow! These are some really interesting questions and responses here. Sadly, I have to get ready to go to work now. And possibly shovel snow to get out of the driveway. But I definitely would like to respond to some of this later. I'll give it some thought.
What caused you to dive into storytelling as a hobby? Alternatively (if you can't remember), what part of storytelling do you like the most?
I'll give the short version because I could bang on about this forever. No interesting story here, just a neurodivergent kid who found home in fiction because they felt alienated from reality and had no friends XD I used to make up stories all the time as a kid, and the little OCs I made up were almost on the level of imaginary friends. Skip ahead to Easter Holiday week off school when I was 13 and read all the Harry Potters from 2 onwards in one week since I'd already read the first one. Despite me reading them when I was 13 I don't think I properly got back into writing stories until I was 16? By 16 I had no care for the HP series though, I lost interest in it completely. Most of my writing pre-SimLit was for the same story and characters which I'd started writing about when I was about 17-18. I'd like to revisit it sometime, but I prefer SimLit at this point (if you think Divided is messed up, the pre-Simlit story universe is even worse.) For a while I did want to be an author, but that dream died off when I was 17.
What got me into SimLit was a particular fun TS4 legacy that involved a fair few alien abductions, and also an old TS2 story that was semi- popular (it was one of those that upon first reading was really good, but upon second reading there were a few things that felt iffily-portrayed.) I joined another smaller Sims forum in 2019 with my first SimLit, and now it's a massive hyperfixation that's taken over my entire life. This is what happens when people give me attention... XD
Comments
Since I often create a new Save while playing, my Saves folder can get very large. I have made a system where I store all Saves on an external drive. I sort them into folders and give the folder a name so I can recognize it. It can be the family name or something else.
If later I feel like playing with the family. Do I simply copy the folder to my Sims4 folder and rename it to Saves. (Remember to move the Saves folder that is in the Sims4 folder before adding a new Saves folder.)
I would like to illustrate it with some screen prints from my D drive.
NB: To save space, you can safely delete all extra versions of your save.
Your save has a number, e.g. slot_0000016.save, but a slot_0000016.save.ver0 and slot_0000016.save.ver1 are also saved. Maybe up to slot_0000016.save.ver4
You can delete these extra copies as they are just copies.
Incidentally, I have made a similar system with my screenshots, where I empty the Sims4 folder's screenshots folder regularly and save images in folders referring to a chapter or date.
Since I had a blog for the story, what should I do with that? Maybe similar, just unlink it from my signature and keep the original blog on my Blogger profile but start a new one for the new/revamped save? The new blog would have a different title.
I have a tendency to over-overstart saves... one I had done, then restarted to a clean slate, then restarted again as a challenge and then restarted that because of a lost save and now because of the update. I gotta stop or I'll never get anywhere! :D
About feedback, do you also wish to hear negative one? Or only the positive things. As not sure how person might take critique, I usually avoid mentioning if something bugged or bothered me, as last thing I wish to do is hurt anyone's feelings
Sea may rise, sky may fall, My love will never die..
My heart, my heart, My drowning heart, Oh all the tears I've cried
Oh I may weep forevermore, My love will never die..
I'm the opposite to you in that I focus on characters more than plot, whether reading or writing. For me, good characters can save a meh plot, but a great plot can't save meh characters.
@Ellupelluellu Sorry my response is a bit rambly (not surprising at this point I imaginE)
Mainly exactly what you said- you have no idea how someone's going to take it.
- This is going to be harder for you as a non-native English speaker, but it all depends on how you say it. So long as you do your best not to be rude about it, if you want to write critique. However, my advice would honestly be to not bother, because a lot of folks don't like or don't want criticism. (And whilst people will froth at the mouth about 'I HAVE A RIGHT TO CRITICISE!' 'BUT HOW WILL YOU IMPROVE???' it's literally just SimLit, if people don't want criticism I'm not going to give it.) I personally don't give critique anymore on anything drawn or written. I always focus on positives because I want to boost people's creative confidence. Mostly this stems from my deviantART days where a lot of the site was made up of younger people, last thing I wanna do is wreck a teenager's confidence.
If folks have an issue with my story, they can tell me if they want, just so long as they don't go having attitude about it acting like a 2007 wannabe Wordpress caustic critic- your snotty attitude will be reciprocated. XD I personally don't care to hear about minor grammar errors because I just don't care anymore as long as the story is legible. Unless they change the meaning of a sentence, then feel free to tell me.
Personally I'd want to say yes, I'd rather hear the negative feedback too. Not only the positive. If the parts of your story that can improve aren't pointed out to you, then you might never improve. Constructive criticism is important to grow as a writer and artist.
You're right that you never know how people take criticism, though. Some writers handle it better than others. Hurting people's feelings by accident is something I try to avoid too. Constructive criticism is very much a skill to learn and I don't always trust myself to say it gently. So even though I would prefer getting the negative feedback, I usually focus on giving positive feedback. I know that's very contradictive 😆
Funnily enough I have been thinking of character flaws. To make it easier I’m using some of the ones I have, things like self-doubt, a tendency to give up easily, anxiety. Now I just have to make sure that the characters don’t sound too extreme!
And yeah, I think it would be pretty unrealistic to say “only good feedback please!” Like @DaniRose2143 says, you can be negative without being rude or personal. Of course, we have to mind our own preferences when reading other people’s work. Fiction is subjective. There are books I’ve disliked in the past which others have loved.
@Ellupelluellu I'm okay with negative feedback. I'm curious about what people think and don't want negative thoughts filtered out unnecessarily. I prefer negative feedback over silence.
All my characters begin with two things: A look and a voice.
I get a rough idea for a character and I create them in CAS, fine tuning their look. The physical features reflect the idea I have for them but the clothing and hairstyle is a representation of their character and that gives me ideas of how they are.
Next I develop a voice for each of those characters. The voice is partly about pitch but mostly it's about how they talk. What phrases and words do they use? How do they interact with others? How do they sound to themselves when they think? Once I have that voice sorted I find it becomes easier to write them and develop them.
Try imagining your character in a variety of situations. They go into a grocery store to buy milk so how would they approach the clerk or other customers? Or they come home and find someone in the shower. Or they have to confess to mum and dad that they've crashed the car. Just simple set ups and think about how they would go about resolving them.
One other thing...deeper characterisation isn't about lots of backstory; most of my characters' backstories are left vague and I drop little bits of background here and there. Also, I don't like weighing the story down with exposition so I find the characterisation comes from dialogue, interaction and actions rather than internal monologues.
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
You already got a lot of very useful answers, I don't have much to add. I'm also quite weird as a reader, often what draws me the most to stories is not the characters nor the plot, but having an original setting for the story. Characters are probably a close second, though.
In my case, what makes me like or dislike characters the most is whether I can relate to them and the choices they take or not. Actually, I would describe a lot of my characters as "good" and "without very evident flaws" as well (and I don't see it as a big issue).
I would also say that (in my opinion) one of the biggest points about making good characters is to ensure that their behaviour is coherent with their surroundings, and that the events in the story affect them to some extent (i.e. character development along the story).
In theory, negative feedback (at least when constructive) can be very useful, but, on the other hand, in here everyone is always so nice with their comments and so I don't know how I would react to a very negative comment if I received one. I actually like quite a lot the chill atmosphere around this forum, and critiques would surely be a possible source of avoidable drama.
Anyway, there are a lot of different kinds of negative or critical comments. Above all, I always find it very useful when I notice that some points in my story were unclear for the readers (either because they tell me, or because I read it in between the lines of their comments). These comments can be seen as very mild critics, but can also help me a lot in adjusting the following chapter in a way that clarifies those same points.
What caused you to dive into storytelling as a hobby? Alternatively (if you can't remember), what part of storytelling do you like the most?
I was an avid reader as a kid. Mini-me would read anything she got her hands on, partly because it was an escape from reality and partly because fantasy stories were just loads of fun. But if you read a lot, you pick up language and vocabulary pretty quickly too, and Dutch class was always boring because of it. I'd copy the authors I read and write stories during class instead. My teacher caught me, but instead of berating me, she read the whole thing. Even graded it for me and gave me pointers to improve. Then gave me permission to keep going as long as she got to read it. That really started things off. I still remember that teacher. 🥰
I was also an avid reader, I would devour books. Before I was allowed to have a phone I would read myself to sleep every night, and during the long summer break I'd read all day. In my primary school there was a real influence on creativity & culture, so things like classical music, chess and creative writing were very much part of the curriculum. Every week we'd have to turn out a story about something, it was really to practice our spelling and grammar but I used to absolutely throw myself into it. I always had an active imagination and I was always coming up with characters in my head (like giving backstories to my Bratz Dolls, haha). My stories often got picked as the ones the teacher would read out to the class, and that made me feel encouraged to keep trying and keep improving.
I briefly went to a "gifted child" weekend school (Bleargh!!) where I took specialist classes in creative writing that helped me improve more, and that's when I started writing for myself. I never showed anybody what I'd written until Sims 2 came along when I was like 11 and I saw how people were using their game to illustrate stories. I immediately started working on my first story and posted it for strangers to see (They did not like it very much).
Since then I've swung in and out of storytelling a bit, having years away from it here and there. I work in a creative industry surrounded by actual writers, people who write actual screenplays and win awards for them so it's easy to feel a little intimidated, but I enjoy doing it so much that I keep reminding myself that my peers being professionals doesn't make my work invalid. I think everyone has a unique perspective on life and their own interesting way of telling a story.
That's it!
I enjoy seeking out and finding my muse and connecting with her, feeling the words flow. I love the way writing connects me to my characters. No matter how stressful the real world gets I can sit down with them and it all melts away while I write.
I was more of a movie and TV watching kid but I read lots of books as well; mainly non-fiction. After university I went into the film & TV industry and I worked on a lot of poorly written stuff that, for me, didn't make a lot of narrative sense but often looked visually impressive. I felt a lot of writers and directors I was working with (and I was quite low on the ladder at the time) understood visuals but not storytelling. Finally, I decided to give it a go myself, having learned scriptwriting from the books of John Truby and my script writing tutor at film school, Mike Sarne. I lacked the nerve, though, and drank a whole bottle of red wine in one sitting to alleviate myself from the fear and worry. It worked; I just sat down and wrote the idea I had into a script over the course of a week (only needing that one first bottle...I was tee-total the rest of the time).
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I wrote further scripts over the years but not prose or in novel form. This, SimLit, is my first attempt at writing prose instead of scripts and I'm enjoying the change. Sims 4 is the equivalent of that bottle of red wine: It's the way to get the ball rolling, overcome my doubts and it has the benefit of giving me a visual reference to the story and characters as well. The scriptwriting background goes a long way to influence my writing style.
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
I'll give the short version because I could bang on about this forever. No interesting story here, just a neurodivergent kid who found home in fiction because they felt alienated from reality and had no friends XD I used to make up stories all the time as a kid, and the little OCs I made up were almost on the level of imaginary friends. Skip ahead to Easter Holiday week off school when I was 13 and read all the Harry Potters from 2 onwards in one week since I'd already read the first one. Despite me reading them when I was 13 I don't think I properly got back into writing stories until I was 16? By 16 I had no care for the HP series though, I lost interest in it completely. Most of my writing pre-SimLit was for the same story and characters which I'd started writing about when I was about 17-18. I'd like to revisit it sometime, but I prefer SimLit at this point (if you think Divided is messed up, the pre-Simlit story universe is even worse.) For a while I did want to be an author, but that dream died off when I was 17.
What got me into SimLit was a particular fun TS4 legacy that involved a fair few alien abductions, and also an old TS2 story that was semi- popular (it was one of those that upon first reading was really good, but upon second reading there were a few things that felt iffily-portrayed.) I joined another smaller Sims forum in 2019 with my first SimLit, and now it's a massive hyperfixation that's taken over my entire life. This is what happens when people give me attention... XD