About writing together

[abes...@gmail.com]

About writing together

Hi everyone!

Several people have manifested their interest in helping with the story, and were wondering how to do so. Just to make sure we’re looking at the same thing, we’re talking about the following wiki link: http://code.google.com/p/story-creation/wiki/Welcome?tm=6

There are several “roles” a story contributor can play. When doing collective story creation – like the writers of TV shows like Lost, Supernatural, X-Files, etc. do – there are a few “rules of engagement” that help the creative process, and phases the writing goes through.


The phases:

1. Brainstorming. Anything goes; we don’t have a story yet, only a concept. We have a vague idea of what we want to start with, a good idea of some elements we want to see in the final product, but no defined structure yet. There was a good quantity of raw ideas so far, but we need several more to have enough to create a full, rich story.
   
   
2. Background creation. Once we have a few good ideas boiling in the pot, it’s interesting to flesh them out with background creation. This part was done profusely and with very high quality content, so far.
   
   
3. Synthesis. Putting the elements together, summarizing and refining them. At this step, we still don’t cut anything out, but we try to enrich the plot and the missions to build the critical path of the story. We need to know why what happens does happen, what’s triggered by what and what’s a prerequisite or a condition to something else. This is where we start to see an actual story taking form.
   
   
4. Connecting. We are now able to see the outline of a story, and we start to see what’s missing, what’s too obvious or too convoluted, what lacks logical connections, etc. Only at this step should we should start challenging what brings the player to go from point A to point B, and even then, removing pieces of story or ideas is premature. The writing team usually cycles between steps 1 and 4 repetitively.
   
   
5. Editing. This is the first part where we can decide to “kill” any piece of story, some ideas, some races or devices, some plotlines, etc. Even then, we try to keep as much story as possible, to keep it rich, but for the sake of the whole storyline making sense, sometimes, some things have to go. This is why you have so many movies or series with “deleted scenes” or “alternate endings”, because during the creative process, everything was kept open as long as possible, even if things got settled on one specific way in the end.
   
   
6. Scripting. We now have a full story, a good plot, solid background and a logical story flow for the whole game. We can start scripting dialogues and work on the videos, audio track and voice acting, etc.

Here are the things that would be the most helpful at the current stage:

1. To have veterans roam the forums, and add in the comments section of the appropriate wiki page all the depth of ideas that came about in conversations about each device, race, ideas, etc.
   
   
2. To share any idea, whoever wild or crazy, in the comments of the following pages:
   
• Story > How it Starts
• Story > How it Ends
• Tools > Writing > Ideas Repository
• And of course any other page you want to comment on! But these are the most important at this step of the brainstorm.
  
  
3. To bring enough ideas to the table to enable the How it Starts to “reach” the How it Ends
   
   
4. To contribute to the Story > Critical Path section, by advancing the chart. This process is still being tweaked, but this will be a great tool to get an idea of the story at a glance

That’s it for now!

More soon!

Dave