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Endrenesk
Sep '16

After a year and some months about agonizing over my failure to write anything, I've realized that I don't know what I'm doing.
Not in the common sense that I don't understand what a story is, or how to build one, but...
I create settings for stories.
Creating a story within those settings is not something I know how to do.
Having ideas is, yes, kind of nice, but it gets me nowhere. The reason I fail is because I don't understand what story I want to tell.
Take, for example, 'Heartstones'- a setting where people's hearts/souls are encapsulated in stones that can be used for magic.
It's great, as far as settings go.
But, that leaves me in the dust; there are too many options to choose from.
People say that a story should have a message, a moral, a meaning. This saying annoys me the most, and I don't understand it.
"Friendship is power", "Honor and Strength", "Love is complicated" and so on, yes, these are all themes and messages.
My favorite stories are the ones you can't understand until it's all over, or almost there- Such as the Zero Escape series,
There is no such thing as Jason, Danganronpa, and so on.
What do these have in common? Their theme, their message, is not inherently obvious. I don't know what it is.

I've heard that bad stories are often forgiven because of their good characters.
But, why forgive a story when there isn't one at all?

Basically, I want to know how to decide what kind of story to tell, why, and perhaps most importantly, how.
After all, I feel that my worlds are only as powerful as the story involved.

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DTSaranya
Sep '16

There's nothing wrong with stories that aren't understood until the end, and ones that are a little more ambiguous rather than having a distinct theme that can be stated in a sentence. Often times those ones are the most thought-provoking.

It does need to explore something, though. There should be some kind of issue or idea in which you're interested, something that you want to explore. It won't always pop up right away... You can just meander around picturing your characters in situations until something jumps out at you as significant, and then just build from there.

The advice I'd give would be to draw from personal experience. What was a point in your life in which you learned something? How did it change you as a person, or the way you thought of the world? How did you learn it?
Even when we're not directly writing about ourselves, we often do our best writing when we're inspired by our own lives, as then it's a subject personal to us that we understand well.

Also, if your characters develop at all as people (which they definitely should!) there's a story in it. If they're learning and changing, there's a story to be found in there. If a character is learning something and growing because of it, then the audience is experiencing that along with them.

Ideally, you also want a conflict that will hook readers in. There are lots of different ways to do this, like a threat of danger, a character wanting something and having to work to get it, the audience knowing something that the characters don't... whatever you want to use.

You're also right that a well-built world and interesting characters can make up for a LOT.

Also, don't overthink it too much. Pay attention to your imagination and put effort into picking out which ideas mean something to you and which ones don't, but don't stress over it. Let it flow organically.

There's no right or wrong method to this. These are just my personal suggestions. wink

gateofselidor
Sep '16

You can "build" a plot as well. Start with the basics: give your protagonist a goal, and an obstacle that prevents them from achieving it. After that, gradually add more elements. Create other characters, whose own goals may align or conflict with the protagonist's goal, or a mix of the two. Lay out journeys (physical or otherwise) that your characters will undertake to achieve their goals. Flesh out the obstacles. Add sub-plots. Take it step-by-step, make sure you have a strong foundation that doesn't get muddled in the details, and with some work and lots of revisions, you'll have a story to put in your world.

LeoKi
Sep '16

Another suggestion: Write a small encyclopedia about your world, then refine the articles, you may end up outlining stories.

shazzbaa
Sep '16

I do think that good stories have something to say, whether it's apparent as a "moral" or not, but I don't think every creator starts from that point. Some people do; they have some personal experience they're drawing from (literally or metaphorically) or they have a message that they care about and want to explore through their story.
But other people are just looking for the thing that they'll have the most fun telling, the story that they enjoy the most. Even when my stories pull from personal experience, I usually don't realise they are at first.

What works for you might be really different, but for me, I've had a couple of story idea where the initial idea was the setting and world, and my next step was to create characters that allowed me to explore that world. A digital world where something's gone wrong and people are getting their data corrupted? well obviously one of my characters needs to be one of the corrupted people, because that's the thing I want to explore. The plot has to have something to do with these elements that I'm interested in. I recently enjoyed a particular story and wanted to capture some of how it made me feel, so I set up my story with some similar elements. Stuff like that! Any idea of the ~Deeper Meaning~ of the story I'm telling won't usually come in until much later.

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