Huh; I Suck

[chadu]

I have no idea how to tell a story.

Settings, sure; characters, sometimes; actual story, nada.

Comments

[woodwardiocom]

Steal plots from Shakespeare. It's allowed; even encouraged.

[ext_1586392]

Would you like to? There are plenty of places you can pick up a schooling in structure...

[mytholder]

Gaming poisons your narrative brain. If you handed those characters to players and ran a game for them, reacting to their choices, you'd be fine.

Try outlining in ghastly, soul-crushing, multi-thousand-word detail. You've trained yourself to respond to improv cues. You've got to kill spontaneity, at least for the moment.

At least, that's what I'm trying.

[archangelbeth]

Or run the characters as PCs and NPCs, which is sort of like playing chess with oneself, and is what I tend to do. "Character X wants Y, and NPC Z wants Y, and they're going to clash about this, and meanwhile, NPC Q wants to kill character S... And how can I get this to all happen in a satisfying manner within a 4 hour con slot 100K words?"

[wombattery]

Sounds like you suffer from a similar condition to mine. Perhaps as a consequence of many years in academia, I can do exposition with one prefrontal lobe tied behind by back. But plot? Nope.

[cmdr_zoom]

An explanation of classic story structure I read just the other day:
"Act I, put your protagonist up a tree. Act II, set it on fire. Act III, get them down."