@“Mnemogenic”#p134194 Let‘s try no themes the first time around? While they can sometimes be helpful, like @“Funbil”#p134200 I feel like they can be restrictive. I also suspect that if we’re changing the format each round, a lot of us will have to put a lot of imagination into deciding what, say, a Twine poem is. If there‘s a theme to work around on top of it, that might be hard for a lot of people. Hopefully the writing prompts can have a similar function for people who aren’t sure what direction to go in?
I'm open to changing this though if anyone feels passionately about it.
@“saddleblasters”#p134289 Seems like the approach that lets some people have the cake and some people eat it too would be to call a theme, but make the use of the theme expressly not required for participation, and just more of a suggestion, not unlike the writing prompts in the Google doc. I imagine most of these will have some sort of “artist's statement” attached to them, even if it‘s just "here’s my twine game, I didn't use the theme" on the post. So, use of or not use of the theme will be communicated either way (or not communicated, depending on the preference of the authour).
The worst case scenario is that a theme will be called for a particular session of the Twine Club that, coincidentally, no one who makes something references lol. Assuming it doesn't take much effort to decide upon a theme, that kind of also means that not much has been lost. It could even just be recycled for another future session of the club's activities.
Woohoo! I'm excited. Definitely going to steal some of the format ideas from horse master. not too worried about styling right now, but only because i could see myself using that to procrastinate from the actual writing.
after spending a few minutes in Twine, i decided i'd write the whole thing in a word doc first and “port” it afterward. i have two problems now:
1.) i can see why working in twine from the get-go is beneficial. my word doc is a mess of color highlighting and font sizes that indicate branching paths. i'm starting to get a little confused myself.
2.) because i'm simply writing in a word doc, i'm afraid i might be biting off more than i can chew. i already have about ~ 2500 words. i'm trying to decide if i should follow through with where this idea seems to be going or if i should purposefully cut it short so i can spend more time getting the hang of Twine.
@“MoH”#p134451 I think it might be helpful to try porting over what you have so far, so that you have a better idea of how Twine works and how your story “plays” when working on the rest. Maybe doing this will answer (2) for you before you make any big decisions.
Here's what I'd try: Based on what you've written so far, I'd make a list of Twine features you need to tell your story. For a lot of stories, this might be just links, [variables](https://twinery.org/cookbook/terms/terms_variables.html), and making text appear when certain conditions are met ([Harlowe](https://twinery.org/cookbook/conditionalstatements/harlowe/harlowe_conditionalstatements.html) and [Chapbook](https://twinery.org/cookbook/conditionalstatements/chapbook/chapbook_conditionalstatements.html) do this differently). I'd look up how to do each of these (in the manuals or in other tutorials) and then make a tiny test project to try each of these out. Then I'd port the word doc to Twine, consulting the test project whenever I forget how to do something.
You might decide to continue writing in your word doc, but I think actually implementing a segment of your game could help a lot for deciding how to write it, and it might make the way you annotate stuff easier to translate to Twine.
I would extremely not recommend writing in a word doc first, if only because that is going to inspire a certain linearity, and it's also going to introduce more resistance to branching off. But also: forget what I think and do what works for you.
When writing in regular twine (or at least Sugarcane and Sugarcube, dunno about others), you can put any word in [[double brackets]] and it will link to that page or it will make the page with that title for you. I think this is a great way to handle branching, because you can be writing one page and by the end have four new pages because it's so easy to just [[bracket]] stuff. I think this non-linear way of writing is really freeing, but others may have different feelings.
If anyone has been wondering why there are so many dumb ass writing prompts in that google doc all of a sudden, you can thank yours truly. That's about what I got the mental energy for.
@saddleblasters , can you maybe edit in your helpful links, like the link to the writing prompt google doc, to your first post? That way I can put even more goofy writing prompts in there.
@“Gaagaagiins”#p134483 I like the different approaches to writing prompts that we‘re seeing already. I lean towards the vague, for example, so most of my prompts are a few words that aren’t complete sentences, whereas yours are fairly detailed sets of instructions. More people add prompts!
@“Gaagaagiins”#p134483 Ok, I copied those over to the first post! I also added some of the stuff Mnemogenic had suggested.
As for your suggestion about themes (@"Gaagaagiins"#p134307), after thinking about more I think maybe what I'll try round 2 is picking a prompt from the google doc and calling it "This Round's Featured Prompt" or something like that. Not sure if I should do it randomly or exercise my own discretion. This addresses one of my concerns that I didn't directly say before, which was that I don't exactly trust my ability to come up with themes myself lol.
My only misgiving with that as a non participant for this month is that I am disproportionately prolific in contributing writing prompts, so now there is like a 30-50% chance it's the Gaagaagiins Theme Twine Club.
This is my dark secret, but, a disproportionate number of the Art Jam themes were from me too... I am the #IdeasGuy
Maybe themes to be selected at random should be a separate thing to contribute to?
I am sorry, I don‘t know how to regulate my equally intense desires to be a show off/entertainer, and to avoid giving the impression I think I’m better than anyone else
@“saddleblasters”#300 @“Mnemogenic”#750 thank you both for the advice, that was very helpful. i was writing non-linearly in my word doc before, but it was too much to handle. i spent the day with some manuals and ended up going with Chapbook. i still have some ways to go in understanding </s>config<e> files and how to properly use them, but otherwise i'm having a lot of fun.
if i may add a dissenting voice to the theme discussion--all of the prompts in the google doc are admirable, but i fear some of them may be too restrictive to be a "theme." for example, "the defenestration of prague" or "your own obituary" are excellent prompts, but as themes they may produce too many similar stories.
when i think of themes, i think of something broad and almost benign, almost exactly like how [lapham's quarterly ](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/) themes their issues. many different perspectives and approaches can live under the umbrella of "freedom" or "friendship." taken one step further, i think a lot could be done by applying our current list of prompts to different themes. how would "you own obituary" look when applied to the theme of "the sea" versus the theme of "technology"? and how would it look when someone else applied a different prompt to that same theme?
putting my money where my mouth is, i've added the list of lapham's quarterly themes to the doc (under "themey themes"). i don't have any allegiance to that magazine (in fact i've hardly ever read an issue), but it's the first thing that came to mind. surely there are more exciting themes than the ones i listed. i hope this wasn't too forward, and absolutely no offense meant to the honorable @"Gaagaagiins"#429 or anyone else who contributed prompts! likewise, i won't be offended if my view of themes doesn't jive with what everyone else is feeling.
@“MoH”#p135048 First impressions after ||getting to the golden pheasant but being unable to appreciate it because I was too busy thinking about money||:
||I also have a family member in Florida (my grandfather) but didn't grow up there. I've ended up at zoos, forts, *Gatorland* etc, not really wanting to be at any of these places, but not really knowing where else to waste time at. Florida is such a mysterious state to me. It's a massive place and I've found myself in many different disparate parts of it, but I have no idea how they connect, or what it's like for, say, my aunt (who's only about 10 years older than me) to have grown up there. All this is to say, many of the trails of thought the protagonist went down were very amusing to me. I think I somehow picked the shortest path (I want to read that story you hint at!) so I'll write more when I have more time to play again tonight. I appreciate the particular golden pheasant illustration you linked to, which perhaps was precision engineered to make me want to actually find this thing and not be distracted by money when I see it.||
@saddleblasters well said about the pieces Florida not connecting. i also didn‘t grow up there, and i have such a strange repulsion to it which of course makes it all the more interesting. much of the state makes me hopeless like i’m stuck in a 90's waiting room, but then there‘s also the beautiful swamps, animals, the keys… i’ve also never been to miami. i don‘t think i’d like it there, but probably an important piece of the florida puzzle.
@Mnemogenic lmao!
thank you both so much for reading/playing--i was texting a couple writing buddies that this process has already been much more rewarding than writing & submitting traditional stories to magazines etc. i'll save the rest of my thoughts for the larger feedback week!
@“MoH”#p135112 Thanks for the early submission! It has motivated me to get a bunch of writing done. Hopefully I'll have my own little project finished in a couple days.
