Koakuma's Writer's Parlour ~ Have some tea and discuss fiction and writing here!

[Kips McKipzerson]

1. Only write what I would like to read.
2. Don't think too hard about it; just flow with the ideas.
3. When actually writing chapters, don't second guess myself as I write; if I write it one way, leave it that way.
4. It pays to proofread at least three times; I never seem to get everything with only one or two times.
5. Make it fun; writing needs to be as entertaining to me as it is to those I'm writing for.

Yeah, that about sums up the major ones.  OC focus is bothersome, but not completely bad, and I personally love reading written descriptions of danmaku and spell cards, and am trying to learn how to do the same myself.

I think you should also note that you should use paragraphs when needed. As in, Not a paragraph EVERY OTHER SENTENCE, or everything clumped together in one big paragraph.

[MaxKnight]

I think you should also note that you should use paragraphs when needed. As in, Not a paragraph EVERY OTHER SENTENCE, or everything clumped together in one big paragraph.

Well, I don't know if I can abide that completely...  I dislike the artificial visual lengthening that it gives to use single lines...  Paragraphs feel more right to me, and I can't bring myself to break a paragraph in half or less if I can help it.

And trying to do that would probably have me breaking my third rule!

[Ryuu]

as long as you lot remember to start a new paragraph whenever a new character is speaking tee hee hee

[Bias Bus]

What rules do you guys follow when writing?

Don't go to anything distracting when writing is serious business.

Be loose. Be free. be creative.

Have fun.

Uhm...that's about it.

[Phlegeth]

My main rule is to not give just one character preferential favor.  I mean it's boring to have just one character on screen all the time and for them to win every confrontation.

Kind of related to that, my second rule is to allow a max of six in the main "party."  And have at least three of them to be static.  That way people and myself won't get bored.  And having more than six would make things crowded.  Using M4 as an example, the main party is Marisa, Alice, Meiling, Tewi, and Ichirin with a rotating sixth spot.

A fun rule, have at least one "Boke And Tsukkomi Routine" per arc.  Try to have it before the boss fight or things get to serious.

[MayKissingDoveWyks]

What rules do you guys follow when writing?

1. Enjoy yourself while writing.
2. Detail is important, though it could depend on situations.
3. Sound like you're telling a story instead of rambling on.
4. Introductions should include description and detail to provide a clear image in the readers head.
5. If little to no one is replying about your work, keep writing it.
6. Don't work too hard at it, you may exhaust yourself.
7. There is no such thing as a bad story idea.
8. Plan a decent amount of the story ahead of time.
9. Format appropriately so that the text is actually readable.
10. Update stories with at least a good amount of it for the reader to read.
11. When using quotes, make sure the reader knows who is saying what.
12. Play around with personalities. It's interesting to see characters with something off the scale or not commonly seen.
13. ......................
14. Be careful with punctuation.

That's it I think.

[Dizzy H. "Muffin" Muffin]

I've been toying with an idea for a format for a (textual) story. I was thinking of MS Paint Adventures, and how nowadays it's pretty much just releasing a few comic-panels-with-captions a day, and I thought: why couldn't you do that with just prose? So I was thinking of a story which was released in ... bite-sized chunks of only a few pages at a time, rather than entire "chapters," and this could result (if you kept on a schedule) in a higher output with less ... indiviudal effort, I guess you could say. Wonder how well it would work.

[capt. h]

I've been toying with an idea for a format for a (textual) story. I was thinking of MS Paint Adventures, and how nowadays it's pretty much just releasing a few comic-panels-with-captions a day, and I thought: why couldn't you do that with just prose? So I was thinking of a story which was released in ... bite-sized chunks of only a few pages at a time, rather than entire "chapters," and this could result (if you kept on a schedule) in a higher output with less ... indiviudal effort, I guess you could say. Wonder how well it would work.

That kind of already happens. The only thing I don't like about it is that almost none of the main characters are from canon - you never see the world from the point of view of Mokou or Yuuka or Flandre.

[Ryuu]

you never see the world from the point of view of Mokou or Yuuka or Flandre.

umm maybe you should read one of the billion mokou/flandre centric doujin

[Sect]

Or the canon Mokou short.

[Iced Fairy]

Or the canon Mokou short.

Oh Cage in Lunatic Rangate.  No one reads you.

*sighs*

[capt. h]

I was refering specifically to the stories on the website http://touhou-project.com/gensokyo/.

EDIT: Iced - Isn't the translation for Cage in Lunatic Renegade only completed through chapter 6?

[Iced Fairy]

EDIT: Iced - Isn't the translation for Cage in Lunatic Renegade only completed through chapter 6?

Yes, but since Mokou is Chapter 4....

[Dizzy H. "Muffin" Muffin]

That kind of already happens. The only thing I don't like about it is that almost none of the main characters are from canon - you never see the world from the point of view of Mokou or Yuuka or Flandre.

I didn't mean an actual audience-driven story, I meant just, y'know, prose. And it'd be on my site. ;P

[capt. h]

You know, if you're talking about updating a story daily, then I tried that in Shoot the Moon. Worked great until I ran out of energy, and I had a lot more energy working on it than I ever did for any of my other projects due to the constant feedback. I actually think it's a great way to write. As I reader, I might only check in on your story weekly due to personally liking larger chunks, but as a writer it works great; the readers were very helpful in suggesting good directions for the story, and my readers loved that story. The only problem I had is that I'm an inherently low-energy writer that works in waves and has trouble completing anything, and I slumped a mere 30 or so entries/days in.

[MayKissingDoveWyks]

You know, if you're talking about updating a story daily, then I tried that in Shoot the Moon. Worked great until I ran out of energy, and I had a lot more energy working on it than I ever did for any of my other projects due to the constant feedback. I actually think it's a great way to write. As I reader, I might only check in on your story weekly due to personally liking larger chunks, but as a writer it works great; the readers were very helpful in suggesting good directions for the story, and my readers loved that story. The only problem I had is that I'm an inherently low-energy writer that works in waves and has trouble completing anything, and I slumped a mere 30 or so entries/days in.

This happens to me often.

Every story I've written so far have periods of where I slump on my work, most of them had fallen prey to be ended abruptly because my interest waned.

[Bias Bus]

That kind of already happens. The only thing I don't like about it is that almost none of the main characters are from canon - you never see the world from the point of view of Mokou or Yuuka or Flandre.

That's because the staple of the stories on TH-P are to use a VN protag, which is usually a faceless male, and take it from his point of view. That and being either of those aforementioned characters would sorta kill some of the difficulty. The way I see it, when you're a VN protag, you're pretty much playing on Hard mode right there, anything can kill you, you have to walk on eggshells the first half of the game to not die or get royally screwed over, and watch out for certain characters being they too can fuck your life and your chance at a good end (sometimes even might just flat out bad end you, depending on the writer). If you're a Touhou half of that stuff is chucked out the window but, also grants some extra freedom being you can survive half the crap the writers throw at you.

There are stories with there from a Touhou's prespective though. I've read one that was hinted to be Kogasa's pov.

[Dizzy H. "Muffin" Muffin]

Kay. I think that when I have a little less on my plate (*cough*CSA*cough*), I'll try it with this little EX-Rumia backstory kinda thing I've been meaning to do something with. (I'll still work on i.e. Different Story of an Eastern Wonderland and the like, but ...)

[Esifex]

For the most part, yeah, a handful of the writers here have already tried to adopt the 'update each day' approach to their stories, but that takes a lot of foresight and planning to pull off well. If you're ab-libbing it, you run the risk of coming up against a scene where you're REALLY not sure how the characters would play it out, and you get stuck, and run up on your self-imposed deadline.

Probably, in my opinion, the best way to do this is to have the entire story and all the little scenes involved therein fully planned out ahead of time, and knowing exactly how each conversation will turn out before they start. Then, when you get to those specific points, you take a little extra liberty in crafting the exact conversation itself.

[capt. h]

For the most part, yeah, a handful of the writers here have already tried to adopt the 'update each day' approach to their stories, but that takes a lot of foresight and planning to pull off well. If you're ab-libbing it, you run the risk of coming up against a scene where you're REALLY not sure how the characters would play it out, and you get stuck, and run up on your self-imposed deadline.

Probably, in my opinion, the best way to do this is to have the entire story and all the little scenes involved therein fully planned out ahead of time, and knowing exactly how each conversation will turn out before they start. Then, when you get to those specific points, you take a little extra liberty in crafting the exact conversation itself.

He means the ENTIRE story. Not just a general idea. That might not be practical if your story explodes.

The problem is the "middle" part. I knew exactly how "Shoot the Moon" would end from the beginning of the story. But then I started writing my story, and I realized that there was a huge amount between point A and point B that I didn't think about. It never occured to me that I would still be on day 5 an entire 40 pages into my word document. And this is even with about 15 posts/chapters future chapters already written.

Incidentally, I never formalized the daily updates, which allowed me to write in Kogasa and Nue when I actually had an idea of how the two would act. Had I not waited, they would have been much less interesting characters. The audience will often let you me know what its expectations are, which can be even better than the direction you were I was planning although it can derail an entire outline. You want I wanted to be flexible enough to incorperate the wisdom of the audience although I did it a the cost of maintaining daily updates.

I started to implement a timer in my story to avoid plot holes. It might not be necessary to include a timer in the content of the story, but it is an extremely good idea to know when all the events are happening in relation to eachother (this may be more true of complicated stories than daily update stories).

I found it essential to write several chapters ahead, and have posts in reserve. I also found it necessary to choose a story I would absolutely always return to, even if I were to take a few weeks off. I selected my story after contemplating it for nearly a month, so I knew it had some staying power with me. The story you pick should be a story you absolutely will want to tell even six months from now.

[Dizzy H. "Muffin" Muffin]

Oh, I know, that's always a risk. There's a similar dynamic going on with Create.swf Adventures, actually; admittedly, in the latter case there's more direct audience-participation, but even then I've run into "slumps" once or twice when I was at point A and didn't know exactly how to get to point B. (As an aside, while I've had to miss CSA updates a few times, it's never been specifically because of not knowing what to do.) I know it isn't really the same thing, but the principle is similar.

[Ayuka]

Hey, how do you all deal with character's 'voices'? One of the complaints I've gotten before is that when I write dialogue the characters sound like me and I think I'm running into that problem again. Does anyone else have this problem? Or do you even worry about it at all?

[Tengukami]

A good exercise for learning how to do voices is you pick a character that you, personally, have absolutely nothing in common with. You might even loathe this character, but it's not necessary. The important thing is picking a character very unlike yourself. Then you put yourself inside them - what shaped this person, how do they look at the others around them, what's important to them, what do they love, fear, need? Try really being that character that's so different from you, and getting the voice right. Much like multiple runs on Hard will make Normal seem easier, doing this will make adopting distinct voices for the characters you can relate to that much easier.

[Bias Bus]

I usually don't worry about it. The minute I do, I start fucking up.

The most I do is I think of what that character would say or how they would react to come up with good dialouge for them.

[Esifex]

For me, it helps to actually imagine what the conversation would sound like - not just what they're saying, but what they're saying, in their own voices.

Then again, coming from a guy with 'SFX' as his handle, you can only expect me to think in audio terms. I've gone through and paired up a bunch of expected voices to the various characters by linking them with voice actors/actresses or characters in TV shows, and in a lot of cases, applying that characters' personality to the Touhou in question. From that point, I cross the two ingredients over.

Lets say, for example, that I'm using the English VA of Major Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell for Yukari. Kusanagi is typically 'all business', but she has been known to crack a good joke every now and again, especially at the expense of her second-in-command. This personality links up with my interpretation of Yukari pretty well; very serious when it comes to safe-guarding Gensokyo's stability, but not without a sense of humor. If I need her to have a conversation with (for some reason) Mokou, who I've tagged the VA for C.C. from Code Geass (for this example, at least), I would imagine how the conversation from those two personalities would go, but talking about whatever the plot demands of them for my story. From there, I get the word structure for their dialogue, and the personalities from the parent-voices bleeds through and is subtly tweaked by my interpretation of the Touhou in question.

[capt. h]

I've been wondering if logical scientific principles can be brought to touhou. Can magic in touhou be treated the same way Full Metal Alchemist treats alchemy? - Spells run on mathematic precepts that are discrete, but not directly known to the audience. You know what happened and how the chemistry was manipulated (the character manipulated the oxygen molecules in the air and created a spark to cast a flame, for example) but perhaps not the underlining mechanics.

I'm wondering if that would work in a story, or if it would fall apart due to the sheer impossibility of some of the abilities.

[Iced Fairy]

I've been wondering if logical scientific principles can be brought to touhou.

Yes and No.

Scientific principles can be brought to anything.  After all science is studying how things work.  If uttering 10 specific words and tossing a ball of sulfer makes a fireball every single time, then that's science even if it doesn't match real world science.

However SSiB and Grimoire have specifically stated that results in Gensoukyo are based on belief and faith, and are thus not reproducible.  In short a spell works because the caster thinks is should work and not because of any merits of the rituals used.  So science as a field is kinda useless.  Experiments that only work for you can gather some great technobable, but that's only good for making your magical style more prevalent, not figuring out how the world works.

[MayKissingDoveWyks]

Well alchemy was used back in the Middle Ages and before then, when people started to discover the use of minerals and such. There's a theory that the concept of magic came from alchemy uses. The user would have to know a wide variety of minerals, but their knowledge about some of the minerals would be limited unless they had tested their use before.

If the time period is set around the time when alchemy was actually being put to use in creating specific objects, plating, and grinding lenses, then it's entirely possible for the user to have access to the minerals as there were many.

Fire can easily be created, as so can incense and other smells from the minerals being used. Chemical reactions in alchemy are pretty much contained when being done. So creating chemical reactions and using it out of the air may be a little preposterous. It's cool and all, but not entirely possible.

That's my input.

The above statement was because I misinterpreted the question. But alchemy in Touhou is entirely possible.

Scientific and mathematical concepts could be applied to Touhou i.e. speeds and velocities of danmaku and their paths. But doing so would require incredibly precise calculations and things that are beyond normal physics.

[capt. h]

Yes and No.

Scientific principles can be brought to anything.  After all science is studying how things work.  If uttering 10 specific words and tossing a ball of sulfer makes a fireball every single time, then that's science even if it doesn't match real world science.

However SSiB and Grimoire have specifically stated that results in Gensoukyo are based on belief and faith, and are thus not reproducible.  In short a spell works because the caster thinks is should work and not because of any merits of the rituals used.  So science as a field is kinda useless.  Experiments that only work for you can gather some great technobable, but that's only good for making your magical style more prevalent, not figuring out how the world works.

((2.5g belief + .25g color + 1.35 kg love) * 300 KJ * 500 m/s^2)/ (.6 * (400 C spark - atmospheric temperature)) = Love Colored Master Spark.  :V


Though Patchouli is the last person I would quote when it comes to distinguishing science from magic, considering she was the former page quote on tvtropes for Clarke's Third Law.

EDIT: I need sleep. I could have sworn someone made a Patchouli reference.

"The essence of magic is to determine the root cause of all things. There's no distinction between science and magic." - Patchouli

But I really wasn't talking about canon. I meant if I were to try to make touhou obey the laws of physics - such as apply aerodynamics to flight spells - do you think it would fall apart when Yukari starts gapping around, or Sakuya manipulates time? Or would it be possible to write touhou as a world ruled by different fundamental scientific principles that make sufficient sense within the pre-set rules of the world?

[MayKissingDoveWyks]

Scientific and mathematical concepts could be applied to Touhou i.e. speeds and velocities of danmaku and their paths. But doing so would require incredibly precise calculations and things that are beyond normal physics.

But you CAN change the laws of physics in Gensokyou to fit your needs. It'll just be that they are abnormal compared to the real world.

Just saying that the rules might be complex to write.

EDIT: And Clarke's Third Law could work in this case.