Reference for Story Writers

I've been trying to work on getting more details filled in for the overall story of Crescent Legends. Even aside from the story though, it helps to have details listed in the characters as well as their surroundings as well. So here are a few reliable tools to help you do just that.

Before I talk about the useful tools in story making, I feel that I should let those that are interested in writing their own story know that a good story has a good climax, often being a big plot twist. Even the story writer of 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors gives this advice in the Q&A for the game, and I couldn't agree more. The plot twist is a driving force for the readers to figure out what is going on, and many events before the plot twist should build up the importance of this plot twist. So make a good plot twist, then create the rest of the story to build up towards the plot twist.

Starting with characters, this Character Profile Form web page is basically a tool to help you answer a fairly complete profile of your characters. If you can manage to fill in the majority of the spaces provided with thoughtful, meaningful answers, then you will definitely end up with a very detailed and complete character. Don't forget to save your work with the button below, and back up the files as necessary. A good, story writing process takes a long time, and who knows what can happen to a file or two (or your entire hard drive) during the process of putting your story together. Learned that the hard way myself...

Next is the settings, where the story takes place. When writing a fantasy, fictional novel, often times you will need your own, fictional world for this to take place in. Especially if this is for a potential video game, namely RPGs, having a world map will help a great deal. Here's a program, Campaign Cartographer 3, that I found on a friend's blog that I found interesting, and great for designing world maps for either occasions and more. It's got plenty of detail, lots of icons to use for labeling things on the map, and other tools used for things other than just world maps as well. I have yet to try this program out myself, but when the time comes, I'd like to spend some time with this program to make the world maps of both Farule Levios and Sedule Ramios in Crescent Legends.

It feels like I'm still missing some important factors in writing stories, but I keep thinking of video game stuff like BGM and controls, which doesn't necessarily apply to novels. Either way, it's been in my mind to write my own compositions using a midi composer program, but the last one I tried, some version of FL Studios, didn't come with sound fonts that I really liked. I never did find a place to download some either, unfortunately, and this was back on Lappy, so I don't have the program anymore either. It'll be a long ways before I even move onto making music anyway, even if I have the inspiration which has come and gone quite a while ago now.

When I do get to that point though, might as well start it off with making something on RPG Maker. I tried one of the older versions before, and I was a little discouraged by the limitations that the program had at the time, as well as how I lacked sprite artists to help make sprites for my characters and such, so I never made anything of it then. With all these other tools though, perhaps I'll be more inclined to finish this project.