Wednesday 27 April 2016

Writing Salon Week 1: Pitch Your Story Ideas

This post is for the May 1-7 writing event of the 2016 AIF Writing Salon.

Have an idea for an erotic adventure? Have a steamy sex scene that you want to write down? Have you ever wanted to 'ship your favorite fictional characters? Pitch your ideas and get feedback from others. We'll spend time talking about how to flesh out concepts and simplify ideas.

The biggest problem faced by new authors is that they work on ideas that are too ambitious. They decide to write a novel when they should start with a short story. Another problem new authors face is that seemingly innocuous details of a story idea might require thousands of words of writing and code. The work needed to implement a minor character or alternate path can easily grow out of control.

By sharing your ideas with others early, we can help you simplify your ideas. Often, you can keep the core characters, emotions, and sexiness of your story but with fewer characters, rooms, and plot points. We can also offer suggestions about what order you should implement things in. With AIF, it's important to have something playable as early as possible. It makes it easier to see how it works, and it gives you a base from which you can build out something bigger. We can make suggestions about which scene might be best to start with.

If you have something you want to share, just post it as a comment to the blog post. Be careful to use a separate account for posting and not an account you use IRL. Anonymous comments are welcome, but it would be useful to tag your comments somehow so we know which comments are from whom. AIF Central sometimes has difficulties dealing with longer comments. You can break up your posts into multiple comments, or sign-up to become a blogger on AIF Central and make a new blog post with your content.

Saturday 23 April 2016

April Open Thread: Plot Twists

This was originally going to be an open thread for April Fool’s Day, but I didn’t want to knock down Lost Trout’s post so quickly.

The question: what is the best ‘twist’ you have encountered in AIF? Did it add a lot to the story? If an author chooses to use a twist in the plot, what steps can they take to make sure it succeeds (not saying it is essential, because it isn’t)?

To define twist via Wikipedia: “A plot twist is a radical change in the expected direction or outcome of the plot. It is a common practice in narration used to keep the interest of an audience, usually surprising them with a revelation.”

Saturday 16 April 2016

Two topics: Abstract Challenges and Pictures

Here are two topics I’m interested in hearing people’s thoughts on. This isn’t quite an Open Thread as usually with those I put out a topic to stir discussion; this post is more for elements I have been considering. Most of this is based on elements I have seen in other adult products (hentai games and RAG AIFs)