Story Hour Fatigue

Oh, one more piece of advice if you're finding it difficult to get enthusiastic about your writing:

Read something.

Like, say...

A Story Hour? I can recommend several...

barsoomcore said:

Oh, one more piece of advice if you're finding it difficult to get enthusiastic about your writing:

Read something.

Like, say...

A Story Hour? I can recommend several...

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Yeah, that is really good advice - when feeling slow on my own - often reading someone else's has inspired either to emulate or better their attempt. . .

I will speak up as a reader. Hey folks, write for your fun. I love seeing my favorite Story Hours updated. I miss them when they aren't. But I also try to be understanding when you all have other things going on in life and don't update. I appreciate that you want to make it an update worth reading, but remember who your target audience is. Really we are just a bunch of gaming geeks.

It's the same thing as telling other folks at the FLGS the story of your game. We are listening, or reading, because it is fun. It's neat to see the interaction of the opponents and the PCs. It's neat to think "Damn, I should do that in _my_ game!" That works for both players and DMs. We love to share in the gaming stories. We love it so much that it is like a drug fix. Tell the stories you want to, in the order you feel like telling them. Share them when they are fun to write up because we are here to share in your fun. But please don't feel any serious obligation to the readers. Feel much more obligation to yourself to keep the story hour fun. When you are having fun writing it, we are having fun reading it. It will just fall into place.

barsoomcore said:

And while I agree with the summarizing tip, here's another: When you don't like what happened, or you can't figure out how to get through it --

MAKE IT UP.

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Absolutely. I only started writing my storyhour about two years into the campaign, and I've been relying on a combination of my own notes, my players' notes, and getting to write up behind the scenes material that I couldn't really do in a game that focuses on the PCs. I now get to make up and detail the stuff that happened from the other side of fence from them, and tell the whole story.

When in need of material, make it up and make it interesting, don't get bogged down in a scene or a few paragraphs and end up stalled and stumped in your writing. I tend to jump around when I write, and go it bit by bit rather than smoothly from start to finish with only rare exceptions to that.

KidCthulhu said:

We, the devoted story hour readers, do not expect you to be Faulkner.

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I certainly hope that's true. William Faulkner died in 1962, so never had a chance to play D&D, yet alone write a story hour for one!

When I started writing my story hour, I was already a year and a half behind. Close to two years later I'm only now starting to make headway into shrinking the gap between where the game is and where the story hour is.

For me, story hour fatigue sets in because the task is just so big. The game is on-going, which means that the writing is on-going, and I know that even if I caught up with the game "present" I'd eventually fall behind again. It's the nature of the beast and something I didn't quite grasp until I was doing it.

I don't know if it's a useful perspective, but I would really love to be only a year behind. I can also say that in bits and chunks, I am getting there.

A couple things that are helpful to me, although not necessarily useful for anyone else:

1. I have a partner in crime. Fajitas, who DMs the game, also serves as fact and sanity checker on new updates. We're both writers, and it's useful to have someone who is in there slogging with me. Also, I'm not above looking at something coming up that I don't want to tangle with and saying, "Here, you write it."

2. I have a backlog. In part, this is necessary because I have to build some lead-time into the schedule because of outside notes (see point 1). But one of the nice things is I can have a couple months of no writing and still update regularly. Now, I don't particularly recommend underemployment with limited internet access as a means for catching up on story hour writing, but... I also won't deny that it works.

I will say one of the benefits to running behind the game is it does give you the freedom to write events out of order, and then fill in the gaps later. Some games need to be written up fresh; others are better with a bit of perspective.

If you're up for a phone call to catch up sometime, Sep, I'd be happy to be encouraging by voice as well as post

Hi Sep,

Speaking as a long established and uniquely "unsuccessful" SH writer I understand some aspects of SH fatigue - in particular the falling behind bit. Where once I was writing up stuff in the week that it happened I'm now a year and a half behind and updating less frequently.

The backlog is the biggest downer, I think. It makes the task look too big. Of course, there are so many other calls on time now (one of the biggest I currently have is ENworld moderation, believe it or not - there is a lot of looking at stuff that is fine to pick up duplicate threads or nip problems in the bud ). One of the other issues is the sheer number of storyhours - at one point you could update once a week and remain on the front page, then once a day... now you've got to update twice a day!

In some ways I think it is harder for people with popular storyhours though - although the idea of a legion of fans bumping for updates sounds cool, it is an extra level of pressure which could become unwelcome after a while.

Thanks for bringing this up though.

Cheers

just give a brief summary of the next year of play and skip to whatever part you feel like writing about. or just post stats for the different characters in the game. that's almost as interesting as the story itself.

pogre said:

Sell the updates at RPGnow. The reward of getting paid may be enough to push you over the edge. I know you are perfectionist and may respond - it will take me even more time to prepare something for sale. Instead, I suggest you say to folks right up front in your "for sale" blurb - this is exactly the same quality and approximately the same quantity of my story hour.

I guarantee you lots of publishers of pdfs would step up to format and sell your stuff for a percentage to save you that hassle.

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While true, legally, his story hour would be impossible to publish without a lot of editing. He uses a lot of material from books that are not OGL and thus those references would have to be changed so as to be unique (and not just renamed well-known stuff). Practically all the named demons and devils would have to be renamed and reimagined. Very messy.