[META] How I Write My Story Hour.

[TheYeti1775]

Personally, all my notetakers are horrible.

What are you talking about, my mental notes are excellent.

Now for my sorry excuse of a story hour, I write all the time on the bus. But never put it to electronic format. I'm just lazy that way. But I do sit there and bug Funeris about updating his all the time. He's a much better writer than me.

 

[Sagiro]

I have a terrible, terrible memory.

Once upon a time I wrote my Story Hour using a combination of that flawed memory, hastily-scribbled notes taken during the session, and my pre-game notes. I’d often supplement these with begged-for e-mails from my players, detailing specific things they remembered doing during a game.

This system worked okay for those few times I was able to write within a day or two of the game, when the details were still fresh in my mind. But if I waited longer than that, I’d start to forget things, and that would launch me into a vicious cycle. I’d be less enthusiastic about writing about a game whose details I’d forgotten, which would cause me to delay writing and thus forget even more details.

Also, my long-time readers will probably have noticed that my early installments have little or no character dialogue. That’s because a) I can’t remember specific spoken lines for longer than about 90 seconds, and b) because my players engage in such wonderful dialogue, I’m loathe to put words in their characters’ mouths they didn’t actually say.

Then I started using the tape recorder, and almost everything has changed for the better. Now I can write Story Hour chapters that reflect what actually happened, and not a half-forgotten hazy memory. There’s more character development, because I can include what the characters actually say to one another, and to NPC’s. Even better, I’m reminded of (and record) all sorts of smaller scenes and forgotten details. This helps the Story, and also helps me maintain better campaign continuity, which in my case is sometimes an insane juggling act.

The only downside is that it takes significantly longer to write each installment. Dialogue in particular takes a long time, because I can’t type as fast as the characters talk, so I’m always starting and stopping the tape. But I’m more excited about writing now, and love listening to the recorded sessions, knowing I’m no longer missing a skillion improvised details. I usually do the work between 11:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. (when the family's asleep), and am generally keeping up. (That is, the Story Hour has lagged about 10 months behind the campaign for almost a year now, and I'm not falling further behind.)

I know it’s not for everyone – Piratecat tried using the tapes and hated it – but for me it’s helped my Story Hour, and my campaign, significantly.

-Sagiro

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I picked up a digital recorder with somthing like 6 hours of recording capability, and I've been considering using it, but haven't got around to it - I intended it for when I was DM'ing and writing a story hour, but that hasn't happened. I may use it to record key conversations in the game I'm currently writing up as a Story Hour, where I'm a player rather than DM. It would be neat to have a more accurate record of conversations, and with this setup I could rip the session onto my hard drive and work with it that way - a little easier than using a tape recorder.

 

[pogre]

My method is somewhat similar to nemmerle/el-remmen: I force myself to write a sentence or two as I pass my cpu and while coats of paint dry or hirst arts blocks are drying in the molds. I usually get to a certain point where I start writing pretty heavily and those turn into my 8-10 page updates. I use the pictures I take during the game and feature in my story hour as a reminder.

 

[sniffles]

I'm a n00b in the Story Hour section, but here's what I do:
I'm the primary note-taker for my group in all our campaigns (we have about 6 other current campaigns besides the one in my story hour). In the past I wrote up my notes in an email and sent it to all the other players in that campaign, and any other friends who were interested in following along. I then copied the text from the email into a Word document and saved it. The intent was to eventually put all my character journals on a website. I started posting to story hour recently because it seemed like a more convenient way to store my writings and my fellow players can still read it at their leisure without having to join the forum.

But I haven't changed my basic process since moving to using story hour. I write up each session within a day or two of the time it takes place. I use a first-person narrative style so I don't have to worry too much about leaving out things that the other characters did while my character was somewhere else, or otherwise unable to see what was going on. I usually do my writing at work, since my job involves working on Word documents all day, so it's easy for me to make it look like I'm working.