FeroxAnima wrote:
I mean, at first it seemed rather obvious to me that I should; if I don't anymore feel as excited about the idea, what reason do I have to stick to it?
But with time I realized that I'm never as excited about the idea as I was at first, and that if I keep dumping ideas because of that I may never get a complete work
So my question is this: do you think I should just dump such ideas and wait until I find one I'm really sure of, or instead try to keep moving forward with them?
My advice is to start small. Whenever we get good ideas (or ideas we think are good, anyway) it's always tempting to start crafting the sort of epic storyline that will make Men Weep, which is...impractical. Consider, for example, the millions of tumblr accounts, each with an artist talking endlessly about their SUPER GREAT COMIC that they will TOTALLY START WORKING ON ANY TIME NOW, FOR REAL, once they get all the background fleshed out. This is how I used to operate for the longest time, and it never did anything but bring me grief. Halfway in (or not even halfway in) I'd get tired of the idea and, having no tangible evidence to indicate whether or not I'd been wasting my time, just scrap the damn thing, adding it to the pile of failures (and you'll have a pile of those, obviously, because nobody gets it right the first, second, or even third time).
So what I do now, and it started with the nascent idea for my current (stalled, and I appreciate the irony there) project, is I take a page out of game development's book, and I create a vertical slice, so to speak. A short story (or scene, or issue--whatever end delivery system you're using to tell your story) that, without bothering to introduce the world, characters, or even their relationships to one another, uses the idea you had. It could be from some part you kind of want to do later on. It could also be a one-off that has fuck-all to do with your BIG EPIC STORYLINE and is just an excuse to have the characters run around on some unrelated narrative--it literally doesn't matter. The point is to create a little window into whatever world it is you happen to have set up (after we decided to scrap Emi's path and put together something new, I sat down and wrote something not entirely unlike the bad end and something not entirely unlike the graveyard scene, for example, which was enough to convince me that the greater outline we'd made would be decent enough to release to people. In the case of the Vanquisher, it was a script for an issue which, upon further review, I don't even LIKE that much, but having done a full 25 page script that had the characters interacting was enough to convince me that it was worth pursuing the idea. Whether or not that will ever bear fruit is another matter, almost solely based on how much time and money I can afford to spend making it happen). It is an exercise that I've grown fond of, and might help you to finally get what seems like a good idea off the ground. I always find having a clear endpoint that is not tens of thousands of words down the line helps a hell of a lot with getting motivated to finish something.
Once you have that "vertical slice" complete, you will have a better idea of whether or not the idea seriously has legs. I can tell you right now some of your ideas that you think are good are actually shitty, and once you put them down on paper you will see the truth of that.
Anyway, you could give that a shot. It has helped me immensely, and certainly it is always nice to discover, sometimes, that the great idea you had actually works best as nothing more than a 5k word short. It can be frustrating as hell to have a lot of ideas that you can't seem to get down on paper, so it's always good to put as much stuff in the "complete" or at least the "well christ I tried" column as possible. Write and write and write and write and eventually you'll finish a longer thing which people might even enjoy.
FeroxAnima wrote:
I had another question -
How did it work, when one of the girls had made an appearance in another girl's route?
For example, when Rin appears in Emi's route. Did you (I'm assuming Aura will answer this xD) write her dialog for Hivemind, with his directions? Or he wrote it himself, with yours?
My question is basically whether each girl's respective writer was the one writing all her dialog in all the routes, and if not, then how did you... coordinate it properly, so that every girl remained true to the personality her writer's intended for her to have?
The writer of the path would write his own version of the character, hewing as closely as possible to what that character's path writer had established. Then, during the review process, we would offer feedback on the scene, change the odd line of dialog here or there. I personally don't recall having to change much beyond shortening some of Emi's lines when she showed up elsewhere. It was very rare that serious characterization problems ocurred--mostly it was "oh she wouldn't say that word, it's too formal a phrasing for her" or things of that nature. Careful planning. In the case of the track scene (which was an event that happened across multiple paths), I wrote my version, provided a few suggestions for how it might play out differently on Rin's path, and turned the whole thing over to Aura.
That's a helpful answer.
