Hello Chyoa, new in town, just have a few questions. 1) When starting a new story, there's a minimum word count. If a choice is essential to be made first thing, is it okay for the word count to be spread across multiple saved drafts instead of one large opening chapter? I was thinking of using variables to do 'character creation' at the start of the story and didn't want to just add a bunch of filler to get the requirement. 2) How is editing previously publish and saved chapters seen on this site? Is it frowned upon? I've been trying to write a fanfiction and keep the characters in character, but in character this person would not be having fun sexy-times so it's going a bit slow. Is editing a previous chapter seen as okay? For reference, heres what I want to change, making the rule easier to accidentally fall into sex (And thus easier to write). 'Get what she wants' rather than 'Succeed at tasks she wants to succeed at'. Should I make a comment saying why it was edited? Make a new chapter with the easier to write with rule? Any help would be great. Thank you.
1: The wordcount is a guideline (I think). You do whatever you want. 2: Editing is fine, unless you change the chapter so that someone else's work no longer fits, or if you write a chapter to get approved and then drastically change it.
if you start a story, I'd recommend your intro give enough detail for other authors to know how to proceed. it's fine to go back and edit old chapters if you find errors or think you can improve them. If you want to piss off an author, edit his chapter for content, not just grammatical and usage errors. I've had some of my chapters completely changed. If you find a continuity error or such in another author's chapter, I'd give a heads up that you changed it.
The guideline exists for a reason. You do want a strong opening. I would suggest a world building teaser, something to get the reader interested and set your story apart from all the rest. One more thing, I know this isn't what this thread is about, but I would also suggest keeping the customization to the minimum necessary. Too many writers just stop writing after character creation or expect others to fill in the content for them. Customization adds more work and unless you are very lucky you will be writing your story alone, at least for the first bit. Keep in mind, I would prefer a story about a character with a different hair color than mine over a no story at all.
This is very true, and I've seen a lot of stories which start along these lines and go nowhere, because the amount of work necessary to customize even a few elements is more than people realize. Let's say you want the reader to be able to choose three characteristics about the protagonist; we'll go with age, hair color, and cup size just to pick three items. So your first choice might be one of four different ages; 18, 24, 32, and 45. Now you have to write four follow-up threads to choose hair color; blonde, brunette, redhead, or black. Now your story is broken into sixteen threads, and the final customization is cup size; let's say you go with B, C, D, and DDD. This leads to sixty-four different chapters. So already, you've written 1+4+16+64=85 chapters, and you haven't even started the story yet! Besides, every story thread will now need to be written sixty-four times if you want the reader to really be able to choose any options they want and still be able to get into the story afterward. Even if it's simpler than that - even if you only customize two things with three options each - you still need to essentially duplicate your story across nine different threads, tweaking it here and there to match the options which were initially chosen. There's a reason why these stories never go anywhere; it's because the authors invariably realize that it's just way too much effort. I wrote one like this once where the reader could choose six different characteristics. I actually finished the part with the initial options, and ended up with a story that had well over two thousand chapters and went absolutely nowhere. If you want the reader to have initial options insofar as customizing a character, it really is better to just let them choose between one of four or five different possibilities. Sure, they might not be able to define the woman of their dreams to be in the story, but there's no point if they do the customization only to find that there IS no story.
It's a recommendation, not a hard rule. Like others said before, don't make a lengthy character customization as it would result in hundreds of different branches with no content. The only way to make that work is to use the Game Mode feature and integrate the different character traits into every thread, though that needs some additional work.
KhepriDrone did say they wood be using variables. I just want to be clear that using Game Mode still makes more work.
Thanks for all the replies guys! After some thinking, I'm not going to be editing the chapter (even though I'm the only one writing responses to it) and I'm not going to be worrying about the word count too much for the other story, though I will be cutting options down a ton.
Just wanted to pop in and say "Hi!" I'm glad you got the help you needed and I can definitely say that the other people are right, its best to stick to a minimum number of variables for this sort of thing and edit the other authors content as little as possible.
