Hello, I wanted to find out how you approach writing technically. Do you just start writing? Do you formulate your texts in other software beforehand? Do you plan your characters and storylines concretely or do you just let them pop up as needed? I'm new to the forum, but I've been writing non-linear stories for a while now. So far mainly for the classic roleplaying game. I love complex stories that branch out in many different ways. I have found that I like to be helped by various tools, which I would like to introduce to you and perhaps you also have recommendations for me. As I come from Germany, many of the tools are also from "Good old Germany", but they can all be used in English. When I start a new story concept, I plot the story first. I use the "Drama Queen" software for this. A tool that comes from the planning of television series. It's a software program in which I define the chapters and storylines and graphically display the arc of suspense of the various plot lines. The program supports me with various storytelling tools, I can collect characters, locations, ideas and storylines and the program guides me directly to all the important turning points of a dramaturgical plan. I can use tried and tested structural models (3-act, 4-act and 5-act, sequence model, hero's journey step model, etc.) from a huge database. When my plot is ready, I switch to articy:draft. This is special software for creating non-linear storylines. The software comes from game development. Here I can graphically relate my chapters to each other. I can define variables and test the entire run including various branches without having written a single word. (every now and then the tool is on sale at Steam). In the end, I write my chapters in Papyrus Author, a classic authoring tool that offers a spell checker as well as style and readability analysis. You can highlight verbatim speech to read dialog without the descriptive text and check the chronological sequence of the plot via a timeline. Once I've finished, the text can be published. Now I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. - Feucht von Lipwig
Wow, that is a pretty neat process and here I am just using a document in libreOffice Writer. Luckily my story thread is just linear, so I can just write it one chapter at a time in, a now, very long document. My process is the following: 1. I make an outline of a chapter. 2. Write the chapter (sometimes I write later scenes first and then write towards them). 3. Chop the chapter into many smaller chapters if it has gotten too long. 4. Make a copy of the chapter/s where I format it for chyoa, mainly just replacing character names with variables. 5. Copy the formatted version/s to the site and save it as a draft. 6. Let the chapter/s simmer for a day at least. 7. Read it over and make changes, copy those changes into my formatted version chapter/s in my saved document (to have a backup of the text). 8. Remind myself that "Perfect is the enemy of good" and publish the chapter. 9. Hopefully get to enjoy some dopamine hits as I watch the notification bar show those red numbers. If I had to do some multi branching stories I would probably just use an excel document and/or link chapter inside my own document (which would quickly become a mess).
