Today, I'm gonna talk a bit about my difficulty writing plots, be it for games, stories or videos.
Coming up with a setting is usually the easiest step for me. Oftentimes, I'll be in the mood for a certain setting, which rotates every couple days to weeks (anything from pirate themed to cowboy themed, or fantasy to sci-fi). I can usually come up with specifics and nuances for these themes (for instance, the nations within a fantasy story, or the mechanics behind how magic works). In fact, I'm constantly coming up with these things throughout the day. I tend to think one up, ponder it for a few minutes, then forget about it and never use it for anything.
I struggle a bit more when it comes to making characters. I have trouble making characters memorable without using archetypes or cliches, and I'm not great at making relatable protagonists. When it comes to making up names, I am absolutely awful. I'll almost always use a name generator, ask a friend, or just use a generic modern-day name. I'm a little better at designing the appearance of characters, but I never do much in terms of details, and many of my characters end up looking like they could be part of the same extended family.
I'm not really sure what to say about my map-designing skills. On the one hand, I'm not bad at, say, arranging cities and nations, and putting landmarks like forests, mountains or ancient ruins. On the other, I've yet to figure out how to make land masses seem realistic. I realise this isn't a very easy task to pull off- real continents are basically fractals, with an unimaginable amount of geological processes responsible for the placement of every individual grain of sand. That said, I'm sure there are people who can at least mimic it reasonably well, and I'm not sure I'm one of those people.
If I do come up with the outline of a plot, it almost always stays as just that. Once I've made all the important bits (the intro, the ending, all the main events in the middle), I just stop, and can't progress any further. I can't write dialogue, or any sort of filler scenes, whether it be for a story or an RPG. The outline itself usually isn't too bad, though- oftentimes, it evolves alongside the setting, and they become quite intimately connected.
Anyways, that's gonna be it for today- hopefully you enjoyed this post!
