So that's what the story is about...

[strangetomato]

Overheard behind a bookcase in a house on Bay View Drive, Belladonna Cove:



"...True enough. Some things are just personal. But we had to do the right thing to safeguard everyone against that source of evil. I'd hate for Jocosta to have died in vain."

"Dear sister, how I miss her."

"And I as well."

"Well, nevermind. That's a story for another day."


"Yes. This one's about Bella. The mystery behind her disappearance."

"And Strangetown. Aliens. The sims who hate them and the sims who love them. Or those foolhardy enough to do both!"

"About death. And Death's son."

"And the terrible consequences of meddling with mortality. And about flowers. Don't forget flowers."

"I thought it was mostly about sex?"

"No, really it's about identity. And family. And love. Aren't all stories worth telling really about that when it all boils down to it?"

"Yes, but now we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we?"

"Yes, indeed, sister. All in good time."








Note: I was revisiting what I'd already written for the long-suffering Chapter Thirty-Five (part four) of Strangetown, Here We Come (the damn thing is actually written if I can ever get pics for it), and I'd forgotten all about this little snippet here with the sisters breaking the fourth wall to discuss what, if anything, the story is actually about.

What do you think? Did they nail it?

My vote's on "I thought it was mostly about sex?" ;)

Comments

[peni griffin (from livejournal.com)]

You don't absolutely have to have pictures, you know; or if you do need some to make your points, you don't need to have as many as you have in the past. Most simbloggers use too many of them, and the weight of getting and organizing them slows them down and eventually prevents them from getting through the long, hard middle of the story, which is hard enough to do (believe me!) in text-only.

You write the story the way you need to write it; but you're allowed to go around the impenetrable thicket, or fly over it on the broomstick, instead of chopping your way straight through it. And if you can't experiment here, where can you do it?

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

That's certainly food for thought, and thank you for the vote of confidence that the story could possibly stand on text alone.

I think it's always a dicey proposition for a sim story to be presented as text-only, and for any story to drastically change its medium in the middle of the story (unless it is just briefly, for effect). The combination of text and images is really the heart of what makes it a sim story, and many storytellers lean just as heavily on the images as the text (some more so) as the core of their storytelling. In my case, I've used the images as the the main storytelling tool in more than one instance.

That said, I do agree with what you're saying for myself. Very much so. I had moved too far into using sets and posed images and it was weighing me down. I enjoy stories that do this (many to great effect, as with Simtopi or Skell's Fortune and Romance), but I don't have the time or inclination to even attempt to do that anymore. I'm going to make a move back to using a more simplified approach to images and hand the responsibility of providing those details back to the text.

Thank you for your input. :) It's been very helpful.