A lot of people worldbuild when they daydream and have the bones of a story kicking around in their brain, but have to pay the bills and raise the kids etc so they never flesh it out and write it down. What’s your story’s premise? Fantasy, sci-fi, alternate history, mystery, western, whatever genre.
I will not tell lol I am working on it and really excited about it
Not even a hint?
That’s so cool you’re actually writing it though!
Ty it’s a lot of genres a few are fantasy, adventure, that’s all I’ll say
Over the next 100 years or so VR and haptic tech make it so people can become fully emersed in virtual reality. So pretty much everyone does. There are arguments on both sides, but eventually most people choose to live in their own world as a “god” with only VR interaction between one another. Everyone in VR stops having real kids, but thanks to AI improvements they can still have “kids”. Technology eventually allows people to plug in permanently while their bodies are maintained by AI and robots systems. Eventually their bodies die, but their consciousness has been captured enough by the system that no one knows or notices when their VR friends bodies die in reality.
In the real world a very small segment of society refuses to join the VR universe and pledge to remain in the real world. Maybe there’s some war in there because of this. Eventually though, the population of earth drops to maybe a few hundred thousand mostly wandering communal groups, while everyone else’s consciousness is in VR systems. This is good for the planet.
After a few thousand years, the people in reality have multiplied and built a better more equitable world, but have completely forgotten about the people in VR, and the automated buildings containing the computers have become buried and lost to time. Until one day someone stumbles across one of these ruins and begins interacting with the VR people again despite a mythical belief system that such technology is all bad.
Some shit happens and there’s a VR vs reality reckoning… Maybe some sort of Romeo and Juliet love story to keep it interesting.
A sci-fi drama about a guy who develops a brain tumor. The tumor becomes sentient and can communicate with the man through their shared thoughts. Over time, they develop a kind of friendship. At the end, the man must undergo brain surgery to remove the tumor. Despite being able to prevent the surgery somehow (haven’t worked this part out yet), the tumor allows it to happen anyway, knowing that it must die in order for the man to live.
I think I would write this as a short story, but I’ve never written any fiction before and don’t even know how to start.
I once read a Harry Potter fanfic where his scar was basically that.
I’ve read a lot of books and articles about how to write, and honestly it just seems like different authors all have different routines. Some are very rigid with their schedules and some write when inspiration takes them.
Everyone needs to know fundamentals of plot, character, and dialogue though. There are college classes on it n
I have three things I want to see in a fictional world (either mine or someone else’s):
- Furries, but not in a weird “metaphor for racism” way.
- A nice sophisticated magic system.
- Either a mideaval fantasy or spacefaring sci-fi setting.
The current idea rattling in my head is for a game which will likely never get finished. A spaceship with a small crew gets blown off close while travelling at warp speed or whatever. The heroes need to visit a bunch of planets (and learn secrets within) to find… Elemental crystals or something, I guess, to make their way home. Not sure how I can incorporate magic into it though, or if that would just be scope creep.
I once started writing a story with a “monster universe” setting but in space. Werewolves and vampires always at war with each other. Humans and animal-humanoids caught in the middle. A few eldritch horrors lurking around the void.
I did a self contained short story set in that universe, about an observation station sitting at the edge of the galaxy, monitoring for potential intergalactic information. They detect a large mass of dark matter that only became detectable when it got close enough to reflect light from our galaxy. As they observed, they realized that the string of dark matter was just a tentacle the size of a large star cluster, and they couldn’t see what was on the other end. It swept close and then retracted away.
Had a dream about a hermit that finds some strange idol while he’s out hunting. Begins praying to the thing and kind of inventing his religion and morals as time goes on. Eventually he dies, when he gets to the after life it’s like a busy train station. Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. all go to different afterlife’s that are made in the image of their religion. This man’s religion was ancient and forgotten. So ancient and and forgotten that he had no “train” to take him to his afterlife.
Not entirely sure where I’d go with that but I really enjoyed the dream and if I knew how to write I would lol. If anyone wants to write it though feel free and just let me read it when it’s done
Homeless dude living in the train station of the afterlife? That sounds pretty cool. Like the train stations in the Matrix.
There’s something good here - if anyone takes this up leave a link or something for us other folks to check out, too.
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about fleshing this out: who/what made the train station? Given it’s a place people stay only for a short amount of time before being whisked off to their afterlife, what does the MC learn staying there for so much longer?
I’d finish one of the stories I’d already started:
- Sci-Fi, life on board a converted old interplanetary transport vessel, refitted for interstellar transport, on its way to join a small group of pioneers and colonize a distant planet.
- Fantasy, centered around a crafty dwarf who has built a decent self sufficient for himself independent of the fortress, unaware that his childhood friend caught a curse and caused the fortress to succumb to the goblin invasion.
- A more down to earth story about a struggling early twentysomething, and what sheer desperation does to a person.
…but the common denominator for all three is that I haven’t quite figured out the plot yet.
What is your dwarf society like?
Was*
Typical dwarvish. Very hierarchical. An industrious proud people, full of skilled craftsmen who pull their weight for the greater good of society. Due to seasonal attacks from a goblin horde nearby, they’ve built fortification that protect them, and during attacks the wall guards are helped by alchemists fire. Unfortunately that last step failed during the most recent attack, which was also unusual in its strength and strategy (the horde got outside help), causing the fortress to fall. While looting, the invaders opened the floodgates that had redirected the river, thus drowning any survivors except one.
Shit. No other dwarven cities? No war of reprisal a la War of Dwarves and Orcs?
I played a fantasy game (on Nintendo 64!) that had a lore waaaay too ridiculously deep for itself, but part of it was that a vaguely dwarvish race had dwindled to a single city via repeated wars and pogroms from other races, and were living under the protection of one of the large human kingdoms at the time. These dwarves were also secretly harboring the last known dragon in the world, who had given magic to humans about a thousand years ago.
There are, but they’re quite some distance away, and the story doesn’t focus on the region as a whole.
I’d love to write a really good acid western. So far all I have are daydreams about being a badass old west drifter to the music of Spindrift.
Edit: I suppose there’s also what I started when I tried (and failed) NaNoWriMo, which was a horror story about a pathogen that made people deranged killers of a spectacular nature. There was a fight in a stained glass factory, that was kinda cool. Should see if the laptop with the draft still boots…
(If I recall the movie correctly, it was basically The Crazies, but more violent and written before the 2010 version came out [never saw the 1973 version])
Mankind has started colonizing the solar system, including installing a satellite at the Sun-Mars L1 Lagrange Point to protect Mars from solar radiation and dumping a ton of water and methane ice on Mars until it is able sustain a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on the surface. Then, Kessler syndrome hits Earth Orbit, which causes a chain of events that collapses society on Earth.
Thousands of years later, it is found that there are now landing paths to get back to Earth, even though these paths are sporadic. A Lunar nation invites a Martian nation to team up to explore Earth and what is left of humanity.
I’d write a sci-fi story, which explains the fermi paradox. There are thousands of alien races all over the galaxy, but they basically all took one look at humankind and said “fucking hell no, those guys are absolute dicks”.
I’ve got a similar story that I’ve been workshopping for years…the alien races decide humans are too warlike, and after our first space war (against other humans, with us not knowing aliens exist yet) the alien council ruling the galaxy decides we’re too dangerous and getting too technologically advanced, so they send an AI to try to wipe us out. Galactic civilization has been largely peaceful for tens of thousands of years so they don’t know how to do war, but they program an ai to try to eliminate humanity while preserving the rest of life on Earth.
They mostly succeed, but in the conflict the earth does get devastated despite the best efforts of the AI. A human colony ship escapes, and hundreds of years later the descendants of the massacre return to wreak bloody vengeance on the rest of the galaxy.
I have a setting and characters but no story. And I have stuff that could be part of a story, but I don’t know how to put it together. Like an arranged marriage, and jealousy between someone born to power and someone who fought to earn it. I just don’t know how to make a story that fits all of them in there.
A reverse Three little pigs. Where the pigs (cops) are the bad guys, and the wolf is just a pot head
I’m already an author.
You would write a story where you were already an author?
No, I was referring to the title which I thought referred to “if” I was an author. Though very, very few of my writings are fiction and most are vents/guides.
