Chrono Spiritual Successor Brainstorm Session (Come and join the fun!)

[idiotekque]

Magus is an awesome character, I agree with that. When you think of Chrono Trigger, though, do you see him as the grand antagonist? Hell no, he's a gray area character, and he ends up being more or less GOOD.

Do you think of the insurmountable, unstoppable force of the world eater Lavos? Do you think of the accomplishment you felt when you cracked that shell open and took down the most powerful destructive force in the universe? Hell yeah.

I'm all for gray characters and intricate stories that make you think. I write them myself. I simply don't think they have a strong place in this kind of game, this kind of story, this kind of project. By all means, there can be gray area characters, but the primary antagonist? Utterly disagreed about that.


EDIT: But hey, I'm not in charge. I'm just giving a writer's perspective that I think applies to this case. I've even had teachers who insist on that hated antagonist in any story. I disagree with that rigid of a view, but there's a lot of merit in that view. To SOME extent, it's extremely important to have that reader vs. antagonist relationship, even disregarding the characters in the book. When the reader/player/viewer feels emotionally invested in things, the story profits.

[Kodokami]

idiotekque: You must be thinking of the wrong Lynx. In Chrono Cross, we don't know Lynx's motives for most of the story; we don't even learn of Lucca's murder til way after it matters. There is so much wrong with the development of Lynx's character that all I could feel for him is sympathy, not hate. Tell Serge that he's actually his old man before he kills him--now that would be interesting.

You also forgot to mention perhaps the most important antagonist in Cross: the Dragon God, and by connection the planet! Lynx is just the dark horse beside this guy. It's a shame it and Harle's relation with Serge was overlooked during development.

A final note: I could probably find more to hate about Magus than Lavos, but that may just be an opinion on my part. I'll think more about it.

[tushantin]

Anyways, just brainstorming, but we definitely need a good antagonist.

<------ This guy. 'Nuff said.  

Lennis believes that Characters are what drive the story. Though believes that it's the Plot, the Setting, that's the core foundation of the game / story. Nangbaby makes it clear that it's the Gameplay and Atmosphere, the Art and Programming (heck, Programming is also an art-form) is what builds them and that makes the game in the first place.

Honestly speaking, neither are above each other; if we focus on one over the other, we have plenty in lacking. Chrono Trigger is very much like a globe, where an individual is appealed by an aspect they relate the most with (or actually want to be appealed by). But there's no question that what made Chrono Trigger great was the sheer balance of everything.

And a good game needs a good leader that understands this, and manages skills proficiently with the goal in mind, balancing every resource needed to achieve it.

Hence why I question yet again: What the heck are we aiming for? Something worth playing for fun? Something you could pour hours on end? Something that's simply a visual telling of a novel? What is it?

What kind of game would YOU want to play?

Personally, I wouldn't want to jump into a full-fledged CT-like RPG (unless some have a finished, open-sourced engine working for development, and we have artists on-board -- doesn't matter 2D or 3D). That would take too long. Instead, since we're just freshly starting out, we ought to go for a simpler design of a game that would be fun to play, quick to produce, and much to profit from at least for the time being. Keeping our goals small and achievable sets us up for long-term success with bigger projects too. Doesn't have to be perfect.

This reminds me of how Ninja Gaiden's own complex story-line came into being: the idea actually started off as a wishy-washy non-story fun-slasher game called Kage / Shadow of the Ninja. The story didn't take a genius -- some galactic emperor decided to enslave Earth, so we needed Ninjas to kick his ass, and we totally did -- but the gameplay itself had enough atmosphere to make your imagination go wild with the kinds of stories that could take place here. The result? The action-packed game was a hit! Eventually Tecmo got the publishing rights to it on Gameboy, and they eventually turned it into a Ninja Gaiden spinoff and integrated the atmosphere within the main franchise.

But if having the idea purchased by a corporation sounds far-fetched, how about the story-line for Street Fighter 4? With all the multiple characters and their struggles, the story eventually became one hell of a challenge, despite the simpler setting of "characters join a tournament to save the world". But it all started off with this weird game which only had one playable character (unless you choose Player-2 controller which automatically gives you Ken with the same moves as Ryu), but eventually became successful enough with its idea and became a standard for every fighting game ever. The game only had one story: win the tournament and kick Sagat's ass. Eventually the grudge between Sagat and Ryu would go on to be in-depth character development for later games.

So that's my idea: Start small, so we can get something achieved. But don't restrain your imaginations just yet, because what you propose right now might just became a game-changing event in time. (ZING!) The game-play mechanics or any idea that's innovative could be made in while still keeping our production achievable. I mean, look at the hit Indie game called Limbo -- it started off simple, just one playable character in one simple setting. The game began with one innovative idea that financed the developers enough to help them begin with a second, even better game. Oh, and the studio that made the game only consist of two people (though of course, they needed the grants from elsewhere to help finance the development of even this simple game).

And don't even get me started on Angry Birds!

The best way we can achieve something is by targeting the mobile markets currently, probably along with consoles.


So then we get back to topic.

Why don't we take a bit of inspiration from Radical Dreamers? It would be a simpler endeavour, combined with Lennis MGS gameplay suggestion, along with stealth of thieves. We could somehow have time travel into the midst. What do you think?

Tell Serge that he's actually his old man before he kills him--now that would be interesting.

(Serge about to destroy Lynx)
Lynx: "I... I am your father!"
Serge: ".....Nnnnoooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"

[idiotekque]

I don't think Lynx's character was handled badly. I think it's an important point that his motives were shady and not recognized until later in the story, but I'll admit a lot of Chrono Cross was vague and confusing (which is why the majority didn't connect with it as well as CT, which wasn't so confusing). Your first encounter with him? He poisons the girl you're quickly beginning to love as a character. The second encounter? He STEALS you body, then stabs her again. Then he turns her against you.

Those are dramatic events that create a lot of animosity against his character, while still weaving that mystery about his character. Whether the final reveal could have been handled a little better or not, I don't think it much detracts from his CHARACTER, it simply convolutes a story that could have been a little bit clearer.

And I talked about the Dragon God, I just called it the Time Devourer, which I suppose it is not. My error.

Why don't we take a bit of inspiration from Radical Dreamers? It would be a simpler endeavour, combined with Lennis MGS gameplay suggestion, along with stealth of thieves. We could somehow have time travel into the midst. What do you think?

Not a bad idea at all. As much as I love Radical Dreamers, though, we'd need to make it significantly less... weird.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

I'm going to through this out there...

I had mentioned the concept before, but what if time was a fatalistic structure? Akin to the film 12 Monkey's, one cannot change time; attempts to do so are merely creating the pre-exiting timeline. What if one wanted to change the very nature of time-space dynamics? What would like that look like? How would that work?

My story is a tale of family. Of two brothers: one of which becomes lost in time, and one that searches desperately to find him. Traveling through time, making friends and enemies along the way, our young hero Blue Cervantes learns what it is to lose everything and how loss connects us all. The main villain ends up being a version of Blue from the future, and Blue unknowingly visits upon various moments of his own future. Only by using the powers of the Blue Singularity and destroying the Chains of Fate can Blue penultimately defy fate and end the predestination that haunts mankind.

EDIT: I just realized that there's nearly a page of posts behind me. I need to catch up on my reading and see what you all are talking about...


EDIT 2: Removing my synopsis. I'm going to keep this concept to myself.

[Lennis]

Really, CT only works because Lavos is treated as a force of nature. If they'd tried to make it work as a character, they would have ended up with Final Fantasy V, whose weakest point is its antagonist.

Yeah, Ex-Death really made me cringe.  That might be why Final Fantasy V wasn't released in the US until much later.  Four's Golbez was a much more interesting villain, and Six's Kefka knocked it out of the park.  In fact, I'm inclined to compare Kefka to The Joker.  Appearances aside, the two villains share many of the same qualities.  Perhaps that was intended.

In talking about Chrono antagonists, I'm surprised no one has brought up Queen Zeal.  Sure, she's just a thrall of Lavos, and maybe that's why we should hate her.  The original game never made clear if the Queen simply gave in to a lust for power, or whether she was just too weak to resist Lavos' influence.  Either way, Crono "dies" because of her.

My view of Lynx is that he wasn't handled very well.  Yes, a villain needs to do things that make you hate him, but if you can't understand even a fraction of his motives over the course of a narrative without resorting to a wall-of-text after it ceases to matter, then the character is ineffective as an antagonist.  Lynx is more like Lavos in the way he is portrayed: a force of nature that does bad things simply because.  But Lynx clearly isn't the mindless monster Lavos was, so the player has a disconnect.  They expect more and get less.

On the subject of gaming platforms, mobile would seem to be the way to go, but I advise caution.  The market is experiencing a huge bubble in Japan, and I've heard rumors that it may be on the verge of popping.  Anyone going all-in on the promise of mobile is likely to lose his shirt.  As they say: "Diversify, diversify."  Mobile isn't going away, but the smart play is to wait and see how the market corrects itself before making a commitment.

[Thought]

@Alfador, allow me to illustrate:

What gives something a Star Wars feel? Is it having Luke, Leia, and Han in it? Certainly not, as the X-Wing series of books proves. Is it having the plucky rebels fight against the dark empire? Certainly not, as I, Jedi proves. What makes Star Wars feel like Star Wars is the setting.

What gives something a Lord of the Rings feel? Is it having Sam, Legolas, and Gandalf in it? If so, then about half of each book loses that feel (and certainly the Hobbit and Silmarillion fail). Is it about lone fighters standing against a dark tyrant? Again, no, because of the other LOTR-like texts out there. It's Middle Earth and the fantasy meets history aspect (well, really, a secondary world history crafted in such a way as to be mistakable for a primary world psuedo-history).

The setting is often what gives something a particular feel. Not always, of course. What makes a heist story or a romance feel like a heist story or a romance? The plot. What makes literary fiction feel like literary fiction? The characters.

As for ideas, write them down, examine them to make sure that it isn't actually a solution to a problem you've been having with the current project, and if not, keep the idea for later use. No, not all ideas will see the light of day, but that is just because ideas are cheap. If you make a habit of writing down ideas, and also consciously developing your creativity, you'll always have more than even jumping from project to project can satisfy.

@Acacia, Lavos wasn't evil. It was just trying to survive and breed.

Regarding villains, there are two types and they serve very different purposes in a story. The Dark Lord (think Sauron) is great for removing moral dilemmas and making for cool stories, but they can never be shown on the page, as it were. Those villains are less a person and more of a force of (or against) nature. When you write that sort of story, it isn't a man v man conflict, it's man v nature. The relatable villain, though (think Smeagol) can be represented on the page, is very human (the hero of their own story, actually), brings up moral dilemmas. This allows us to have a man v man or man v self conflict. A common difference between the hero and villain in modern storytelling is that the hero overcomes their own flaws, while an antagonist succumbs to them.

CT has both the Dark Lord and relatable villain (Lavos and Magus, as Alfador pointed out). CC had Fate and Harle (Lynx was never relatable, alas).

You're totally misunderstanding me. I never suggested that having an antagonist who is being evil just to be evil. That's just weak writing.

You just dissed Tolkien.

Actually, you didn't just diss LOTR, you also insulted Star Wars, Firefly, Avengers, Indiana Jones, Beowulf, Harry Potter, and generally a huge chunk of beloved and classical human literature.

Not either type of villain will work for every type of story. That doesn’t make one stronger or weaker than the other, nor is one indicative of stronger or weaker writing. Indeed, a strong writer will use one or the other as appropriate in the story, not conforming story to a prejudgment.

As for the hated antagonist, the protagonists do need an emotional investment in the story (only Magus in CT really had this), but that emotion doesn't have to be hate, nor even directed at the antagonist. There are so many other emotions, all powerful, and so many goals. Often, stories (the kind that never make it  to market) fail because the protagonists only ever react to the villain. Ideally, the protagonists should have a goal, something that they are passionate about, and the antagonist is the roadblock. They can have as much emotion attached to them as a wall and still work.

For example, Magus is passionately driven to find Schala. That’s a beautiful plot set up right there, and we don’t need a hated villain to cloud it, although to make a story interesting, we do need antagonists (antagonists and villains are themselves different things).

@Tush, I said setting was most important for giving the game a CT feel to it. Nothing more, nothing less.

[alfadorredux]

@Thought: Actually, in Tolkien's case, the "feel" for me comes largely from his use of language, as far as I can tell. Which explains why Michael Scott Rohan's The Winter of the World feels more like Tolkien to me than the LotR movies do (well, that and the bowdlerized characterizations made me hate the movies with a passion). Feel is highly subjective, which may be why no one here can agree on what makes Chrono Trigger what it is.

With respect to creativity, I think you're again making the mistake of generalizing from your experience to someone else's. It doesn't work. If writing your ideas down works for you, more power to you. For me, and for a lot of other people I've encountered, writing them down in an undeveloped or summary form is like pinning insect specimens: it kills them.

Overall, this conversation seems to be bogging down at about the same level I expected it to: lots of people have ideas, but no one's willing to get behind anyone else's.

[FaustWolf]

One of the things that I think helps fanfic writers come together is the presence of constraints. The fanfic *has* to conform to certain facts, so there's a basis for amicable agreement out-of-the-box. Since canon is out the window here, the community might find it helpful to establish more constraints. At least everyone agrees that time travel will feature heavily.

Skimming the thread, I think Nangbaby has an interesting point: should the story come before the gameplay systems, or should it be the other way around? If you treat the gameplay systems first, then that should add some parameters that the story must conform to. As an example: rather than let the presence of a futuristic era in the story guide the decision to have a jetbike race, let the desire for a jetbike race guide your decision to include a futuristic era. I appreciate that there are many ways this could go wrong, of course.

The aforementioned idea of beginning with an extremely limited micro project is also worth serious consideration IMO. I tend to see this as the best option if the community wants to produce something that actually sees the light of day in a reasonable time frame. So what's a cool concept for a minigame that centers on time travel? Make that, and upon further reflection, we might realize the minigame was just the training mission for the antagonist who appears in the full story, or something.

Take Canabalt as an illustration to add to the ones tushantin already mentioned. It's a very narrow game, but man, it's packed with so much atmosphere I'm dying to know more about the world. You could totally, totally make a grand RPG follow-up to something like that.

[tushantin]

What makes Star Wars feel like Star Wars is the setting.

You'd have won your argument if you ended it there, but then you went ahead and said...

What makes a heist story or a romance feel like a heist story or a romance? The plot.

....which makes you fall face-first. Plot doesn't make romance, and plot alone doesn't make heist. Even if you took the setting and plot and threw it in the bin when it comes to Romance, the characters would create the world, the setting and the plot based on their own personalities and disposition, because ultimately it's all about relations between characters, and how those relations and choices eventually create plot. Plot doesn't dictate people falling for one another; interaction between characters does. In which case, creating vivid and memorable characters is always paramount.

However, that's not to say that the relations between characters and settings is a one-way-street. Even if it's the characters that create the setting, and not vice versa, in many occasions it's the settings that influence the characters' development.

Having written heist stories before, I think the same goes for that too. However, in case of Heists, there's much trade between plot and characters compared to Romance and Drama. Settings are easy to come by, but what drives the story is not the plot, but the characters. See, the best characters that retain in the audience's minds are not those governed by the plot but those that govern the plot. Which is why really great stories begin to take a life of their own when you start writing them despite a good outline; and that's a fairly good thing.

But Lynx clearly isn't the mindless monster Lavos was, so the player has a disconnect.

The fact that Lavos was capable of flying through space-time, devour planets, dabble in human genomes, build dungeons, create intelligence in the form of a rock, etc. would state sufficiently that Lavos was anything but mindless. In fact, Lavos was to us as Lucca was to a mayfly. Due to the large intelligence gap, besides the lessened intelligence of FF, there's just no proper means of contact. The mayflies, or even the bacteria in our own belly, wouldn't really get what we try to communicate with them, and they'll simply pass us for "involuntary movement of the earth, probably an earthquake or something". And we? We'd happily dissect them just to study them.

I think the same goes for Lavos. The shell of Lavos was nothing more than a complex organic space-time ship and computer that could be artificially grown, all done by the true Humanoid Lavos that was inside -- and that Lavos was the core Scientist of its species.

But I get what you mean: Because there was no intelligence contact between the species, the audience would then simply take Lavos' reaction as mindless because they could neither relate to it nor make sense of it (as almost everyone does in my locality when I ramble in techno-babble).

It doesn't work. If writing your ideas down works for you, more power to you. For me, and for a lot of other people I've encountered, writing them down in an undeveloped or summary form is like pinning insect specimens: it kills them.

Hah, I've heard that advice before too, and it's a really splendid one! Interestingly, I've gotten into the habit of trusting myself, my creativity and aptitude, rather than moaning my forgetfulness as I used to. Why? Because it then trains my impulses, my instincts, to be able to intelligently imagine on-demand and at the same time be able to pick the best ideas out there (and if it doesn't work, I always ask someone or do something to stimulate my creativity).

What this brings to mind is how we got into a bad habit of treating ideas in the first place: While it's true that the best "Eureka" moment comes to us when we daydream rather than force ourselves to think, as much as it's an awesome idea, jotting them immediately does tend to kill whatever's in the back-seat at the time and ready to roll to you, and eventually the idea you had stagnates. I've then made it my business to allow my muses to flow, try to soak in what I thought, and let it settle into contemplation until I get the big picture -- and not rush into writing every piece I get and end up being disorganized. And when I'm finally ready... I write / work to my heart's content, without stopping, because I instinctively know where I'm going.

Which again brings to mind, Alfador, that your approach to such treatment of ideas is much of a healthy cognitive training in itself, allowing imagination to harmonize with the critical prefrontal tendencies -- rather than have them conflict and weigh you down. I'm half-wondering if it's your programming experience that developed that kind of ideology, because it's freaking convenient when it comes to creative thinking.

But I do think that Thought has a point: Whether it's at earlier stages or later, the act of writing anything alone -- whether or not you intend to look at it later -- will help your thoughts retain in memory. In fact, it also helps in your creative process when things are right in front of you and you needn't rely much on your working-memory to remember details long-term, and hence focus your mental energy into evaluation of story alone. This I usually relate with the analytical approach rather than plainly creative, though.

But here's where I unify both methods: I follow the Doctor Who script-writing scenario. Throw in fancy words and elements, and trust yourself to figure out what happens later. This is incredibly convenient for Mystery writing especially. xD

Overall, this conversation seems to be bogging down at about the same level I expected it to: lots of people have ideas, but no one's willing to get behind anyone else's.

The aforementioned idea of beginning with an extremely limited micro project is also worth serious consideration IMO. I tend to see this as the best option if the community wants to produce something that actually sees the light of day in a reasonable time frame. So what's a cool concept for a minigame that centers on time travel? Make that, and upon further reflection, we might realize the minigame was just the training mission for the antagonist who appears in the full story for example.

Okay then, enough arguments. Time for business!

How's this for a game idea:

How about multiple relatable characters in a Viewtiful Joe like gameplay, but with time travel?

And here's the twist: the relatable protagonists are actually the bad guys of the sequel (if the first game gets successful enough to finance the sequel) who were training enough to give the real protagonists a hard time?

Hmm!!

....

THIS SOUNDS LIKE THE GAME IDEA I ACTUALLY PROPOSED TO A COMPANY ONLY A WEEK AGO. O_O

I could totally ditch what I pitched if everyone's interested in helping make this, though. I have the perfect story for this too.

[FaustWolf]

Well, even a complex fighting game like Viewtiful Joe may be biting off more than is chewable. I would suggest constricting the project even more. Like, *way* more. Let me propose these parameters and see what everyone thinks:

1. The project should include only one human/humanoid character that needs complex animation.

2. Other in-game objects are simple shapes that one artist, working for free in his or her spare time, can churn out in a month or two.

3. Environment art should be limited to what one artist, working for free in his or her spare time, could produce in a month or two. As a corollary, the enviro art should be sufficient to establish a cool world that piques the player's curiosity.

4. The game needs between one and five deadly-addictive killer tunes as background music. Or whatever a talented, up-and-coming composer could churn out in a month or two, out of the sheer goodness of his or her heart.

5. The gameplay style should be a logic game that uses a clever time travel element as the major gameplay mechanic/surprise.

6. For programming needs, the community selects a representative to contact lesser-known game design schools and offer the project up as an unpaid summer internship. This is after the game design document and assets are settled. Then it's released as a free download on platforms where there are zero or negligible distribution costs. Free distribution may be worth the sacrifice if it gets enough players and ratings to earn the project some clout.


The project goals being:

A.) Establish one recognizable character.

B.) Establish a world, and perhaps its eras or environments.

C.) Establish a time travel mechanic and theory that has the potential to create conflict, or has some other ramifications when applied to a wider story.

D.) Arm all those involved with a complete project to hang their hats on.

Probably feels like a suckerpunch to everyone who was hoping for a giant, sweeping project right out of the gate, but maybe more within the realm of possibility. This is just some food for thought; feel free to devour it or toss it in the garbage disposal, as I think I'll need to sit this one out for sheer lack of time.

[Thought]

The aforementioned idea of beginning with an extremely limited micro project is also worth serious consideration IMO.

Brilliant, on numerous levels. Not only does it provide a proof of ability to the market, it shows potential talent that the team is serious, and it starts building a fan base.

For the game itself, I feel "The Company of Myself" might be a place to look for inspiration. It doesn't involve time travel, but I think the applicants of it to the game are fairly straight forward. In fact, let's assign homework: everyone go over to kongregate or some other website, find a fun short game that seems like a fresh approach to something, then come back and tell us about it.


@Alfador, Tolkien's a bit of an odd case because he wrote so little outside of Middle Earth. Because of that, it's very easy to confuse the Tolkien feel for the Middle Earth feel, although some of his other work (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example) feels like a Tolkien book but not a Middle Earth one.

As for creativity, I'm honored you think I relating that from my own experience, but no. I got that from seven separate but highly successful professional authors (well, eight, but I can't remember the name of the 8th). These are: Michael Stackpole, David Farland, Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Taylor, and Mary Robinette Kowal. Developing ideas later is not a matter of subjective personal experience, it is simply how it is done. To be fair, brainstorming, creativity, and inspiration are skills that have to be developed. If you haven't developed them yet, that says nothing about what you can do and what will work for you, only about what you haven't done yet.

Regarding the lack of anyone taking a lead, aye, you're spot on there.

...which makes you fall face-first. Plot doesn't make romance, and plot alone doesn't make heist.

First, plot does make romance, but it looks like your romantic tendencies are making you miss that (different uses of "romance" here, by the way). Romance books are all very formulaic, down to what has to happen on what page. That's one of the reason that the romance genre gets so little respect. The characters and setting are entirely interchangeable (and that interchangeability is what allows the romance genre to function as a viable market: a book is 95% familiar and 5% new). I wouldn't be surprised if there is a niche romance market out there for what you described, but that's a niche market, not the genre at present.

As an aside, the paranormal romance genre is different than the romance genre and plot is less important (while setting is more so).

Second, for heist, you'll note I didn't say that plot alone makes it. Indeed, you will note that I have been discussing the key element that defines a feel, not the only element. That said, there are two main components to a heist story. The heist itself (which is often formulated as a mystery: not a "who dun it," but rather a "how'd they do it") and the team of experts. But the team of experts itself plays into what each of their role in the plot itself is. What drives a heist is that mystery, not the characters (which isn't to say that the characters aren't important: again, I am talking about key elements for a feel, not only elements for that feel). That is why Mistborn: The Final Empire doesn't feel like a heist story: the characters and setting overshadow the plot, giving it a different feel.

While it's true that the best "Eureka" moment comes to us when we daydream rather than force ourselves to think...

And by "true" you mean "false"

At its best, the "eureka moment" is what cause idea collapse: suddenly that moment of inspiration causes eight or ten disparate ideas that you've been working on to collapse, come together, and start working brilliantly (like a star). But no, the eureka ideas are never as good as the ones we force ourselves to think of. The reason for this is that the eureka ideas are our first reaction. Because they are our first reaction, they're also going to be the reader's first reaction. If we put down on the page exactly what the reader expects, why are they reading us in the first place?

You want to come up with the first idea, discard that, then the second idea, discard that, the third idea, discard THAT, and when you get around to the fifth or sixth, then you're finally in business. That fifth idea wont be coming unless you are specifically putting effort into refining things, though.

... jotting them immediately does tend to kill whatever's in the back-seat at the time and ready to roll to you, and eventually the idea you had stagnates.

I think if you take a closer objective look at what's happening, you'll see that's not quite what is happening.

Writing down an idea does do something: it gets it out of your head so that you stop thinking about it. In turn, that opens up your head for MORE ideas. There is a sweat spot for when to do that, but it is always fairly early on. You can tell when that moment comes based on when you find yourself thinking about the same aspect over and over. That's useless behavior, THAT's stagnation.

When you put an idea on the page, your mind then has room for more ideas, which you then need to fit to the idea that's on the page. Let's say that you get the idea for a great climax. That's well and good, but you wont get the ideas for all the components you need to pull it off until you get that climax out of your head so that the other scenes and aspects can flood in.

Ideas stagnate in your head, not on the page, because no matter how brilliant you are, you can't hold everything in your head that you need to. Ideas come to life on the page because you can continuously add to them and infuse them with increasing levels of awesomeness. If you find this isn't to your experience, I suggest that something else is going on, and then the onus is on your to examine truthfully and figure out why it isn't working for you. It might just be simply a skill you haven't developed yet.

[alfadorredux]

Thought, the real problem is that you're coming across as a patronizing prescriptivist jerk, which I hope was not your intention. I'm not some high school kid; I'm aware that there are processes unlike my own. I've tried some of them, and for me, they do not work. Most of the pros that I've encountered (Patricia C. Wrede, Charlie Stross, Mary Gentle, Alma Alexander, Jo Walton...) agree that process is personal, and that there's nothing that's guaranteed to work for everyone.

And now I'm going to duck out of here for twenty-four hours, because this kind of discussion does not combine well with being both clinically depressed and seriously conflict-averse. My meds can only handle so much.

[Thought]

I am sorry that you believe I am being patronizing and jerkish, Alfador. That was certainly not my intent. Unfortunately I am not a charismatic individual: when I try to write encouragement, I can see how it would come across in the opposite. Perhaps it might help you to understand how I see the back and forth.

You were saying that something was beyond your abilities (namely, that if an idea is on paper, it dies and you can do nothing about that). My response was essentially that it wasn't beyond your abilities: you are good enough that no idea need remain dead. You have the ability and the talent to make the deadest idea come to life. Personally, I don't see it as jerkish to think that someone is capable of more than they think they are capable of.

Also, if you have a chance to talk to those authors again, they'll all agree that there are several things that work for everyone: writing more, working hard to make yourself better as a writer, revising, going on to the next project, etc. If you can't write an idea down without it dying, how can you ever revise? If you never revise, a story wont be as good as you are able to make it.

As for ideas: again, you can say that putting ideas on paper kills them for you. And again, I will say that you are good enough to make them live despite that.

All in all, I see it as a very uplifting and encouraging message: I am sorry if it is not coming across that way.

EDIT: Having researched the authors you mentioned, Alfador, I see that they all hold to the same stance as the one's I mentioned. Indeed, a few of them expressed extreme credulity at the prospect of someone claiming to the otherwise. As such, since you say that you're familiar with their perspectives, it might be a communication problem is at the heart of the issue.

[idiotekque]

No offense to anyone here, but we're going nowhere with the conversation. Story, plot, characters, and writing in general are extremely versatile and faceless things. Argue till you're blue in the face that there are RIGHT ways and WRONG ways, because there are always things that are going to work better, hit harder, while others fall on their faces, but in the end, it's a subject that can be argued over until the stars go out.

What's happening right now is basically:

This is how it should be done.
No, this is how it should be done.
You guys have some good ideas, but you're both wrong about this and this.
No, sorry, in the nicest way possible, I'm smarter than you.
Actually you're not, because this vague, abstract concept you're speaking of is slightly wrong, hence totally wrong, hence I am right.

And so on and so forth. I'm not innocent or absent from that either.

I know that no one here is purposely trying to be a jerk or insist that their way is the only way, but unfortunately with extensive debates like this focusing on subjects that even the "pros" argue themselves (don't even start the story/plot snafu), it's not hard to come across as a know-it-all ass. The important thing is to put our heads together and focus on compromise, even on subjects that you hold very dear, to achieve a cohesive end result (or hell, even get started). No movie, video game, novel, or any creative product is perfect. Creating something purely via one's own thinking will give you a flawed result. Creating something via a group's thinking will... also create a flawed result. The important thing is that we work together to create a result in the first place. After all is said and done, if the end product isn't amazing, it's still a better than nothing. And I'm not saying "Make something crappy just because", I'm only encouraging more focus, more cooperation, more compromise.

Put simply, if any of us are "right" in our individual arguments, congratulations, but it doesn't matter. Moving on now.