Story Ideas & Discussion Thread

[Terk]

by Wegason: "Notepad, wordpad, word, whatever works for you and you are comfortable with."

[Terk]

by Amaroq: "That's exactly what I do, yes.

My habit tends to work something like this:

Open up "Write.exe" (wordpad) to the latest installment of my story-file; fire up FM and load to the latest save-game.

During the week, take notes on events and emotions - it might look something like:

Hayden Foxe satisfied with role
Nicky Thomson strained calf, out for 6 months
Mathieu Berson loan ends.
Very nervous about rematch with WBA

Or something like that. If I feel up to writing, I might write the installment for it .. but if not, I'll get to the match.

Match-day, I'd note the opposition's danger-man and recent results... then as the match goes, I'll note my tactical adjustments and any key items that caused it:

14 Weatherson shoots wide
19 Foxe tackle in box - penalty? No!
20-25 intense pressure by opposition
26 Morgan yc - the goal sure to come any moment
28 switch to 5-4-1 for more defense.

When I feel inspired to "write", I'll come back to that, and change it into prose that the rest of you might want to read - and I'll use the "Match Report" feature and the ability to watch replays to bulk out the detail .. and a knowledge of how the match is going to wind up to know what things to cut out. For example, if the yellow card doesn't turn out to matter, it might not "make the cut".

What I've found, with that, is that if I play too far ahead, I lose the motivation to write about it .. but if I don't let myself play without writing, I lose the motivation to play.

So its a balancing act, definitely.

..

If you wind up with an epic tale, file organization becomes very important. I've wound up with one file per month, and a naming convention YY-MM-Team, so for example 06-05-York.txt; that way "sort by alphabetical" gives me "in date order".

One neat thing about having gotten way ahead is that I can come back and layer-in foreshadowing - for example, if you re-read the story knowing where it goes, you'll spot references to Book II characters making cameo appearances back in the Book I portions of the tale."

[Terk]

by BobBev: "Personally I use Word as my writing tool of choice. I apply my formatting there and have a neat macro that converts that to markup tags. It can deal with bold and italics and anything in Courier New font is put inside CODE tags. If anyone else would like to use it then here it is. If you want to use it then replace the curly brackets with square ones.

Sub FMS_Markup()

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Font.Bold = True
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.Font.Bold = False
With Selection.Find
.Text = ""
.Replacement.Text = "{b}^&{/b}"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Font.Italic = True
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.Font.Italic = False
With Selection.Find
.Text = ""
.Replacement.Text = "{i}^&{/i}"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Font.Name = "Courier New"
With Selection.Find
.Text = ""
.Replacement.Text = "{code}^&{/code}"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

End Sub

[Terk]

by Glamdring: "Amaroq's disciplined approach is the most sensible probably, but it depends how much detail you want to include, especially about things actually reported in the game.

I generally ignore individual news items about players, of the like that Amaroq mentioned, but it depends on my type of story. My recent ones have been more "broad brush" so someone being unhappy at some point of the season is of no interest to me.

I use the FM game as a skeleton for my story, but since it is fiction I will sometimes make things up about players or anything else that doesn't occur in-game and miss out many things that do appear in game. The only aspect I stick to, obviously, in my stories are the hard facts of results, where we finish in the league, players we signed (although again often I don't bother mentioning all the players we sign). It goes without saying that if I were to start inventing results and players people would have no interest in reading those stories at all.

So basically, I generally just right off the top of my head when writing a long time after the event (e.g. my current main story covering the past 10 seasons of play), adding in some made up things for interest, but keeping key facts correct from the game."

[Terk]

by Peacemaker7:

Amaroq's disciplined approach is the most sensible probably

Yeah for him.

Its pointless asking what style should I use, everyone is different you have to find that our for yourself there is NO right answer here.

[george94]

I've really got to work this out. I need a quick easy way of getting the tables up. All my efforts of coding etc turn out awfully as you can see in the community thread. Can someone help me?

[HD]

Easiest way is to go to the table in the game, then select options, Print Screen, save as text file, then open that and C&P it into your story between code tags.

[Pickles]

I could give you some tips, but then you be guaranteed to fail

I want to come back FMS (if anyone remembers me here that is) soon and may do once I can get a fecking game going that gets past the end of August :o

[HD]

Originally posted by Pickles:
I could give you some tips, but then you be guaranteed to fail

I want to come back FMS (if anyone remembers me here that is) soon and may do once I can get a fecking game going that gets past the end of August :o

If people remember you, they're not likely to want you back.

Anyway, nice to see people leave FMS, become hardened crims, then return. We could have predicted it back then...

[Pickles]

Bastard!