Eheheheh... I never really thought about that before. Probably because I'm a literary sinner and just pound mindlessly on the keyboard

Or, at least, that's how I am with sim stories. I'll admit to using the pictures as something of a crutch when it comes to writing, just because they take care of the visual description on their own. If the reader can see that Florian is a rather lithe man with shoulder-length blond hair and blue-gray eyes, why stress that in the narrative?

With my off-line projects that don't involve pictures, however, I do stress a little over the writing there. If I previously described a character's hair as "mousy brown" and want to describe their hair color again later, from a different character's point of view or whatnot, I have to pick something that is at least marginally similar to "mousy brown". And then of course, there's the whole subjectivity element; my idea of a "large, dark room" may be smaller and lighter than your idea of a "large, dark room", so there's a need for specificity, but not to the point of "over-describing" (for lack of a better term--I think I left my brain in one of my classes today).

As for dialogue... I don't know. The dialogue just comes naturally to me, but that's probably just because I tend to over-analyze my characters to the point of near-total empathy, which may or may not be a hazard to my psychological well-being.

But like I said, I'm a literary sinner. My outlines comprise of one-lined, vague ideas for chapters that sometimes change entirely, and I almost never do more than one draft of any given piece of writing.

Sorry Pen, I probably didn't even answer your question there. I'll maybe check here again later when more people have answered and see if I can put in my real two cents' worth then.

EDIT: ...please tell me that this scene with the man meeting the manic depressive elephant in the bar will be featured in a chapter of DBL? Pleeeeeease?

Hehehehe, you may have a manic depressive elephant when two things happen:

1) The custom content exists.
2) I have absolutely, positively run out of ideas.

Neither seems like it's going to happen anytime soon.

Your outlining process sounds a lot like mine, Van. I write a sentence or two- just enough to remind me of what the plot of the chapter is. Then I hit the actual writing of the chapter months later (DBL is outlined up until Chapter 120-something which, er, is not even the end of the story).

But there is never a draft. What you get in my story (apart from the prologue, actually) is the first and final draft. I never just quickly write the whole thing through, then go back in and revise. I know that's the way to go. It's more efficient and I have a sneaking suspicion that the writing would be better that way. As it is, I carve away at individual sentences, weighing the connotation of Word A against the connotations of its synonyms, Words B, C and D. *Le sigh.*

Ach, picture breaks! That's a whole topic in itself. I try to nestle a picture in such that the sentence before it and the sentence after it both describe what's happening in the picture, unless the sentence after it would be so shocking -- like "Woah! When did Finn end up sitting on his ass on top of the table?" -- that I am forced to put it before. But sometimes I even fret about people who scroll down too far while they're reading and know that Finn is about to get knocked on his ass, long before he gets into a position of jeopardy in the first place. Sometimes I fantasize about having actual pages to turn!

But I admit, I often leave huge swaths of writing pictureless until I am totally done writing the chapter. Unless it's a picture that directly contributes to the description of the scene, and I don't want to forget which picture it was and lose the connection, I don't usually like to take a break from writing to insert a picture. You can see how little "about the pictures" my story is, from my own perspective. (I do write with image thumbnails open next to me, however.)

I think the constant rereading from the beginning helps me break out of being too focused on the sentence-level details. I am constantly pulled back out into a big-picture view of how everything hangs together. Another reason why I think it's good for me. Because like you, otherwise I think I would be far too focused on minute details.

I would never actually add pagination... I hate pagination on the Internet. In real life you can turn the page in the middle of a sentence and your brain never even registers a hiccup, but on the Internet you click... and wait.. and wait... for the page to load, the browser to render the page, then the images to be filled into the page...

I know some people whine and cry about how long pages take to load if they're not chopped up, but in sum they actually take a lot longer if they are, and you only win if you never click the subsequent pages. (On the other hand, I do prefer blogs where the front page only shows a snippet instead of the whole chapter... unless they only show a single chapter on the home page. Loading ten full chapters when you're only going to read the latest one is indeed slow.)

I was thinking more like... Lothere: the eBook. For reading on a Kindle or whatever the kids have these days. (Actually I think the Kindle demographic is mostly middle-aged folks reading The New Yorker on the train, but I digress.) I think it would be spiffy if I could have a single picture per page, with a few paragraphs of text... assuming I would be the one deciding where to put the page breaks. If I had actually been working within those constraints I probably would have written or illustrated the story differently, but still, it would be cool to read that way.

When I'm adding pictures to the story -- once the must-have, scene-defining pictures are in place, which usually happens while I'm writing -- they really become a sort of eye candy as far as I'm concerned. I go through the text (for some reason I almost always start at the end and work up) and if I spy a big block of text, I look for an image that I can stick in the middle for no practical purpose aside from breaking it up. I'm not saying they don't matter, but they are quite secondary to the story-telling.

I try to work it so that on an average-size monitor a reader won't usually have more than one full picture on the screen at any one time. If I literally did break a chapter into ebook pages, I would often have a picture centered on the page with text before and after. My theory is that when people are reading and they approach a picture, their eyes flick away more and more frequently to grab a few impressions from the picture; and once they pass, if something in the paragraph below calls attention to something in the picture (often descriptions of facial expressions end up in there) they glance back up, but less and less frequently as they read on, until the picture has scrolled away. It's not so much that I think they need a visual break between chunks of prose, but that having an image in their peripheral vision the whole time they are reading really contributes to their visualization of the scene. (And for gloomy, desolate pictures like Egelric's beach scene, contributing to the mood.)

I would love it if someone did an eye-tracking study of people reading this sort of story though! I could be all wrong about my theory. But I do get miffed when pictures reveal surprising events that don't happen in the story until several paragraphs after the picture. I prefer to read about it, then look at the picture. Read the book before you see the movie, people!

That's a good point... as soon as you "turned the page" you would be sucked in by the possibly-surprising picture. I guess slow scrolling has an advantage there.

I have, at times, considering moving the images off to the right or left of the text and having it read side-by side. Or wrapping the text around the pictures. (This made more sense back when they were 400x300 instead of 600x450.) But I haven't found anything I liked better. I'm not sure there is an ideal reading arrangement for what we're doing here, especially since each author has a different way of weaving pictures into text (or writing text around the pictures if they go that way).

I do think that if I could control pagination myself and knew up-front that I was going to be doing that, I could come up with something that would maximize the impact of the pictures without giving away too many surprises ahead of the story. (If I had a big enough ebook-reading screen that I could comfortably fit a full picture and a nice block of text.) But I think the writing -- or at least the location of the pictures therein -- would be different then.

Didn't we read books like that as kids? Beautiful full-page illustrations with a block of text at the bottom of each page? We write books like that for grown-ups.

That does it! I'm switching to screenwriting!

Seriously, I think scrolling down a page with images inserted in the middle of the action is probably the best I am ever going to do. But I am constantly frustrated with this process when it comes time to put the pictures in. I wonder if there is something inherently impossible in what we are truly trying to do.

I don't know if this will interest any of you storytellers out there but here is an old essay by Errol Morris about the necessity of narrative context in photography, written for the New York Times:

Liar, Liar Pants On Fire

Particularly when history is the writer. The context in a photograph of something that happened in reality has a lot more potential to shift than in what we do. Take Morris's example of the Lusitania. When that photograph was taken, the context was merely, "Here's a steam ship that we're launching." There was no way for the photographer to know that the boat was going to be bombed by the German army and become a rallying point for the US to enter the war abroad.

But I thought that this linked in nicely with the earlier bits on this thread about how much information is necessary to tell a story when we've got the images right there. As a reader of narrative and a viewer of images, I have to agree with Morris. We can see an image without the context and draw our own inferences but it is the context of the image that gives us the full narrative. And the narrative is what gives the photograph its depth of meaning beyond the information that is conveyed in the image its self.

As storytellers though, the context for most of our images remains pretty static. We may choose to leave little breadcrumbs of foreshadowing in images. We may even revisit a set of images and get ideas that will make a detail or set of details in an image seem like foreshadowing, thereby changing the context of the image for ourselves as well as for our readers. But for the most part, the context of our images has been predetermined and not so subject to change.

It does become an interesting thing to think about as we write, though.

Wow, so many interesting comments and observations here! And I don't just mean that about the man who owned a Kindle. *gasp*

My creative process is different from yours in the sense that I start with a sentence, or just a word. It comes out of nowhere, usually. And it just doesn't go away until I sit down and start writing. Once I do, it leaves me alone. It's really weird, but I guess that's just my obsessive tendencies showing up even in my creative outlets (does that even make any sense? ).

Anyway, I start off with that, and see where it goes from there. It pretty much writes itself, but I agonize when I can't find the right word or expression, or when I think something could be phrased later, or when there's only dialogue and I don't know how to make it all flow smoothly. I've found the best thing I can do is just let myself write, and then go and revise and rewrite instead of wasting my time fretting.

Another additional problem I have and that is harder to shake off is that I'm not a native English speaker, so I often find myself in a situation where I don't know if my sentences aren't awkward or where I simply don't know how to write what I want to write. I worry about making a mistake, too, since my native language's grammar and spelling is perfect, but in English I can't be so sure.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that writing involves a lot of confidence and a lot of letting go of your fears, and just trust your instincts. You can worry about the rest later.

As for the visual versus text information... I dunno, like Pen, I think it would be a bit much for me. I like scrolling down, finding those breaks between the text. It's part of the excitement, and it acts like an incentive: you want to know what happens next, so you keep on reading; you want to see the next picture, so you keep on reading.

Also, what you've all said about choosing the pictures that will go along with the text as you write has helped me a lot. This should make my sim-writing life easier.

I never told you? I kinda assumed you all knew.

So says Ann, who had me fooled herself until she added a few unnecessary commas in suspiciously German places.

What IS your native language, maruutsu? Sorry to turn the topic from writing and all, but I have to know!

It's not very interesting or unusual one, I'm afraid. It's Spanish. I also speak a little Portuguese and Italian, but those are rather easy for me since they have latin roots.

I didn't know you weren't a native English speaker either, Ann. I've been considering learning another language, but I can't decide between French and German.

Oh, I know what you mean! I often wonder if I don't sound too formal or something.

And Jenny, do you speak German too?

I think both of you guys' English is good enough to pass for a native speaker's. Spanish is the only other language I know at all, I think it's a lot easier to learn than English must be! I'm not very good at it, I can read it pretty well, but when I went to Spain no one understood me through my terrible American accent. I'm always amazed by the facility with other languages that people around the world have - it's quite unusual to be that good at any other language in the U.S., unless part of your family is from somewhere else.

Oh, dear! And I thought I had pressed the preview button or something

No worries, at least I don't have to type all of that again.

No worries.

Yup, that's what I meant. A three way system? Genders + Neutral? I want to learn it even more now.

I thought German was more widely German spoken than French, because of the European Union and whatnot. Isn't it spoken in a lot of other countries too?

Hm, French isn't similar to Spanish in sound; French is a lot more... tangled, I think. I suppose it sounds similar to your sister because of the Latin roots?

And ach, I don't live in Spain. I'm nowhere near France.

I forgot to answer this too.

I'm a native English speaker and I found German easier to learn than French. German is pronounced as it's spelled, so it's easier to go from reading and writing to understanding native speakers speaking. French is very opaque to the ear, with so many silent letters. To this day I sometimes hear phrases I don't understand until someone explains to me: while trying to puzzle out the pronunciation I mash whole words together and break others apart into totally different words that mean nothing at all. German doesn't do that in my head.

German also seems to have a lot more rules (if you like rules, which I do). Things like always putting adverbs in "time, manner, place" order. Or putting commas before dependent clauses. On the other hand, once you get used to the weird location of object pronouns, French word order seems to flow more naturally to an English speaker, and probably a Spanish too, so you don't need rules so much.

French is spoken all over the world since the French were great colonizers. French is the second official language of Canada, and it's spoken in the Caribbean (Martinique, Guadaloupe, etc.) South America (French Guyana), Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, etc.), Asia/Pacific (Mayotte, Reunion, New Caledonia, French Polynesia), and of course Europe (France, Belgium, and Switzerland).

German... not so much.

German is a very cool language though. There is a wonderful precision to German that makes it well suited to both science and dry wit. There is no language like German for irony. The downside of that is that any German declaration of love or other tender sentiments sounds hilarious to me.

Spanish has more similarities with French than it does with German, obviously. But their shared Latin roots go back quite far, so the similarities aren't very strong. Being fluent in French doesn't help me much with Spanish, other than exposing a few cognates that don't exist or are too obscured in English. (E.g. "guerre" and "guerra"... hard to guess that is related to English "war".) As a French-speaker I find Italian more approachable than Spanish, and that's not saying much.

The hardest language I have personally encountered is Arabic. Unlike most of my other languages, it's not an Indo-European language, so it has differences in lots of things that we take for granted in languages even as superficially different as German and Spanish. If you want to challenge yourself, learn a language that isn't from the Indo-European family. Then there simply are no useful similarities.

If you really want a useful language for the 21st century, learn Chinese. Both English and French appear to be on the wane.

I agree about pics shouldn't be spoilers. It's just like when you get a dvd of a movie you haven't watched and the menu screen is a spoiler. Or when you're watching a classic movie on t.v. and they show a little scene before and after the commercial break - for a part of the movie you haven't seen yet. Don't they know that some people are seeing the movie for the first time?

By the way Lothere, how you wrote about picture placement and eyes scanning while reading, that is how I read your stories with the pictures.

Funny confession....There have been times when I have grabbed my mouse and tried to see a character from a different angle or zoom in or out....like when I play sims...

It's due to the above that I sometimes think that simmers get more out of the sim stories. Like when someone reads about a place they have been too. Between the real photos and the sim pics, when you write about Lothere, I can just see it.