How do you fill in the missing details that the canon doesn't cover for characters? Like we don't know a lot about what they do everyday or what they really think about certain people, for example. Some characters don't have a lot of info so it's hard to make up stuff even if I like them.

Feeling like an idea is complete is hard. I know simple ideas can be good, but simple can be hard. Making an entire story out of a conversation can be really hard, for example. It doesn't feel like enough.

>>16503
Can't write, sounds hard, just wanna sleep man.

>>16510
These feelings are very known.

I have an idea.
What should I focus on once I finally get the courage of writing my story, characters? Mood? Atmosphere? Events?

>>16512
>Mood
>Atmosphere
What distinction are you making here? These both sound like the same thing to me.

Either way, stuff like plot, character, and how you express those things are all important for a good story, so you kind of need to focus on all of them.

>>16513
I want to write something mysterious, but I don't know how much I should describe. A book like Dune or Lord of the Rings doesn't seem to describe much, while Lovecraft is all about description.

>>16514
Dunno what to tell you without knowing more specifics, my dude. There's not really a formula for that kind of thing. All depends on the story.

>>16515
You'll understand that I don't wanna give up too much details, it'd essentially be about an investigation. Old Gods, monsters, and all that.

>don't wanna give up too much details
Nobody wants to steal your idea, and even if they did, the execution would probably be too different to identify.

>an investigation
So, what, a mystery story? If you're writing genre fiction, the best thing you can do is go read other examples and see what they do. That does also mean you have to work extra hard to not be predictable to fans of that genre, though.

Hard to offer much more guidance to broad and vague questions.

>>16517
Okay, thanks. Gotta read actual mystery, then.

One thing I will point out about mystery novels is that throwing in a good amount of description will let you hide clues in the background, so to speak.

For instance, have a description of a room with a roaring fireplace, an old leather chair by the fire, four pistols in a frame over a dresser, and a bunch of animal heads that were stuffed and mounted over the fireplace. Go into a little detail about how there's a deer, an antelope, and the prize of the collection seems to be an enormous black bear. The rug is one of those that's so thick you could lose sight of your feet, not to mention containing enough crumbs to feed an army of mice. And so on.

Then, several chapters later, a character remarks about the five antique pistols the victim had inherited. And voila. A clue that all but the most attentive reader is likely to miss (hidden within a bunch of background details that sounded like it was just setting the scene), but something you can refer back to at the climax to show how your detective/protagonist/murder-solver is so much smarter than everyone else.

You don't have to do it this way, but it is a useful trick to know.

How do you get ideas? I have none.

>>16563
Burglary and highwaymanry.

>>16563
Relentlessly steal from everything you read and try to combine them. Have large reference pools.

>flow state
>not horseshit people have hypnotized themselves into believing

>>16611
I wonder what else you could hypnotize people into believing...

>>16618
My favorite story on this site will revive from the dead and reach completion with prose, characterization, and dialogue greater than before!

>>16619
Nobody's stopping you from picking it up yourself.

>>16620
Dunno, doing so seems a bit sacrilegious. Though the author might be long gone from the site, maybe they still think about the story they have written, and despite how remote of a future, perhaps they will return to complete their story in some fashion.

♬Baby come back♬

And to find someone having taken up their story and attempting to mimic their prose, characterizations, and plot would be like imo coming home after a long trip to realize your cat has been swiped by some rando who stole your clothing style and is trying to talk like you but slightly different. It was their story, now taken and explored in ways they might not have chosen.

It makes me wonder how much homage one would have to pay to the original writer's style. Does one attempt the original writer's prose, form of dialogue, and interpretation of their characters or seek to break away and make it their own? How does one respect what the writer they like has written without perversion? How does one pick up the threads in a story that never got unveiled? How does one maintain what drew one in the first place?

Plus, I throw commas around like infinite party poppers and need more life experience to write well enough to give due respect to any writer's works. I also don't doubt that the maw of writer's block would seize me.

>>16621
My view is finders-keepers. If they didn't want it taken up, they shouldn't have abandoned it.

...but I'm a hack who can't come up with anything, much less anything original, so any attempt at such would be doomed to failure from the start.

>>16618
That punctuation is a subjective aesthetic thing rather than a basic FUCKING readability thing. That spacing doesn't matter. That excessive use of formatting tags makes you quirky and keen. Et cetera, et cetera.

>>16565
I dunno, I read a lot and can't get ideas.

I've got a general thing with a sort of stoic crow tengu bloke being broken down and tempted into lewds by Tsukasa. I'm not sure how to really portray that process of giving in and the consequences of it.

>>16631
The first thing would be to establish the position wherefrom he is to be broken down. Who is he? Why would he not, initially, opt into fluffing up a fox? And, from there, what could possibly change his mind on the matter? You will find the answer to the latter rests heavily on the former.

You have the landing. That is fine. Now figure out the jumping-off point.

>>16632
>You have the landing.
You say that but I disagree.

I don't really feel the lewd is the point of everything, though I don't know what the point really is in general. I don't want it to be the point, I guess, as much as a part of things. It's not even so much plot-with-porn as simply fiction with erotic elements... I think.

But, yeah, not really an end goal as such.

I want to write things I'd want to read, but I only come up with things I wouldn't read or just things that are unappealing or don't have much "Touhou" in them inherently and thus aren't worth bothering with.

Fuck.

>>16723
> I only come up with things that don't have much "Touhou" in them inherently and thus aren't worth bothering with.

Just go to a different website and post those stories. Its not like this website has a monopoly on fanfiction. There are plenty of other fanfiction sites to choose from.

>>16724
That's a whole different issue from what I'm talking about. I only care about Touhou. It's just hard to come up with things that feel like they come from the characters and setting.

Any general tips for going back to an abandoned story? I'm having a tough time reconnecting to it.

>>16725
Isn't that what /others/ is for? You can play around with Touhou in all sorts of other settings and see what sticks. But yeah, I get what you mean regardless. I also get a lot of crossover ideas that I would label as unappealing, but hey, it could end up being a Touhou fan's first foray that gets them into whatever you're crossing it with.

>>16730
>Touhou in all sorts of settings
Yeah, no. I only care about vanilla Touhou. No crossovers, no AUs, nothing.

Also, it's not like I've got any actual ideas. I'm >>16631, and the extent of that idea was basically "lol Tsukasa seduces a guy". But, y'know, that's pretty generic, and I couldn't come up with anything that would actually make it feel like a "Touhou" story, and the whole thing honestly felt so trite that I just hated it after a while.

So, yeah, that's been thrown in the bin, and I've got nothing to replace it.

>Any general tips for going back to an abandoned story?
Do you really want to go back to it or do you just feel obligated?

What did you want to do in the first place? Has that changed? How? Does that greatly change anything? Does it conflict with anything you've done already? Do you care if it does or not?

Do you even know what you want to do?

There's a lot of questions that could be asked in return. Think long and hard before you do anything.

>>16740
Thank you. That clears things up. At the very least, I know what I want to do, and I should just do it, even if it takes me a while.

>>16730
Reread it, then see if that kindles any desire to continue it. Plus it'll remind you of where things left off, and hopefully of what your original plans were.