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Hello everyone,

I'm a brand new writer here but I'm curious about something, how long did it take you all to write your best story? I know everyone is a little bit different when it comes to writing but I'm still curious to hear what some of you will say ( especially the experienced writers currently reading this). I'm not just talking about the actual writing of the story if that wasn't clear. I mean from concept to publishing the story, how many months or years did it take for it all to come together. I await your answers.

My 'best' story I'd guess for now would be the only one that was featured...so about six hours?

That doesn't have to be your "best" story necessarily, it could also be the story you are most proud of writing, or what you personally believe to be the best story you've written. Still, 6 hours is unbelievable to me, It's taken me almost 4 hours to just write two pages, and here I was thinking I was at least a fair writer, in terms of speed. Thank you for your reply Mizal it's made me reconsider my own ability on some level, which is always a good thing. 

I don't really like any of the ones I have published actually, and my WIPs that I actually do like I don't work on regularly so it's a difficult question to answer.

It took you six hours to write THAT? I can barely go an hour without having to move on to something else. You have some true dedication.

at least 4 years

How often do you think you wrote in those 4 years? Was it pretty consistent or was it sporadic?

lol

god dammit your lol made me snort irl

No clue, still don't have one.

Which one of your stories is your favorite and how long did it take?

Well since a joke answer isn't good enough...

Dark Nights. Took me about 3 days, 3 and an hour or so if you count the time I spent touching it up after I published it. Proof you can write a feature worthy story in a few days (granted it wouldn't have been featured if it weren't for the fact that one of Seth's stories was, but I digress).

See, this is why I wanted you to give the real answer. A good game can be created pretty quickly and not everything needs to be an epic to be enjoyable. *coughsomeonetellBuckythatcough*

Um... two months, I think.

3 Months for me, but honestly I rushed myself a little bit.

It took me about a month to make my most successful storygame, About Darius and the Desert God. It took me one day of planning and two days of writing to make my favorite one, The Duet.

My favourite is the Hunting the Ripper story which I wrote in three days in a hotel room in South Korea (but I had spent a few months before that extensively planning the entire structure of the story so all I needed to do was get the content down) and I did The James Gang, also in a hotel room, in about the same time, also after a lot of note-making and planning. I guess about three months from conception to completion, including proof-reading, though for me planning it is the most fun part :)

Seems to me you have a thing for writing in hotel rooms, is there an interesting reason behind that?

They're quiet :) It's good to get away from all distractions for an extended period of time so you can focus 100% on writing. I think I remember reading that Victor Hugo locked himself in a room and didn't emerge for like three months until he finished writing Notre Dame.

Show off.

It seems I might have made a grave error after reading your guy's posts. I was never all that much for planning I suppose but still. I might have been jumping the gun in terms of my story considering no planning too place. This is probably going to bite me in the ass later down the line but o well. Still, I appreciate the insight everyone, to be honest, I wasn't expecting much in the way of replies. I didn't really know this site had such an active forum community. I'm glad to see I was mistaken. 

Planning is for the weak. I've never planned, never will. Don't listen to these fools, dammit.

I've always used detailed plot outlines for my stories. I have sections for each part of the story and then bullet points listing the scenes I want to write in chronological order. That way, if I get writer's block somewhere, or just generally inspired to write a different scene than the one I'm currently on, I can jump to a different one on in the plot outline. And with the outline, it is easier to keep all of it in the correct order when I'm finished and it is time to put it into the editor.

I have written stuff before without a plot outline, but it generally takes longer to finish the story and sometimes feels disorganized because I jump around to different parts of the story as I write. It makes it harder to keep everything in the correct order lol.

You could save yourself a lot of work if you use a program like Scrivener. Everything is arranged in a nice treeview on the left so you don't have to juggle multiple documents. And if you want to move a scene to a different location, it's really easy. I think every writer should have it.

I use Truenovelist.com. It's basically a free online scrivener clone. I meant that the plot outline helps me keep a mental idea of the chronological order of everything since I skip around a lot while writing. So if I write a scene that is at the end of the story but only have the majority of the beginning written, the plot outline helps me keep track of where that scene fits into the story when I finally get to that part of it and really flesh the ending out.

Sorry if I wasn't very clear before, I wrote that comment before I'd had my morning coffee and now I realize I worded it poorly and only talked about it being helpful when I move the story from truenovelist to the editor. I mean it does help as a reference but for the most part everything is already in order thanks to the program itself. I should wait to comment in the forums until after my coffee honestly lol.

E: I should also add that I'm a pathological planner. I like to have everything planned out to the last detail before I even start writing a story. Since I learned how to create a detailed plot outline with ever scene as a bullet point (it's just one sentence per scene but still) I feel horribly unorganized without one and tend to lose my direction.

I'm with you on this, I love writing outlines almost more than writing the stories. It's just so nice and organized, and stories can get messy. Especially CYOAs. Picking up any project after it sits awhile, I really depend on them to keep lore and chronology and which characters know what and where they are at which points in the plot all straight.

I've been gradually converting my folder full of outlines and scraps over to nice pretty Book of Ideas in Scrivener, it's been...interesting grabbing some random .txt from an idea from years ago, half of these I'd forgotten about and suddenly it all comes flooding back. Most of them need some tweaking but there's a lot I'd still consider viable plots...just lol at ever getting time to write anything based on them. A lot are for linear stories that would need major overhauls to work for a CYOA too.

It's a hard question to answer because of the 'from concept' part. I expect most of us might have a story idea on a backburner for a long time before actually determining to write anything on it. For instance I spend a lot of time working on settings in my head while doing other things throughout a day. Sitting down and deliberately writing an outline takes about an hour though and I've been able to knock out complete stories in a day or over a weekend, it just really depends on the scale of a project.

That is a good point, maybe I should try and scale back my story right now, it might be better for me to just put out a decent short story for my first time instead of going for the long version of what I have envisioned. 

Approximately 39 years and three months for me. I didn't really plan it. It just happened. If it weren't for the looming contest deadline, I probably still wouldn't have a story.

When it's done.

Best answer.

Couple weeks of 1k words a day plus three days of solid editing 

None the less, it's pretty interesting to hear everyone's different thoughts on the matter, even EndMaster's revealed something of note. There are some who enjoy the planning more than the writing while others just sit down and crank out stories and others still do not concern themselves with keeping track. I don't think I've figured out what category I fall into just yet though. Next story I write ( that's assuming I can get through this current one) I'll probably try and plan it out beforehand and see how that goes over. 

I've only published one story, I wrote it in 22 hours (though there were classes I had to attend in between) and I'm not very proud of it. My favorite story is a WIP I've been working on for about a month now, but most of that has been learning how to make scripts from Ford and BD.

I keep seeing the word script thrown around on the discord and the forums, but to be honest I have no idea what it is.

It's coding for storyagmes. It helps out a lot with the "game" aspect.

Do you have an example I would understand? You've peaked my curiosity, even though I doubt I would be able to figure it out, I'm currently struggling with the just the basic tools this site gives me. 

The articles can probably explain it better than I can. Here's the one on basic scripting.

Thank you for the link, I appreciate the help Leora. 

No problem ^_^