(Author's Notes: This is a look back at how I created the story Laurie and Dag. WARNING! There will be spoilers if you haven't read the stories. If you would like to read the entire saga you can start with The Kid and Me by using the links in the right hand margin. Thanks for stopping by.)
As I have mentioned previously, when I was putting The Kid & Me up on the official site, it took quite a while to gain an audience. As a matter of fact, I may not have had more than two or three people reading it at all for the first two or three segments. Eventually it did find its audience even thought for a Sims story it was quite lengthy.
By lengthy I don’t mean that in regards to the number of chapters in the story. There were stories on the exchange that had far more chapters but each of those chapters wouldn’t have but 20 to 40 frames on the average compared to each chapter of The Kid & Me averaging well over a hundred. You would have been very hard pressed to find one that went into the details that I did. I know, I know, compared to a regular novel or even a novella that’s not very much story detail at all but as a Sim story, it was. At any rate, as I neared writing the last few chapters of The Kid & Me, I began to get messages from people telling me how they had started reading and had stayed up all night reading up to where I had left off. That would make any writer feel good.
So when I finally decided to do a sequel, I felt I owed it to everybody who had been loyal to The Kid and had invested a good deal of time in reading it to reward them in some way by using part of the first few chapters to wrap up some loose ends. But I also didn’t want anybody to feel that they were compelled to have to go back and read The Kid & Me to understand what was going on. So it was a tightrope but I think I pulled it off quite well.
The biggest loose ends I needed to wrap up were having Laurie learn the truth about Joe’s relationship with Susan and the circumstances of her birth. I also needed to do something about her grandparents that were mentioned in the first story, although never seen. Having Laurie discover the truth about Joe and her mother wasn’t a problem. I just had Joe tell her just like he should have done in the first place.
In my original outline that I made for the story, Laurie’s grandparents were actually still alive. I had this whole plot established where the grandparents would contact Laurie and she would go to see them against Joe’s wishes. Than being the nutty grandparents that they are, they would keep her there, lock her up in a room, and force her to recant her sins and give herself to God before going to try out for American Idol (sorry, I couldn’t resist the joke. She really wasn’t going to try out for Idol because Laurie can’t sing.). Pretty cool and scary stuff, isn’t it? Later of course, Joe would rescue her and take her home. I wrote 23 pages of this scenario, 
before I decided it wasn’t working out. As painful as it was, I had to simply disregard all that work.
The problem was that in order to sneak off and see her grandparents it required Laurie to do a lot of things that didn’t jive with the character as I had conceived her. It also required Chuck Easterman of all people actually doing a good deed and that I couldn’t have under any circumstances. But more important it was going way off on a tangent that had little or nothing to do with the real story I wanted to tell. But I still felt that I needed something to explain away the
mysterious grandparents. What was in the story is what I finally came up with, and I think it works as well as can be expected. It is one of those incidents that help define Laurie’s character as she continues to mature. One bit of trivia though is the fact that the two elderly sims in the picture at the grandparents home are the two sims I created for the roles.
As for the house itself, it was one that I found on The Sims 2 site but I had to make a lot of modifications in it. In order to get the pictures of the crucifixion on the wall, I had to drop some Sims onto that lot and have them paint them individually. (You can have Sims paint practically anything you have a photograph of on your hard drive. Easier to do now then it was back then though). As for the room where Laurie found the diary and the photographs, all the stacks of papers and the chest Laurie examined had to be photo shopped in as well as the stacks of boxes. The notebook though was her Diary. Sims can write in their Diary at anytime or anywhere. And on a final note regarding that segment, the person you see Joe carrying out of the house is not Laurie. It was a double wearing the same clothes. An adult Sim can leap into another adult Sim's arms, but a teen Sim cannot. Well, they can now because there is a hack that enables them to do so. There wasn't one then and I had a helluva time figuring out how I was going to pull off something I thought was essential to the success of the story. No amount of manipulation would get the job done, and I was about to give up until the idea for the body double suddenly hit me.
And then there was Bettie having a baby on the highway. That may not have been absolutely necessary for this story but it was something I
had wanted to do in the last chapter of The Kid and Me with Joe delivering his and Bettie’s first child. As it turned out, I didn’t think I could pull it off as far as the pictures were concerned.
It would have taken a whole lot of manipulation of the Sims and some photo shopping to get it to work. So weighing all of those factors, I decided to reluctantly drop it because I felt I was getting myself into something I couldn’t handle. By the time I started to write Laurie & Dag though, I thought I had gained enough experience in manipulating Sims to pull it off.
I managed to do so, but it was every bit as
difficult to do as I thought it would be. For one thing, I had to make it look like Bettie was actually laying down to have the baby. Then I had to be able to put the baby where it needed to be. If you’ve played the game, then you know that when Sims have babies, they have them standing up. They let out with one big scream, one big moan and then the infant falls out of the sky into the mother’s loving arms. Well, it could be a father’s loving arms but that’s a different story altogether.
The other problem was that Sims did not own cars. The only vehicles the game had at that ti
me were service delivery vehicles, a taxi, and the cars from the car pool which ran the gamut from a beat up old wreck to actually having a helicopter whisk them away to work if they had reached the top level of their career.
But, thanks to hackers, you could put these vehicles into your catalog and haul them out for use as needed although they were only meant to be props. In order to get Sims to sit in them, or even look like they were sitting in them, you had to maneuver car and Sim until you achieved the desired effect.
One way that worked (sometimes) was to command them to sit in a chair, on a couch, or somewhere else. Then you would simply pause the game, use a move objects cheat (In regular game play you can’t pick Sims up) and then place the Sim in the car. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. Other times you would just have the Sim stand with their feet going through the bottom of the car and try to photograph it in such a way to make it look like something it wasn’t. As you can see in one of the photographs, there are a lot of things Sims can only do while standing such as using the cell phone. After manipulating Laurie while she was
on the cell phone, I ended up just having Angela get out of the car after Laurie gives her the cell phone because I had troubles enough maneuvering Laurie and Bettie.
When the nightlife expansion pack came out though, Sims were finally bestowed with the ability to own and drive cars. But even now if I were to do a car scene, it would probably require some manipulation.
Where did the inspiration come from for Bettie to have her baby in a car? Probably from a hundred movies and several hundred TV shows. Everybody has done that scenario at one time or another but I had not seen it in a Sims story before. However, my favorite baby being born in a car scene is the one that takes place in the movie, The Thrill of it All. In this film, Doris Day
is stuck in a limousine with Arlene Francis who is about to give birth and her husband who is played by Edward Andrews and that is probably where most of my inspiration came from with the reactions of Angela’s Father being somewhat similar to those of Edward Andrews although Andrews is way funnier in his role.
Another thing I wanted to do in the early stages of Laurie and Dag and have never been able to tell if I was successful or not was to build up to the fact that Laurie was gay step by step so that it wouldn’t be clear or even an issue in the early going of the story. I wanted people to think of her as just an average but heterosexual teenager. I think it was successful up to a point, but if you’ve ever been on The Sims 2 site, you know there is not much that is secretive and word soon got around regarding “the story with the teen lesbian.” But still, my point was to show that when you realize that Laurie is a lesbian, she is no different from the Laurie you thought was heterosexual.
Before writing Laurie and Dag, I gave some thought to writing it in the third person. As a matter of fact, I thought it would be absolutely necessary that I do so seeing as how there would be so many different characters and events at different times. The problem was that I had no confidence in my third person writing skills. Part of my success with The Kid & Me was that I was able to get inside Joe’s head so that you knew what he was thinking and feeling at all times. To me, it was important that even when Joe was doing things most of us would frown on, it was necessary for everybody to understand his motives in order to sympathize with him at all. I finally decided that I could do Laurie and Dag in the first person, and was able to get around my problem by making it clear at the beginning in Laurie’s forward, that this was a story being written by family members. Each family member would then relate the events that happened to the best of their recollection. Of course if I had realized at the beginning that Laurie’s story should have been written separately, I never would have had that problem either. I think it worked itself out okay, although it is probably a device that would be better suited for a film rather than narrative story telling.
Then there was the biggest deviation of all from the outline that I had written. In it I remember that I wrote, “Laurie develops crush on class mate.” My original intention of course was to never have that crush go anywhere and for Laurie to worship the girl from afar. But as I developed and wrote the character of Angela, all of that went flying out the window. More about that next time.
By lengthy I don’t mean that in regards to the number of chapters in the story. There were stories on the exchange that had far more chapters but each of those chapters wouldn’t have but 20 to 40 frames on the average compared to each chapter of The Kid & Me averaging well over a hundred. You would have been very hard pressed to find one that went into the details that I did. I know, I know, compared to a regular novel or even a novella that’s not very much story detail at all but as a Sim story, it was. At any rate, as I neared writing the last few chapters of The Kid & Me, I began to get messages from people telling me how they had started reading and had stayed up all night reading up to where I had left off. That would make any writer feel good.
So when I finally decided to do a sequel, I felt I owed it to everybody who had been loyal to The Kid and had invested a good deal of time in reading it to reward them in some way by using part of the first few chapters to wrap up some loose ends. But I also didn’t want anybody to feel that they were compelled to have to go back and read The Kid & Me to understand what was going on. So it was a tightrope but I think I pulled it off quite well.
The biggest loose ends I needed to wrap up were having Laurie learn the truth about Joe’s relationship with Susan and the circumstances of her birth. I also needed to do something about her grandparents that were mentioned in the first story, although never seen. Having Laurie discover the truth about Joe and her mother wasn’t a problem. I just had Joe tell her just like he should have done in the first place.
In my original outline that I made for the story, Laurie’s grandparents were actually still alive. I had this whole plot established where the grandparents would contact Laurie and she would go to see them against Joe’s wishes. Than being the nutty grandparents that they are, they would keep her there, lock her up in a room, and force her to recant her sins and give herself to God before going to try out for American Idol (sorry, I couldn’t resist the joke. She really wasn’t going to try out for Idol because Laurie can’t sing.). Pretty cool and scary stuff, isn’t it? Later of course, Joe would rescue her and take her home. I wrote 23 pages of this scenario, before I decided it wasn’t working out. As painful as it was, I had to simply disregard all that work.The problem was that in order to sneak off and see her grandparents it required Laurie to do a lot of things that didn’t jive with the character as I had conceived her. It also required Chuck Easterman of all people actually doing a good deed and that I couldn’t have under any circumstances. But more important it was going way off on a tangent that had little or nothing to do with the real story I wanted to tell. But I still felt that I needed something to explain away the
mysterious grandparents. What was in the story is what I finally came up with, and I think it works as well as can be expected. It is one of those incidents that help define Laurie’s character as she continues to mature. One bit of trivia though is the fact that the two elderly sims in the picture at the grandparents home are the two sims I created for the roles.As for the house itself, it was one that I found on The Sims 2 site but I had to make a lot of modifications in it. In order to get the pictures of the crucifixion on the wall, I had to drop some Sims onto that lot and have them paint them individually. (You can have Sims paint practically anything you have a photograph of on your hard drive. Easier to do now then it was back then though). As for the room where Laurie found the diary and the photographs, all the stacks of papers and the chest Laurie examined had to be photo shopped in as well as the stacks of boxes. The notebook though was her Diary. Sims can write in their Diary at anytime or anywhere. And on a final note regarding that segment, the person you see Joe carrying out of the house is not Laurie. It was a double wearing the same clothes. An adult Sim can leap into another adult Sim's arms, but a teen Sim cannot. Well, they can now because there is a hack that enables them to do so. There wasn't one then and I had a helluva time figuring out how I was going to pull off something I thought was essential to the success of the story. No amount of manipulation would get the job done, and I was about to give up until the idea for the body double suddenly hit me.
And then there was Bettie having a baby on the highway. That may not have been absolutely necessary for this story but it was something I
had wanted to do in the last chapter of The Kid and Me with Joe delivering his and Bettie’s first child. As it turned out, I didn’t think I could pull it off as far as the pictures were concerned.It would have taken a whole lot of manipulation of the Sims and some photo shopping to get it to work. So weighing all of those factors, I decided to reluctantly drop it because I felt I was getting myself into something I couldn’t handle. By the time I started to write Laurie & Dag though, I thought I had gained enough experience in manipulating Sims to pull it off.
I managed to do so, but it was every bit as
difficult to do as I thought it would be. For one thing, I had to make it look like Bettie was actually laying down to have the baby. Then I had to be able to put the baby where it needed to be. If you’ve played the game, then you know that when Sims have babies, they have them standing up. They let out with one big scream, one big moan and then the infant falls out of the sky into the mother’s loving arms. Well, it could be a father’s loving arms but that’s a different story altogether.The other problem was that Sims did not own cars. The only vehicles the game had at that ti
me were service delivery vehicles, a taxi, and the cars from the car pool which ran the gamut from a beat up old wreck to actually having a helicopter whisk them away to work if they had reached the top level of their career.But, thanks to hackers, you could put these vehicles into your catalog and haul them out for use as needed although they were only meant to be props. In order to get Sims to sit in them, or even look like they were sitting in them, you had to maneuver car and Sim until you achieved the desired effect.
One way that worked (sometimes) was to command them to sit in a chair, on a couch, or somewhere else. Then you would simply pause the game, use a move objects cheat (In regular game play you can’t pick Sims up) and then place the Sim in the car. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. Other times you would just have the Sim stand with their feet going through the bottom of the car and try to photograph it in such a way to make it look like something it wasn’t. As you can see in one of the photographs, there are a lot of things Sims can only do while standing such as using the cell phone. After manipulating Laurie while she was
on the cell phone, I ended up just having Angela get out of the car after Laurie gives her the cell phone because I had troubles enough maneuvering Laurie and Bettie.When the nightlife expansion pack came out though, Sims were finally bestowed with the ability to own and drive cars. But even now if I were to do a car scene, it would probably require some manipulation.
Where did the inspiration come from for Bettie to have her baby in a car? Probably from a hundred movies and several hundred TV shows. Everybody has done that scenario at one time or another but I had not seen it in a Sims story before. However, my favorite baby being born in a car scene is the one that takes place in the movie, The Thrill of it All. In this film, Doris Day
is stuck in a limousine with Arlene Francis who is about to give birth and her husband who is played by Edward Andrews and that is probably where most of my inspiration came from with the reactions of Angela’s Father being somewhat similar to those of Edward Andrews although Andrews is way funnier in his role.Another thing I wanted to do in the early stages of Laurie and Dag and have never been able to tell if I was successful or not was to build up to the fact that Laurie was gay step by step so that it wouldn’t be clear or even an issue in the early going of the story. I wanted people to think of her as just an average but heterosexual teenager. I think it was successful up to a point, but if you’ve ever been on The Sims 2 site, you know there is not much that is secretive and word soon got around regarding “the story with the teen lesbian.” But still, my point was to show that when you realize that Laurie is a lesbian, she is no different from the Laurie you thought was heterosexual.
Before writing Laurie and Dag, I gave some thought to writing it in the third person. As a matter of fact, I thought it would be absolutely necessary that I do so seeing as how there would be so many different characters and events at different times. The problem was that I had no confidence in my third person writing skills. Part of my success with The Kid & Me was that I was able to get inside Joe’s head so that you knew what he was thinking and feeling at all times. To me, it was important that even when Joe was doing things most of us would frown on, it was necessary for everybody to understand his motives in order to sympathize with him at all. I finally decided that I could do Laurie and Dag in the first person, and was able to get around my problem by making it clear at the beginning in Laurie’s forward, that this was a story being written by family members. Each family member would then relate the events that happened to the best of their recollection. Of course if I had realized at the beginning that Laurie’s story should have been written separately, I never would have had that problem either. I think it worked itself out okay, although it is probably a device that would be better suited for a film rather than narrative story telling.
Then there was the biggest deviation of all from the outline that I had written. In it I remember that I wrote, “Laurie develops crush on class mate.” My original intention of course was to never have that crush go anywhere and for Laurie to worship the girl from afar. But as I developed and wrote the character of Angela, all of that went flying out the window. More about that next time.
Click here to read the fourth and final part of The Story Behind the Story.
No comments:
Post a Comment