Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I wrote a series of stories about one of my Dark Age of Camelot characters who was named Elar, a randomly generated name. My original intent was a short story about a real person accidentally waking up in a game a-la Matrix. What observations would they have, why are there no restrooms, that kind of thing. After a little thought the first story came together as a farce. The second story needed a darker tone because I wanted combat to feel scary and not flippant. But I didn’t realize with only one “real” character that I was rather limited. I tried a throwaway character as a pickup groupmate with an attitude problem, but by design this was going to be short lived. The longer term problem of who Elar was to interact with to convey story was not really solved. I settled on introducing real members of my guild into the stories. Unfortunately I did this just as two of us had children and one stopped playing, which made it a bit less fun.

So why bring this all up? Because I’m thinking about what makes a good story and what doesn’t. I’m certainly not good at it, but I want to be.