R.H. Walker, Author

(Cover photo by Mohamed Trabelsi on Unsplash)

Since finishing Story Genius I’ve started applying bits of the method to my own writing, but I have yet to try the full method from beginning to end. I thought we could give it a try together with a project I’ve been quietly interested in for a while: I Knew You Once, a Stardew Valley fanfiction-come-horror-short.

Thus comes the birth of a new series for the blog: “Demo Sundays”, an ongoing project to explore story structure and story drafting methods I read about while completing “By Writers For Writers” (learn more here). I hope that this will be great practice for me, and I also hope that this will round out my critique of the methods themselves. I’m not just reading these books to read books, after all. I’m reading to expound on my grasp of story, and the tools I have to wrangle it.

DISCLAIMERS

I Knew You Once will be a work of fanfiction. The characters and settings used in the final product are not my creation. I have not, nor will I ever, monetize or profit from my fan works. If you see anyone attempting to monetize the final product of this project, now or at any time in the future, it is not me! Report them!

A second softer disclaimer for the fic readers: I am not a regular fanfiction writer, so I am not well-versed in its conventions. This story will be more experimental than trope-y, and more horror than romance in genre. I hope you enjoy it all the same!

If you’re not familiar with Stardew Valley, here’s what you need to know: Stardew Valley is an independently-produced video game that was first released in 2016. You play as a young person who inherits and works to restore their grandfather’s farm. The game has been praised for its wide range of mechanics, which include farming, foraging, fishing, mining, combat, and relationships. I’ll explain more about these mechanics, as well as my inspiration for this particular story, as we dive into the Story Genius blueprint.

In the rest of this post I’ll start the prep work Cron suggests and flesh out the “what-if”, or the story’s initial premise. I’ll answer four prompts from Cron to detail my initial inspiration, why it intrigued me, the themes and/or questions I’m hoping to explore, and finally write a logline to help sum up that initial premise. In following posts I’ll answer more questions about our protagonist, about their goals and misconceptions, share pre-story scenes that help to flesh out the character’s backstory, and find the story’s beginning and end points. There will then probably be a pause as I work on the story itself, but once it’s complete I hope to share the finished piece, as well as the “scene cards” that will serve as my blueprint.

Now, without any further ado, let’s get into it!

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PART 1: THE WHAT-IF

Question 1: What first gave you the pinprick, or the idea for this story?

• The thing that first prompted me to think about this was divorcing my very first Stardew Valley spouse. When you pay the in-game money to initiate the divorce, your relationship ranking with that NPC is immediately tanked to zero. There is no way to restore it. You cannot speak with that person, nor give them gifts.
• Except . . . during the course of the game you can come upon a witch’s hut. Inside the witch’s hunt there are three shrines. One shrine protects the valley from being invaded with the monsters that roam the mines, another can turn your existing NPC children into doves, and the third can make any villager you’ve divorced entirely forget about you, so that you can rebuild your relationship with them.
• I knew about these mechanics long before I actually used them. I eventually divorced my spouse with the goal of exploring the game’s other romances, but I held off on erasing their memory until I absolutely had to (having 100% relationship with all of the villagers is essential to completing the game). When I finally did I felt SO guilty. I immediately questioned what this would be like in real life. How awful of a person would you need to be in order to erase someone’s memories of you? And thus the idea was born.

Question 2: Why do you care? What interests you about this story?

• Are you kidding??? This is pure thriller material, and the implication of magic in this world walks it straight into horror territory.
• Imagine this happened to you. You wake up one morning and carry on in your routine as normal, only to realize that you’re missing a huge chunk of time. Maybe you published a book, maybe you toured with your band, maybe someone thanks you for building a community feature that you no longer remember building. What happened? Why did you forget this huge, life-altering thing?
• Not to mention that yours is the only memory that’s erased. The townspeople attended your wedding! They knew your children! And none of them mentions it to you. Are they in on it, somehow? Why would they keep this secret? What are they afraid of? What could your former spouse be trying to hide?
• The implications continued to spiral in my brain. To have this happen to you would be absolutely terrifying. I knew I had to write it.

Question 3: What’s the point? What ideas/themes/questions are you hoping to explore?

• I like the question of manipulation here. How far will someone go to protect their secrets? How far can a community be pushed in the hopes of protecting THEIR secrets?
• On a more personal note, how would you regain your sense of self after learning about something like this? To learn your greatest achievements were simply stolen from you in the night would be terrifying. How do you reconcile the person you remember being with a person you don’t remember being?
• I think there’s an opportunity too to explore making friends. Pelican Town has a relatively robust singles scene but in the context of the game itself the bachelors and bachelorettes don’t do much hanging out, at least not day-to-day. I think they could all use some friends, and this massive trick being played on them would be a good excuse to get them to interact a little more.

Question 4: Write a “what-if”, or a premise, based on the ideas you’ve developed here. (I’m also going to include a logline, just for funsies).

• What if you woke up on a normal day, only to realize that you were missing an enormous chunk of time? And what if in your quest to learn more, you realized that your entire community was in on the secret?
• A bachelor realizes that people in his town are keeping secrets from him, but as he works to uncover the town’s sinister past, he’ll realize he’s in far deeper than he ever suspected.

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That’s it for this week! Come back next week for more details on our main character, and the backstory we’re using to mine for their motivations!