Story Writing Guidelines

This page is a guide and resource for volunteer story writers.

Story writing is the foundation of all work on Infinity on 30 Credits a Day. An Infinite Monkey may begin work on a new contribution either by writing a short piece of story, by creating some art, or by writing some finished dialogue. But in all cases, there is an element of story writing that comes first, before the artist decides what to draw, or the dialogue writer decides what words will be said.

So knowing what sort of story writing is appropriate is paramount. Each single piece of story must be:

• Short. Whatever action you are describing or drawing must be presentable in no more than three pages of completed comic. It's not fair monopolising things with a vast epic.
• Consistent. The protagonists are in a race through space. Whatever you describe should relate to that in a sensible way.
• PG-rated. No graphic explorations of sex, violence, etc. Levels of innuendo and violence similar to TV sitcoms and family dramas are okay.

• Self-contained. It makes it much easier to build the comic story if your piece of action is a self-contained "episode" within the story. That means the characters and their ship end up in something similar to the position they started in: basically just racing through space. If all the episodes start with the crew zipping through space and end with them doing the same, they can be strung together in any order and it will still make sense. However, this doesn't mean the story is completely static - you can refer to events that have happened in earlier parts of the story.

Story ideas do not have to be entirely self-contained. As an example, someone might write a sequence where the characters land on a planet, ending with their arrival. This is okay, but other Monkeys are probably working on sequences that end with the characters flying through space. The planet sequence will appear in the comic, but new sequences that end with the characters in space will be slotted into the story before that scene. But once it is public knowledge that the characters end up on a planet at some point, Monkeys can start working on new scenes that take place on that planet.

The story will grow organically, with scenes shuffling around to find their natural place in the flow.