So you mean like this?

In a far off cliff lies a sword that is said to wield magical powers owned by a sorcerer.

something like that?

Try starting with a specific character experiencing a specific sensory input. Then describe that character's reaction to what they sensed. Then, their internal reaction should motivate them to either make a decision or take an action. Now you describe what that character does.

For example: While on his way to go fishing in his favorite trout stream, Jack caught a glimpse of something shiny in one of the cliffs bordering the stream. Probably just fool's gold. The mysterious shiny object twinkled temptingly in the morning sun, and the cool breeze seemed to urge Jack to adventure. Did he really want to scrape his hands up scaling that cliff? Probably spiders lurking in crevices there too. Well, maybe if it was a sufficiently impressive chunk of fool's gold he could give it to Lisa and she would be impressed that he found it... After tucking his fishing equipment under a bush where nothing would bother it Jack pressed his fingers into the first hand-hold and looked around for a foot-hold that would take his weight.


Another good exercise is a conversation. You've heard conversations all your life, you know the pace people talk at. Try just writing two characters talking to each other in a natural way.

I second Sun's advice; writing in a limited perspective. You pick an individual and write a work where the narrative knows what that individuals knows, when they know it. No "little did he know" or assertions about facts they're not aware of. Strictly. If you read a lot you know 3rd-person-limited isn't a rule but as a beginner you can learn a lot about avoiding flat assertions and making things natural by doing that. I'm writing a large story in 3rd-person-limited as an exercise.

Edit: fixing link. Go here and enter the words showing telling in the search box, then set the pull down menu right under that box to search titles only, then hit search.
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/search.php

I think I'll write a little into that topic here since it's usually not explained well beyond "show, don't tell", even if you Google it.

A belated response to this, the absolutewrite forums are an abundant source of writing-related explanations and advice if you know how to use their search engine. Here's what came up for threads with titles including showing and telling.

Oops. That's probably a winner.

I had said that cause I've seen numerous articles elsewhere that don't go much into it and I thought that was typical, but I admit I haven't looked in a long time.

Ok I'll write something different now so see if it suits like how you guys mentioned.

Once upon a time in a mystical land deep in the blue sky lives a dark void. This void is said to be pure evil as it absorbs souls by giving people nightmares. One night as Prince Jarell was sleeping in the kingdom, the void appeared in his dream and took him away. The King fell in despair after he found out that the doctors could not cure the poor prince. In an attempt to save his only son, he used the magic genie and made a wish to free his son. The Genie immediately vanished to thin air. But years passed and there was no sign of the prince and the genie's arrival. Where could they have been?

If this isn't good enough, then I think I might need another story writer.

Here's what came up for threads with titles including showing and telling.

"Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."
The search has expired. What was the search string you used?

I think we might be getting kind of off-base on the original question, actually. There is a real difference between writing a story for the story's sake (a novel, a short, etc...) and writing a story as a narrative for a game. A novel/short is self-contained prose, but a game story has many interconnected elements aside from the prose, including many visual elements. The behind-the-scenes work of constructing the story might be similar as for a novel (characterization exercises, setting exploration, etc...) but the presentation will be different. It is not quite suitable to write a full 250,000 word novel, if the end goal is a video game.

So I would say to take the story summary that you are writing (and your most recent post is yet another summary, not a story in itself) and begin to refine it. As you refine it, consider each element in the context of telling a story via a game. You've got a few characters there: Prince Jarell, the King and the genie. Explore those guys a bit. How old was Prince Jarell when he was taken? Was he a boy? What kind of boy was he? Happy, sad, serious, etc... And the King, what kind of King was he? A cruel despot, a benevolent idiot, an indifferent figurehead, an effective and loved monarch, etc... Where did they live? What was the nature of the Kingdom.... the setting, if you will? Who was the kingdom at war with? Could those enemies have been behind the disappearance, perhaps in league with this evil void? And what, exactly, is this evil void? When has it appeared before, by what laws or principles does it operate? Where did it come from? How can it be defeated?

It's all about the details. Your above summary is just that: a summary. And a very basic one at that. True story comes in the details, lives in the paragraphs and scenes and settings, the interactions of characters that are as close to real as you can make them. Why should we care whether Jarell disappeared? We don't know him at all, he's just a name. Are we supposed to cheer for the genie in his search to free Jarell, or should we be afraid of him and whatever ruthless methods he might apply in the granting of the wish? Are we supposed to feel sad for the king, or are we supposed to understand that the King himself might be behind the disappearance? Perhaps Jarell was a sacrifice made unto the void so that the king himself might achieve some dark reward--extended life, extended powers, whatever. Or perhaps Jarell went willingly to the void, drawn by his own dark nature. Any of this could be possible, but from your summary we know absolutely none of it, nor are we given hints at all to guide us in coming to conclusions. We have, again, a set of facts with no emotional pull. Again, it might as well be your weekly shopping list.

How is this story going to be given to us in the context of the game? Is all of this just going to be game-intro expository stuff, or are we going to find it out as the game progresses? When we play the game, from whose viewpoint will we see it? The genie? The king? Prince Jarell? Or someone else, asked by the king to figure out what happened? How much information can our character be assumed to possess from the start, and how much must we learn as we go?

You are seeing, perhaps, that writing of any sort (novel, game, or otherwise) is far more than just typing out a few sentences based on a crudely formed idea in your head. You have to put work into it, real work. You can't just pull airy farts out of your brain and expect people to like it. Just like building a house requires mastery of tools and materials, constructing a story requires a firm grasp on the principles of narrative, of grammar and language, of manipulating the building blocks of sentences and paragraphs, to achieve something that is other than merely the sum of the words.

[quote name='sunandshadow' timestamp='1319009519' post='4874191']
Here's what came up for threads with titles including showing and telling.

"Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."
The search has expired. What was the search string you used?
[/quote]
Darn I was afraid linking to a search might not work. I used the two terms showing and telling and chose the settings to display threads with those words in the title only.

Ok I'll write something different now so see if it suits like how you guys mentioned.

Once upon a time in a mystical land deep in the blue sky lives a dark void. This void is said to be pure evil as it absorbs souls by giving people nightmares. One night as Prince Jarell was sleeping in the kingdom, the void appeared in his dream and took him away. The King fell in despair after he found out that the doctors could not cure the poor prince. In an attempt to save his only son, he used the magic genie and made a wish to free his son. The Genie immediately vanished to thin air. But years passed and there was no sign of the prince and the genie's arrival. Where could they have been?

If this isn't good enough, then I think I might need another story writer.

Well, FLeBlanc is right that story writing for games is a bit different. It also depends what kind of game. If you are making the kind of game that only has a few paragraphs of text in the whole game the way something like Mario 3 does, then the quality of that text isn't very important as long as it's easily understood by players. But if you want to write something like a Myst game, Final Fantasy, Zelda, Okami, Starcraft/Warcraft, etc, those require a pretty large amount of pretty high quality writing, so you'd either have to get someone with a bit of experience or you'd have to work hard to learn how to write well.

In pretty much all cases I recommend against such lore dumps.

However, if that's what you're going for (and otherwise some very light writing), than you can if you can manage to make the whole paragraph work as it's own super-short story.

I'm pretty baked right now but I'm going to rejig it a tad and see what I come up with.

Prince Jarell went to bed one night and bed's where he stayed. His dad found every shaman, doctor, priest and (somehow) a genie to wake him, but they failed, and time runs out when you can't eat. They say the "void" came and took his mind that night. They might say the same for you if you don't wake up.[/quote]

This would lead into a dream-world adventure and you might meet the prince and the genie later and other characters who can expand on things, and you'd develop a lot of material as you go; the quote above does little more than lead into the actual adventure. Lots of details are left off and vague. There is no lore in it; it paints a picture of what happens when the void comes, then maps that onto the friends and family of the protagonist (without actually mentioning them). It closes with a more easily said than done instruction.

This instruction is your ultimate goal for the game (the one I just made up).

Also important w/r/t cultivating a mental image of the void, is that it does so strictly in terms of its affect on the human experience.