Themes Of Healing...Woah

I happened to strike a gold mine of examples from the midst of creating chapter 25 (the Ralsei one). The conversation ended up VERY different than it was in the near-final versions I'm going to show you here, which I think makes it a perfect example.

I started with a basic concept: Spamton and Tenna hang out with Ralsei, because post-chapter 4 I wanted Ralsei to have a Darkner adult who cares about him (Flowery ended up fitting this bill funny enough, in his own way). This isn't a fic about Ralsei though, so I had two real goals for the larger plot:

Spamton's prophecy pep talk, which expands on his conversations with Seam, keeps his in-game promise to help the kids in a different form, and gives some idea of what that poor pipis daughter has in store

Tenna more directly confronts that he is starting to see the Darkner-Lightner distinction/disparity as less important, i.e. Spamton rubbing off on him in a really positive way.

Bonus: the pipis daughter's existence as an unexpected defiance of fate. Scribz actually predicted this in fanart without any inkling that it was already planned in my doc

Ideally, any scene should serve more than one purpose. That can be payoff for something earlier, character development, conflict, expanding on a theme, etc.

So now I need to come up with a plot. I need to get Spamton and Ralsei alone for a weird mentor talk, and I need Tenna to treat Ralsei like he would one of his viewers.

I come up with scenes to suit those purposes, and I make a very loose bulleted outline. Then I do a second, third, fourth, however many passes I need to on adding more detail and refining the ideas. A few "rules" I live by here:

If I'm stuck on what comes next (ESPECIALLY if all my ideas don't feel entirely in character), then the bullet before that is usually where the problem stems from. That bullet needs to go. And if I can't come up with a replacement for it, then the one before it needs to go too

If the whole OUTLINE for a scene no longer serves what you're working towards or it doesn't excite you, then kill it! The third chapter of my current project has seen 4 different complete outlines that I scrapped

Don't write anything you aren't excited about writing. It will clog your whole process. I know writers (myself included) often have the one scene they are really looking forward to writing, and they have to "get through" the rest in order to get to it. It doesn't have to be that way! Create a new scene that accomplishes the same purpose

Whenever possible or tonally appropriate, give the characters something to do that gives drive and structure to pacing. Seam and Spamton playing poker for the Shadow Crystal to underscore their philosophical conversation, for instance (<- whenever I am stuck, I go "I need a little more Seam chapter in this one." I'm still so proud of that)

Stage your scenes like a play. How we move in a space and our body language can be as telling as our words. You can display character through this too

Eventually, as I'm starting to write, I will start to transition the top bullet points into paragraph by paragraph notes {like this}

I was writing the outlines in Comic Sans for the visual distinction on and off. It's kind of a rambling, goofy mess

You may be thinking, "K, I don't think any of that happened in the chapter." And you're right. When I scroll up just a smidge, I had already made a version I liked better

Green text is what I had recently typed into the legit prose. I don't know why I didn't do {my little brackets} here, or why it's now not in Comic Sans, but the content is similar. The gist of dialogue, some internal thoughts and body language. You can immediately see the comparison between the last two lines I had written and the outline I was working off of. I kept the old Comic Sans one below it just in case there were ideas I wanted to salvage from it.

This is now closer to what ended up in the final chapter, but not all the way! Some distracting stuff from the outline gets left on the cutting room floor, and some more impactful ideas come to me as I type. Here's the final for comparison.

Ralsei clocking the Kris-Spamton parallels in real time and reacting accordingly was never in my outline, but it's one of my favorite details in the scene.

Spamton setting a spoon on fire earlier wasn't in the outlines either, but the scene was dry and needed action.

For the very ending, I wrote down what happens while Spamton is blue screening (though I hadn't actually come up with the effect yet!). Even if it didn't end up "on screen", I thought it was important context for me to have when writing.

I'm citing inspirations for mood, I'm jotting down any descriptive phrases that come to mind, and I kind of get all of my "tell" out of the way so that I can translate it into "show" when I put it into prose.

That's my typical process! The Addison dinner required a beat-by-emotional-beat chart to track the motivations of all 6 characters throughout all the dramatic twists and turns, but that only came after several bullet lists that narrowed down what those beats were. Balancing a big cast is really hard! You don't want to lose anyone but you don't want it to feel like everyone is going around in a circle saying lines

This is after the yellow Addison starts pushing about the identity of Spamton's benefactor. They all start kissing up to Tenna and feigning ignorance, but I wanted to have the little differences in reaction jotted down. They're a conglomerate with slight variations

My current project is a 5 chapter, pretty linear progression, so I started my outline by writing out what the five emotional shifts should be. To just model that idea with some TaaTT chapters:

Ch 14: Spamton will do anything to make show promo go well so Tenna won't leave him for a Lightner -> Spamton meets adversity when being himself, so he decides to try something more palatable

Ch 15: Spamton is trying to act like a marketable Addison -> Tenna thinks Spamton is being controlled by the phone again

Ch 16: Tenna needs to save Spamton from the demons -> Tenna realizes Spamton is doing that himself, tells him he likes his men short and freakish, and Spamton ends up more confident as they go into their show