#cozy witches process

I spent the whole past week at a writing retreat. I showed up with a loose version of Cozy Witches including character profiles, a magic system, some worldbuilding, and general character motivations.

But I had very little in terms of plot direction.

At the writing retreat, I talked to a lot of other writers, workshopped the idea, and set up a causal chain and a rough idea of the plot. I started an outline. I was making progress.

But I didn't care.

Something about this story is a little broken, because it was born from writing about an Issue: burnout. It was never a story idea that collided together and melted into something new in the alchemy of my thoughts. It never filled me with the same compulsion for brainrot as my other projects. And I fought to make it work anyway, because I was desperate to prove to myself that I am a Real Writer, not just a Fanfic Writer.

And then I told my writer friends about the fics I write.

And it became so clear to them, and then to me, that what I write as fic IS Real Writing. I reuse characters and I make references to canon but I plot entirely original story events and arcs. I create a new story that no one has ever told before. The Space Lads series has a similar premise to The Martian and it borrows from insights in The Habitat podcast, but it is its own story. It departs from those influences immediately. Scenes are never borrowed from other material. Everything I do is original. Thick As Thieves started as a joke with Eddie The Password Forgetter about which D&D class each Haikyuu character would be, and it organically grew a plot because I wanted to justify to him why Hinata Shouyou, sunshine boy, would ever be a Rogue, the 'criminal' class in D&D. Hinata had high dexterity - and maybe he would steal things, but only if he had a really really really good reason and he needed to do whatever it took to reach his goal. What if the powerful king in this hypothetical kingdom was evil, and was doing evil things, and stealing his magical artifact would save everyone? Then Hinata would be stealing something, but it would be a Good Thing. That's how TAT was born - very much as a stream of ideas that overhwelmed me as they came, and I took dictation from the Muse until I'd written a draft.

That never happened with Cozy Witches. And it never will. Not the way Cozy Witches exists now.

And I didn't want to feel like a failure. And I didn't want to give up. But I realized something this morning: I think the Cozy Witches, all the work I put into them so far, are meant for something else. Another story. Something in my subconscious that hasn't come out yet.

And I need to plant them, deliberately, in the compost pile of discarded ideas, because I believe that something beautiful will grow if I leave them there long enough.

Something different will emerge from me letting them go.

And I realized I don't like internal conflicts enough to make this story the way I originally imagined it.

I'm going back to the beginning with Cozy Witches and questioning a lot of my initial impressions of the story, the characters, the world. Do both witches need to be struggling with burnout? What do I want the story to say? What does the magic represent? What does each witch teach and provide the other that they cannot see themselves?

And I'm basically starting all over again. The original outline? It's going to get ripped to pieces. And that's scary, throwing out all that work. But this is going to be a better story because of it. It's going to be deeper, more layered, more nuanced. The work wasn't wasted, but it is going to be reborn into something unrecognizable.

I've been writing nonstop fanfic for a long time now, and the process of working on original fiction again, creating the characters from scratch - their motivations and their flaws from scratch, their dynamics from scratch - is tough but rewarding. It's hard for me to take so long on development without seeing word count "progress" because with fanfic I'm usuall at the drafting phase so much faster, and the pressure is so much lower. But I'm getting back into it. It's rewarding in a whole other way.

I'm not "writing" yet, but I did go back through my old outline and started to question some things about the story structure, assumptions I made about the beats and the character arcs, assumptions I've made in the worldbuilding. I'm just trying to get back into thinking about the story, but without pressuring myself to be 'productive' (which is ironic, considering how this is a story about burnout and productivity with MaGiC!).

My brain operates so much on momentum. It's one of the reasons I can't juggle multiple projects, and it's why I tend to hyperfixate and overwork myself. Once I get momentum on a story, and I'm thinking about it in the shower, and I'm thinking about it on the Tube, and I'm dreaming about it, and I notice everything in my real life with relation to that story, it's glorious. But to get that momentum started is hard.