#diamondogs1

When you’re making an AU, it really helps if you have some kind of goal in mind (I say even though I’ve stumbled into like half of mine). Basically, in Undertale but this applies to any fandom with a heavy fanart presence, what is going to be the main point of your AU - the designs/visuals, or the story? One isn’t any better than the other, mind! But I’ve definitely seen AUs that were more about character designs, or settings, or visual moments, or one particular relationship, than any kind of overarcing plot. Which, again, is fine! But if you want to do something like this, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time on the visuals - you’re going to be doing a lot of art, and reference sheets, and character design. You need to come up with something that’s going to catch other artist’s attention - they’re going to be your primary audience and potentially your biggest promoters. Is that one of your strong points? If so, then go for it!

And if you’re just batting around AU ideas for fun, a visually based AU is pretty low-stress - if you can’t figure out any particular reason for anything happening, it doesn’t matter since there’s no plot to adhere to. It’s unlikely anyone will call you on it. On the other hand, if your designs don’t grab people immediately, you’re not going to be able to find any traction because there’s no story to build any investment. Outertale is a primarily visually based AU for example, as far as I can tell.

Similar to this is a “concept” AU, very common in Undertale and a close relative of the above. In this case, it’s usually just one core concept, and everything gets spun out from that. What if everyone was a robot, what if everyone was a ghost, what if everyone was evil, what if everyone was in space, what if everyone was in an asylum, what if everyone switched places. In this case, you need to find a good concept that people are going to latch onto and want to explore, and that’s hard, especially in a saturated market, so to speak. If your concept doesn’t lend itself to exploration from others, or to a particularly strong or unique story, or play off of popular fandom tropes, then you’re going to have trouble getting it off the ground. The simpler the concept, the easier it’ll be for others to pick up - Underswap and Underfell are easy to explain in five words, and the characters are flat and have simple designs and are easy to transpose into various situations, so you see those AUs everywhere. The more complicated your concept, the more work you’ll have to do to “sell” it to others, and the harder it’ll be for people to jump into. If you have a hypothetical AU where everyone’s a cowboy in the 1850s, but also an animatronic, and magic works on solar power, and humans and monsters have an elaborately complicated social relationship, and various canon relationships have been shuffled around according to a lot of interwoven rules, it’s going to be harder for people to grab and run with than “US!Sans is a hyper five year old” or “UF!Papyrus is edgy Skeletor”.

Along the same lines, if your AU characters are detailed and complicated and have a set-in-stone plot and story, that’s also harder for people to quickly grab than a vague outline of a character. You can’t really say any interpretation of an Underswap or Underfell character is OOC because they’re so loosely defined and there’s no one canon story for their AUs, and that makes it easy for people to do their own thing with. Fandom likes having some flexibility and blank spaces to fill in.

If you’ve read about this kind of thing before, you’ve probably heard of an elevator pitch… basically, it’s an exercise where you imagine that you’re in an elevator with the director/creator/producer of your dreams, and you have to sell your idea to them and convince them to make it in the thirty seconds before you/they get off the elevator. Popular stories often have simple, powerful, short summaries. “Cowboys in space” for Star Wars for example. Ideas like that are high concept i.e. punchy/short, while ideas like the cowboy-robot thing above would be low concept i.e. complicated/subtle. Note: this does not mean that high concept stories are better than low concept ones, just that they’re often easier to sell, and that applies in a fandom context as well. This Dusttale thing I’ve seen going around where Sans is a murderer and kills Papyrus is high concept (also OOC if you ask me, but note that I haven’t really talked about IC vs. OOC so far. If you’re playing off a tried and true fandom trope, people often won’t care about canon characterization, if the trope is appealing enough) and so are things like Dancetale (everyone dances) or Something’s Missing (sans is dead). In contrast something like the Insomnia comic or Helptale or Gaster!Sans (since I still don’t know what that’s about despite briefly looking into it, haha) would be more low concept, since they’re harder to summarize quickly. Again, it’s not a value judgment! It’s just how easy they are to quickly explain and grasp.

Another note: A concept by itself is not a story. You can certainly make a story out of a concept, but the concept itself is not a story. While you can attract people with a good concept, the real winning combination is a good concept AND a good story.

At any rate, low concept, high concept, whichever one you choose, you should love that concept and be willing to put the time and effort into it because you love it and love the story you can tell with it. Because if you’re just doing it to try and get popular, no one’s going to be happy and a lot of the time, people can tell if you’re pandering or your heart’s not in it. If you’re going to expend a lot of work and energy on something, at the end of the day, it should be something you really enjoy looking at and feel passionate about, at least. Otherwise why even do it?

Anyway, AU is a term that gets broad usage in fandom, to the point where it gets applied to pretty much any story that’s not strictly canon. This is sort of where we hit the other end of things - plot-focused AUs. These can be long or short stories, doesn’t matter, although a long story is a harder sell (it’s much easier to read a four page comic than read 80k words), though on the other hand long WIPs can build large audiences over time. One of the hardest things to know is whether your story idea is good in the first place. Countless books have been written about determining this, haha. I’m not an expert! A good plot hook is hard to find.

But one thing that can help give an idea some direction is to try and think of a basic theme for your AU. What is your AU trying to explore? What ideas does it want to present, or address? Are you exploring the morality of life and death? Are you exploring the nature of personal choice? Is it a story about redemption and forgiveness, or about mercy and kindness, or about cruelty and a hard heart? What kind of point do you want to make with it? An overarcing theme helps tie your entire story together, and it can help guide you when you’re lost. It also helps it resonate with people and leaves a lasting impression. Undertale has a clear theme about choices and mercy in it - if you’re doing an Undertale AU, are you going to comment on those themes yourself? Will your AU reflect different opinions than the original game, or explore or deepen the themes it presented, or will it explore something entirely different? Asking yourself these questions can help you get more of a feel for your story, and sometimes let you know if your idea’s weak or strong.

A rough outline of your story, including the ending, can also help keep you on track. I again refer back to more standard writing advice about story structure here. When you know the structure of your story, even if it’s just the bare bones of it, it’s more cohesive and it flows better, and you’re less likely to write yourself into a corner. It also lets you see your story from a macro perspective, which can be helpful. Is it the kind of story you’d want to read? Would you recommend it to a friend? Would you watch it on TV? If not, how can you fix it or punch it up to make it grab more people?(You can of course just wing it as well and make up your story as you go, haha. Good AUs have come out of that too! But it really, really helps to have an outline.)

One of the things I remember reading about the development of Half-Life is that basically Valve ran what they’d made by play-testers, made a note of all the segments that the testers thought were fun, then got rid of all the boring parts. As a result, Half-Life is always throwing cool, interesting things at you. You never get bored, there’s no grinding or anything, there’s always some new, intriguing thing ahead just when you got tired of what you had. While you can’t make a story constant climaxes (unless you’re ShakespeareHemmingway, who always ups the ante when you need them to every time!), your audience is going to be interested in the “high points” more than the low ones. Think through your idea and find the “high points” - what are your coolest scenes? What are your hardest hitting emotional moments? What are your most exciting plot twists? These are your strong points, and the points your audience is going to remember and be interested in! They’re what you’ll want to build up to and support! There’s a balance to strike between constant cliffhangers and nothing happening of course, but if you can cut down deadtime, it’s pretty much always a good idea. Always ask yourself “Is this scene necessary? Does this scene have a distinct point? Does it reveal something, advance someone’s character or the plot, have an emotional payoff, or set up something to come? Do the characters really need to do this? Or am I just stalling for time?” because the more you stall, the more people are going to get bored. On the other hand, if you go too quickly, your high points won’t have any impact because there’s no build-up or suspense. Pacing is very hard to get right.