#dive in

love ur story ssmsm have a nice day<3

hi!! im so glad you liked the fic! and of course im happy to talk about my process 🙂‍↕️

first things first, i have to be honest and confess i did not outline at first 😭 i had a vague idea of some tropes/plot points i wanted to hit (rivals with benefits, miscommunication, etc), but i mainly wrote the first chapter based on the characterizations i had in my head. at the time i was working on my other college au, and i wanted to take some ideas id had for that which i didnt use and put them somewhere else

so, first chapter goes up, and i really thought no one would care about it since it appealed to my specific niche interests lol. but, it got a bit of interaction and a few comments that really motivated me

the second chapter is when i started to lay the groundwork for the emotional plot, and when i realized i wanted this to be as much a mini megumi character study as it was an itafushi romance. at that point i started to make a rough outline. i thought of the ending (the finals) (though how the finals would go for megumi was up in the air until i wrote it), and then a few key plot points i wanted to hit, but it was all still very loose

as i wrote the next few chapters, i sort of let the characters lead me rather than forcing a particular storyline. they weren't meant to kiss until like chapter 5, but while writing that scene i was like um actually lets make these guys supah gay and horny IMMEDIATELY!

by chapter 6, i was pretty set on the plot, but how each plot point developed kind of came to me as i wrote. i had planned to drag out the will they-wont they secret hooking up arc out a lot longer (like there wasnt supposed to be anything emotional until like chapter 10, and it was meant to be a quick wrap up (you can see in my authors notes that the expected chaps goes from 10 to 11 to 12 until i finally settled on 13 and an epilogue lol)

because i was letting the characterizations lead over the plot, the second half of the fic ended up diving a lot deeper (pun intended) into megumi's mental state than i ever initially planned. the ED was a throwaway thing in chapter 2, and by chapter 11 it was the crux of megumi's struggle and the symbolic center of his issues. i was working off my own (much less serious) experiences, and ended up really enjoying delving down that hole

the switch up is kind of noticeable because it goes from heavy frequent smut to they arent even on speaking terms LOL which was unexpected for me. my thought process was that more smut would have served the plot, but not the characters. this also became clear to me as characters like kamo and sukuna became ways to reflect different characteristics about megumi and yuuji rather than key agents in the plot, which isn't what I'd initially intended

anyway, my main point is that for me the planning was less about the plot and more about the characters! i would say on average i planned about 2 chapters ahead of where i was at. then i would have a point i needed to be at by the end of each chapter (eg. by the end of x chapter megumi needs to be in y state of mind and yuuji needs to be thinking z), but how i got there came as i was writing!