So youâve got an idea for a storyâŚ.
Once again and as always, writing is highly subjective and any writing advice that says you *must* do X or all books *must* include Y or doing Z during your writing process is *wrong* kind of misses the point of the freedom of storytelling and Iâm not a fan. This is how I approach writing and one way you could consider doing the same if youâve got all these ideas and nowhere to put them, not the way you must approach writing.
Weâll start with how I write fanfic because thatâs a far less intimidating market. I donât write drabble fics and coffee shop AUs. I grew up writing fix-it fics and in-universe canon divergences. Essentially: Stop the real story right here, now what if this happened instead?
Personally, I just donât get fulfillment from writing fanfic fluff (though I do love reading it). Even if Iâm committing time and effort into something that will never make me money and that people might not even read for fun due to dead fandoms or whatever, Iâm still going to use it as writing exercise and give it some substance.
Thatâs just me, though. I used to write stuff like character studies and deep dives, and the last fic I wrote to date was a âhey what if this villain went to the good side way sooner and it wasnât just played as a joke on his cowardice?â and its sequel.
So I started that first fic with an idea: What if K joined the good guys earlier? How would that impact the story?
Immediately after that, I was thinking about the ending and what tentpole ideas in the canon I wanted to keep, but the meat of the story I knew I wanted to focus on Kâs emotional and existential struggle of switching sides, risking becoming an enemy to both factions, after the inciting incident of his (absolutely canonical) partnerâs murder, that, in canon, did not get the justice he deserved. When I wrote my post about beginnings and endings, I said that endings for me are way easier than beginningsâthis is why. Before I even start writing, my ending is decided.
Basically: Yes, Iâm writing a story using someone elseâs fictional characters, as one does when writing fanfic. The story uses cartoon characters, but itâs about one personâs struggle with their identity in the wake of tragedy, and how they take life by the horns to make it out of the story the hero they deserve to be recognized as.
And with that core idea in mind, then I write the story around it. The story, which, outside the canon that I had to keep, I had no plan for. The settings and minutiae of the set pieces werenât as important as what each scene did for the themes and Kâs emotional reaction to them happening. I needed to give him enough alone time with the characters of the hero team to learn something from them, enough time on his own to test his new loyalties, and enough time with his old team so he can juxtapose the two and make sure heâs doing the right thing by deserting.
The last thing on my mind was what tropes I wanted to fulfill. Romantic subplots and the like just kind of happened organically and werenât planned.
For Eternal Night of the Northern Sky the idea I had was this: Most vampire stories are about the drama surrounding vampires that depend on humans to survive. So what if I wrote a story where humans depended on vampires to survive, in the exact same way?
Yes, the story is about vampires and everyone can say what they will about people who write vampire fiction. But itâs really about what it means to be a monster when survival demands some brutal decisions. What does it mean to be a monster if everyone is a monster?
ENNS wasnât planned, I just started writing and had the first draft done in 31 days and through the entire editing process, the plot didnât change from draft 1 to draft final, save for a few scenes where I had to fix the surface level problem some characters were facing, but not the reason why they were facing it.
The plot never needed massive rewrites because every scene reflected back on the core themes of the story, and every single scene was necessary to tell it. So even when I had to change the intensity of an argument or flesh out a conversation or change the tone of something here or there, the purpose of whatever was underneath remained.
With that throughline in mind, the rest of the book fell into place around it. My core characters each have a role to answer that thematic question, and side characters around then were created to fill in the world, provide friends, relatives, romances, and the like, each with their own perspectives still on that one big question. My villains, too, all exist to answer that question. Outside of the romances, every single scene is doing at least one thing either for the plot, the protagonist, or the deuteragonist to answer that question. ENNSâ secondary themes were also written into as many scenes as I could (of which I wonât spoil here).
When you write with a theme like this in mind, it gives you these sort of bowling bumper rails to help keep you from straying off into superfluous storylines that bog down the pacing and start to feel messy.
Yes, youâre writing fanfic. But what is it really about? Now maybe it is just a coffee shop AU or 50k words of smutâyou do you. Not everything has to be deep and meaningful beyond being entertaining. Themes just provide direction.
For example, I like the idea of slowburn fanfics. The idea. I will happily sit down for a fic thatâs half a million words long if the characters and the slowburn are compelling enough. There might not be themes, but the story never forgets its throughlineâthese two characters eventually coming together.
In practice, though, I see way too many âslowburnâ fics out there that are just 90% fluff. The chapters stagnate, trading development for taunting the audience with the will they/wonât they. The plot toddles off to to play around in irrelevant scenes with irrelevant characters. Things that probably wouldnât bother me if I wasnât already expecting the romance that was promised, the romance I have to keep waiting for when I could just go read something else that delivers it faster and clearer.
Even if your writing process begins with a few scattered sticky notes and a notion of what you kind of want it to be about, you donât have to hammer out pages of prose to be productive.
If you get stuck halfway through, having your throughline helps you sit back and ask yourself this very important question: What does Character want, how do they get it, and whatâs in their way?
