#spaceace00

Shortish answer: My fics typically begin life as a Scene that kind of just. Unfolds in my head. Which means step one of any attempt to outline is literally a braindump stream-of-consciousness style, trying to get as much of that scene written as I can before it mysteriously vanishes, never to return. As a general rule I write in order, unless there’s something that Appears to me that needs to be written RIGHT NOW (but that goes in a sep doc for when I Get To That Point tbh because more often than not, I have to tweak it to fit what’s actually going on once I get there.) I typically have a very loose outline: I generally know where I’d like it to end, though sometimes figuring out where to start can be difficult, and there are definitely parts of the so-called outline that are variations of “lulz sure hope you have an idea by the time you get here bitch bc I don’t” I am also a chronic re-writer. I have been known to get stuck on a scene because something is WRONG and I’ll have to poke at a different wip for a day or two until I can untangle what’s wrong with the main one. I can’t skip past that snarl, my brain doesn’t work like that: every scene informs the one that comes next, so I need to have the prior scene written. It’s the scaffolding to continue building. A first draft is putting sand in a box. It’s telling yourself the story. It’ll never be as bad as the first time it’s written, and written is something I can fix, but Not Written means I can’t do anything about it. So. Write it. Get it out. Figure it out as it comes. Have a back up project to play with when you need a day to let it simmer.

Long answer: The very first inkling of Severed Space Bitten Time was actually a bunch of nonsense-crack I threw in a group chat for my own entertainment:

But this is more disjointed than usual because the concepts are a bit more highbrow than I typically start with. The initial braindump for Foregone Conclusion was literally the scene where Atsushi’s eavesdropping outside the infirmary door. I just. Threw it out as it appeared in my head and then, well. The next part is: Where do I want to go with this? What is the point? What is this scene about, and, thusly, what emotion or theme am I playing with today?

And for SSBT, the answer to that was, “I want them to merge into one being/accidental soulmates-via-becoming-spacetime-itself/Choosing to become exactly what the other one needs,” which meant I had to refresh myself on all the random physics I’ve picked up over the years first. It ended up looking like this:

notably, this is for the BEGINNING of the fic. Very rushed, very much just keeping track of the emotions and big moments, concepts being used. The doc for SSBT’s outline, once I took the time to neaten it up for my own sanity, is over 3k. However, when I started writing, all I had was this, some very very thin sketches for the middle (things like: protect akutagawa, build up to a full merge, hallucination maybe) and two different scenes for the ending that very much contradicted each other but helped me keep in mind what vibe I was striving to build up.

I no longer have the outline for Foregone Conclusion, but as evidenced by uhh 90% of my other wips, my outline is really just a series of bullet points I want to hit and roughly sketched out scenes as they come to me (learning that sometimes I had to let go of those points was very annoying. But. Y’know. Sometimes the point is good, but you can make the point better a different way. Sometimes it just doesn’t fit once it’s written.) And it’s literally just “Okay, we did X. Because of X, what should/could happen?” Or the reverse, if the scene I start with isn’t a beginning scene: how do I make this happen? What must have already happened to get HERE? Foregone’s eavesdropping was originally Dazai being a bitch about the coat. I skipped back a bit and went, why/how is atsushi hearing this and why doesn’t he just barge in? Turns out he was anxious and unsure, and he’d been trying to be sweet by getting something from the cafe. And hey, turns out Dazai didn’t want to be as bitchy about the coat as I started out either, but he DID want a minute without a hovering and protective weretiger. SSBT is kind of an outlier in that I took a a bit to pin down the beginning, because I spent so much time poking through the physics of… all the physics I never actually mention in the damn fic. The middle section’s notes are very brief and mostly a list of the enemy’s insane overpowered bullshit with potential ways to counter. Still angry about helicopter-gozen, tbh.

The first attempt at chapter five had stuff like this

This whole thing was culled because I realized quickly it just felt wrong tbh so I went and did a quick re-read of what’s been published; I plucked out the threads I want to tie off, the big emotions, the major changes, repeated lines, and once I had that in a list I said okay. As a reader, what would be the most satisfactory ending to this that doesn’t feel like a cop-out? And part of what I struggled with until literally last night was—my brain enjoys reading long involved fics. I want to be eyeballs deep at all times. Give me all the details. Break it down for me from five directions. I want to marinate in this story, please. So—I was setting up ch5 to ensure I had to write a ch6 and a ch7 and and and—and that’s not the kind of fic I set out for, this time. The story is about them becoming and accepting their unity: I told that part of the story already. I just need to give them a new beginning; I don’t need to write the ending to that new beginning too. I need to write this one in such a way that the reader knows whatever comes after my story, they’re okay. Very different parameters. While writing, I keep the most relevant bullet points in the same doc and literally just write above it, crossing off the points as I hit them or realize they’re better off elsewhere/useless after all. That’s why I tend to keep my chapters in separate documents within a single file. I’ve also got the main outline, which has all of the bullet points and self-rants in one very messy pile, usually a cull document for bits that dont fit but might be useful elsewhere… SSBT also has a doc for the divine being/fyodor’s attributes and abilities, breaking down the swords involved etc, and another to keep track of the terms I never used anyway.