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Totally get that although I try to stay in line with canon as much as possible. So I don’t have to worry too much about backstory. I have a fic that I wrote the first two chapters of many years ago that is outlining an entire day per chapter. One chapter is 60 pages long and almost 20k words.

I say go for it. I’m participating in the nh fair and wrote a one-shot of a story I plan on writing later, there was huge support for it and the feedback I got was incredibly helpful in shaping my outline for it. I think it’s a great opportunity to get a pulse on what kind of interest it’ll generate and you might get some really unique ideas from your readers. Well worth a trial run.

I know that game, lol. I used to think it was a joke when writers would say that a story took on a life of its own, its so true. My Naruto fic Monster has truly become a monster. It was one of the few stories I knew the ending to but had to figure out a beginning, but I got soooo lost in the beginning and middle that it’s become this 400,000 word smut collection (mostly) It was intended to be a 20 chapter smut/horror story, laying heavy on the psychological horror aspect but I just had so many ideas for this and that, and it just turned into idk wtf. I’m slowly getting back to its roots, lol, but now that it’s gotten so huge, I’ve had no choice but to plan for two more parts after. I’ve put my foot down on going farther than a trilogy though, otherwise it’d never end and I’ve got other stories I need to work on.

Cool. I did something similar. I started with a long fanfic and that allowed me to realize how I was going to get into original work. I went away from fanfic for several years to write original stuff. Now I’ve come back to fanfic and it’s helped me see what I’m doing and understand my stories better. I thought you were talking about OCs in fanfic. Personally not a big fan of OCs but I get that, my main issue is when you recreate an OC that’s basically a carbon copy of the fandom main character. Lots of long stories get written with OCs as their main characters. Most of my stories were focused on fandom characters with smaller characters being OCs if necessary.

One twist you can do, especially if you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of writing backstory character development fics, is to write it as an episodic serial. Thus each chapter is an “episode”, with its own mini-plot contributing to the overarching development you’re after. Characterization backstories, where I’m simply filling in their character(s) using the episodes to define it, are the most agreeable to this format.

Cool. Having stories that breed plot bunnies is how the adventure grows. Half debating to simply post my Halloween story as the first chapter to a longer story, myself.

I get it. When I first started writing I didn’t have any idea how I was going to end the story. My first story was done by the seat of my pants and ended up, as I mentioned just above, over 100 chapters and 150k words not counting the sequels which also weren’t planned. By the end of the trilogy (which has since become a quadrilogy… for now) I was writing with a plan in mind but nothing written down. With the stuff that I’m posting here, it’s sort of a mix. I had one piece that’s currently up on the site which was intended to be a one shot that I wrote in a 48 hour time frame. Then I did some editing and adding, which lead to a second chapter and an idea for a third chapter but have decided not to write (for now). But I’ve also written stories that have a specific end point when I first started writing it. Also, I wrote a story a while ago with a specific ending but then ended up creating an alternate ending where the story could continue.