Leaderboard

I try to never delete anything, and write things down...even if it’s 100 chapters in the future in terms of plot. A half scene, even if I know I’ll rewrite later, is nirvana in terms of having goal posts to write toward. I’d hand sketch out maps/blueprints, still good years later, notes, etc in spiral notebooks. I’ve still got the spreadsheet I started two decades ago, and that really helps. Having a naming system for the files helps too, thus I typically use something like YYMMDD-description.txt for the various snippets, which is, again, really useful in the rewrite many years later. It is funny to think that I’ve been working on this story for decades, and will likely still be working on it for decades to come… however, it’s nice that it’s being reworked into a much better story IMO.

For potter fanfic, there’s plenty of online things for Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley & Hogwarts… outside of that, I do the same thing I do with originals. Select a real place, permute the name so it’s fictional, and that typically gives me close enough so I can add things as necessary. (Also, on the odd chance my story hits success with TV/films, keeps fans from flooding a real person’s house/business). Of course, originals and the potter basically take place in modern society, so that’s why my trick works. If it’s fictional-fictional, like game of thrones, well, all bets are off, but that’s not what I’m typically writing outside of dream-like sequences (or inside fictional video games).

See, I couldn’t use Google maps because most of my locations are in fictional towns that don’t exist. I downloaded a fictional map for the purposes of figuring out the way the story would play out. But that’s as far as I tend to go.

Google maps has me beat for details. And in the originals, I now tend to cruise for online blueprints of something close to what I want, make a couple of “alterations” notes wise, and use that. (That’s what I did for my demon story.) Still, having a rough idea of the house/building helps me keep the details consistent, so a bit of time sketching is usually a good investment. That’s my chaotic process.

For sure, I’ve gotten into doing this quite a bit and it’s gotten more detailed recently. Many years ago I wrote down a bunch of summaries for stories that I only have recently gotten to. Some of which are being posted now. In fact, the most recent chapter on my Scooby Gang Time story is one of them. Though I ended up abandoning the original premise and went with something more canon dependent. More recently, I have started kinda writing little pieces of stories. For instance, the story that I asked this original thread about is one that is getting future pieces written in bits. While I was writing the story I just finished had a second chapter which I was writing small dialogue exchanges and general outlines of story development for the second chapter. A few years ago I didn’t do that. I went right into a story and didn’t write anything down until I got to it.

Even if you don’t post, I find writing background snippets helps immensely. Especially if you put the project on hiatus, come back to it years later. With my Harry Potter fanfic, I did that with key meetings even if they weren’t part of the actual narrative. I’d write up a minutes to the “Death Eaters” meetups, breakdown of what everybody knew, how they wanted to adapt their strategy. Funny enough, that’s a bit OOC compared to canon where the DEs seem to have an inflexible plan that Harry always fell into anyways. After a couple of comments from readers a bit perplexed, I had leveraged those minutes to create “Seeker/Keeper” scenes, short snippets that showed a touch of the conspiracy w/o revealing too much of it.