Desiderius Price

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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).

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.

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.

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.

One idea… write up that first seduction as a oneshot short story, and make it a prequel. If it’s original and you can center it around Halloween or the Winter holidays, it’d be a great addition to the annual round robin. (Alternatively, you can *start* a similar round robin in your particular fandom.)

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What? That’s limiting… More seriously, I learned by doing it wrong in my first original story (now deleted). I crammed it with so much backstory/flashback that I confused my readers and myself. On reflection, I realized I basically had multiple stories in one. So, I spun one backstory off as a regular chaptered story (complete), and the other off as an episodic serial (still WIP). And working on a second episodic to explain where the main protagonist’s swimming instructor came from, so yeah, gotta cut backstory off at a point or it’ll explode with plot bunnies and you’ll never get back around to writing the story you intended to write in the first place.

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When I write, I generally prefer “showing” over “telling”. Thus, don’t tell them a character is angry, show them slamming a door, raising their voice as they shout back, etc. Obviously there’s extremes to either end, 100% showing winds up with a 1M+ Harry Potter fanfic… I typically don’t like being told what to think, I prefer judging for myself, which is why I prefer showing over telling as I read and as I write. An internal monologue…sounds like either a good start to summary/outline or a wall of text doing info-dumping (use sparingly). However, a short monologue/dialogue is a decent way to introduce facts you want to de-emphasize to some degree, maybe soften/de-gory some bit of it (ie, a rape, an abortion). Overall, you can tell I favor character/story development over recapping, and it’s spun off stories as “character development”

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Was thing more venus fly trap style… anyways, requires a lot of thought

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Hmm….Halloween story, where the happy ending is the tragic ending. Not sure how to pull that off in the original universe I tend to write in.