Story breadth and depth

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Story breadth and depth

Postby animefan78 » Sun Apr 24, 2022 4:34 pm

I wasn't quite sure how to title let alone write this post or if it is even the best place for it so here it goes.

My writing style fluctuates between some planning and stream of conscious writing what pops into my head. This has led me to not finish a number of works due to my expanding the story beyond what I originally had planned for it for example I had planned for my HP story to be around 100K not the monster it has turned into. (It is several times that by now and only a little over 50% complete, I do not plan on stopping it). My question then is how do you write your stories and keep them focused and not turning them into ever expanding works.
animefan78
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Re: Story breadth and depth

Postby jsmt » Mon Apr 25, 2022 7:13 am

I sometimes write the epilogue just after writing the first few pages of my story. That helps me keep it somewhat focused and makes me remember to tell in my story some details about how and why the character got to that point. It also marks the point when the story should end (Let's say the fairytale-kiss moment).

That was the case with my story “Thesis Topic 23”. I wrote the epilogue after writing chapter 1, so from there popped a character (Megan), a scene (Megan’s apartment cleaning), and the little adventure at “The Dark Horse”. More details about the story plot surged from the epilogue but I won’t put more spoilers here ;) , although if you have read the story and re-read the epilogue, you may find a lot of the plot is already there.

regards
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Re: Story breadth and depth

Postby animefan78 » Mon Apr 25, 2022 12:33 pm

I never thought of starting with the ending first, though it does seem to make sense when I think about it. I might try that and see if it helps keep me a bit more focused.
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Re: Story breadth and depth

Postby GraceFairway6 » Sun May 29, 2022 12:58 am

Hey animefan78,

I'm a similar writer to you, in that I bounce between planning and just writing whatever comes to mind. An approach that has worked for me is vaguely planning out the story in terms of key scenes that I want to hit (in Class Mates, say, I knew that Rebecca wound up at the estate, I knew there would be an outfit swap, I knew there would be a party where she has sex, etc.). I find that having the general structure gives me freedom to write whatever comes to mind around those key flashpoints, but without feeling like I may stray too far away.
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Re: Story breadth and depth

Postby animefan78 » Sun May 29, 2022 5:37 am

Yes I use the same sort of thing as well like I have ideas or scenes I want to hit as I go along. Sometimes I have more or less of those and I find the more I have the better it tends to go.
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