You can put together an organizational scaffold in Scrivener that allows you to move back and forth between the forest and the trees. Scrivener: Long fic for me means “fic that is long enough you can’t hold all the parts of it in your head at once.” That’s where Scrivener comes in (or another app if you’d rather, but I really like Scrivener for the ability to see the project either linearly or as condensed notecards). It was not an accident that those were also all the first scenes of the fic that I wrote if I couldn’t do those scenes, I couldn’t do the story the way I planned it so I wanted to know early on if I needed to make changes.
I think of the first things that go into the planning spreadsheet as the crux moves of the story, the most important pieces around which everything else turns. In climbing, a crux move, which can be anywhere along the route, is the most difficult move of the route: if you can’t do it, you can’t do the route. Then I filled in the blank spaces by asking myself “how do we get from X plot element to Y plot element in Z amount of chapters.” I’m not a mountain climber, but I’ve often thought about the first things that go into the spreadsheet in terms of mountain climbing terminology. I simply made 30 rows assuming 30 chapters, and started plugging in the elements I knew I wanted in the locations I wanted them. In this way, I found google sheets an invaluable tool for pacing in the early parts of the planning process.
I wish I had done more short humorous fics before starting them, because I would have realized that I don’t currently have the mental stamina to hold up a humorous tone for the length of a chaptered fic (hopefully that will change and I will finish Last Days some time this century!).īut, what my brain needed was to preserve the blank spaces in between these story elements, and specifically to preserve the right amount of blank space between these story elements so that it didn’t end up, for instance, that the first kiss was halfway through rather than a third of the way through. For instance, I have a few unfinished chaptered fics that have a humorous tone. It’s helpful for all the usual reasons-you get to know a specific version of the characters which helps plan out a character driven plot for the long fic-but it’s also helpful because you will learn if the tone and mood of the fic has enough staying power to capture your interest for the long haul. Just like artists tend to do sketches before starting a big piece, it’s very helpful to write something small that gives you a feel for the ~vibe~ of what you’re trying to do in the long fic. Here’s what I mean more specifically: if you know you want to write (as a totally hypothetical example) a chaptered fic set in America in the summer that relies heavily on a nature metaphors, is written out of chronological order, and features a melancholy tone-it helps to write a few one shots like that before you embark on the Big Fic. Ok, this is going to sound exceedingly obvious, but writing one shots prepares you for writing chaptered fic.
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