[WiP] Brainstorming The Adventures of Buzzik · 2:05am Dec 30th, 2014
Well, everyone, I thought I might try something new.
I'm going to try showing all of you my progress as I work my way through a story.
(The Adventures of Buzzik, a sequel to A Mother's Love Never Dies, in particular.)
Isn't that just a ploy for self-promotion and hyping the upcoming story?
No, Trixie. It's entirely for the readers' gratification, and maybe so other writers can see how I come up with and plan stories.
...
Okay, maybe it's a little bit about hype. But still I hope people will enjoy seeing how I make a story from the ground up.
Today's installment is the initial brainstorming of ideas; more after the break!
Oh, and Big Mac, could you do the spoiler alert, please?
Aye. ... Arr! Here there be spoilers, laddie! Be ye warned!
Initially coming up with the idea for this one was a no-brainer. A Mother's Love Never Dies sets the stage perfectly for a sequel, and a lot of the comments there gave me initial ideas about what to do with it.
So... let's jump right into what is almost always the very first document I make for a story: the brainstorming sheet.
Here, I write down all sorts of ideas and snippets about the story, connecting them with lines when they're potentially related. The more ideas I get down on paper, the more of an idea of the story I get. Sometimes it's linear, usually it's not, and it usually ends up being a huge spaghetti mess. That's okay, though. It's supposed to be messy. At this stage, I'm just throwing all kinds of ideas out there, even if they're bad ones.
As you can see, there's a lot there. Take your time to look at it if you want; you might need to click to embiggen.
It looks like one big, scribbley mess to me.
Well, yes... that's sort of the point, but there is a method to my madness.
And your handwriting, how is anyone supposed to be able to read this?
Hey! My handwriting's great. Well... sort of. I... uh... I blame the scanner!
Of course, this is going to be a huge epic adventure, so just one page couldn't contain all the brainstorming I needed to do.
Good gracious, there's more!?
It's okay, I promise that's the last page for today.
These pages help me organize my thoughts about a story, and they help me make connections between concepts in it that will really help make it a cohesive whole. Not everything in there will make it into the story, of course. You can already see a few things marked off in red that I've decided to reject.
But... why is it green?
Because green is more fun than black! ^.^ (That really is the reason. Writing should be fun, and colors make things more fun.)
Well, I think that's probably enough to dump on everyone for today. If you can figure out much of the plot and how the story will go just from this, I'll be very impressed. At any rate, stay tuned for the next installment, where I try to organize and shape all the various plot arcs and hammer out the basic plot of the story. Until then, thanks for reading! ^.^
THAT'S NEAT!
I should try this...
Might actually get me started on stuff.
AIP§
Flowcharts...
I hate flowcharts...
I'll look at this later...
Nice method of brainstorming.
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I'll be happy if this helps someone.
Later, I'll go into how I turn this mess into an outline for a story.
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Well, if you hate flowcharts, today ain't your lucky day.
This is just one method of planning a story, though. There are lots of other ways.
(Personally, I love flowcharts... as you might guess from looking at this.)
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I do enjoy it. ^.^
This is one of the parts of writing I enjoy the most. I think it's where the most creative parts of story writing happen, and it's the one time in my story-writing process that's really free and anything-goes.
2686941
First off, I'm totally fine with flowcharts. They just look cool.
And second, I'm very much looking forwards to seeing how this becomes a cohesive thing!
AIP§
2686941 I enjoy it too, let's me think freely.
How I write: keep everything inside my head, ignoring the fact that I am easy distracted and my memory sucks...
Have worked to far...
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Heh, a large part of my motivation for planning so obsessively is that I hate it when I had an idea for a wonderful scene in a story, but then completely forgot to put it in at all.
Yup, ur right. Green make things funnier, but I still choose to use the black pen... in a YELLOW BOND SHEET
2686956 I just try to repeat how I want te scenes to e every night ans morning...
It works alright for my current story, just a bit, awkward when it brings up a gay scene... Will only be like 2K words... But still...
Oh wow. Our writing styles are completely different, I keep most of my ideas in my head until I get around to writing them.
Also Twilight, you have no place to talk. Your 'hand'writing is much worse.
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Heh, yeah, we haven't even gotten into paper colors yet.
I used white paper here because it was free and sort of recycled -- in that it was going to be thrown away otherwise.
But when I get around to writing the actual story, I like to have colored writing pads... yellow, pink, blue, lavender. I have lots of fun colors. ^.^
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Heh, yeah. This isn't the only way... or even necessarily the best way.
It's just the way I do it.
I do think it helps me remember things I would otherwise forget, though. In a big, long story like this is going to be, it's impossible to keep everything in your head without losing track of some of it.
I did NaNoWriMo this year. Went into it with one main character nameless until the day before and a plot which was essentially "they're in a school, and conformity, and order/chaos, and Hogwartsishness." I almost met my sharply reduced goal!
Between continuous self-doubt, general lack of skill and experience, and the crushing feeling that it'll never turn out like I imagine tend to cause me to not bother even writing anything down, except those rare moments where I just sit down and start typing the story. Only to later reread it and mentally berate myself for every overdone trope, complete cop-out, and total lack of plot direction. At least it's got decent grammar and sentence structure. I think.
Thanks for posting this!
It's always well and good to get a bit of background info on how writers produce their work, especially from the writers themselves in this sort of format.
I, for one, promote this idea.
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Heh, yeah. That's the other way to approach writing.
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That's one reason I like planning ahead. ^.^
2687783
Glad you're enjoying it!
2688184
I can definitely see why it works. I guess I'm just not sure if I'm willing to put that much effort into something without a return, or at least some help along the way. I've never been very good about doing things on my own.
2686941 Huh... wow, now I feel like doing that with every story I try writing <.< All I ever do is make an outline of the idea, and slowly make it form into something (unless it just dies off, which is disappointing). I shall try out this approach for myself
(And maybe I should think of making a list of character names too 
)
Keep up the good work man, I look forward to reading more.
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I'm glad it's helping people. ^.^