Uranium Phoenix's Projects patreon

Weekly Roundup 5/4

🕑 Added 2025-05-04 17:46:29 +0000 UTC

Comments

UraniumPhoenix

Planning a story for me goes about like this: 1. Come up with a really cool climactic event (at least one, often several) 2. Start thinking about the main character of those events and a bit of the setting. I'd written a different story with a similar magic system to this one, and that felt like a good fit here, so the basics of the magic system I already had down. 3. Get a sense of what major events will occur before the start and end, what themes the story has, and therefore, more about the setting. For example, around here, I knew Mirian would be dealing with Elder Gods and exploring different places in the world, so I started sketching out the map and writing the religions. 4. Start writing characters and worldbuilding stuff I'll need for the first arc (this is usually a main character like "Nicolus" and then maybe a sentence or two about him). I can then drop those characters or facts into any place where I need to. 5. Write! When I start, I don't really have an outline beyond the distant major events. Maybe a few bullet points of things I want to cover in the next few chapters. 6. As I'm writing, fill in more about the worldbuilding so I can keep things consistent, and continue to build up events based on what I've written. So, for example, once I've had Mirian and Valen annoy each other enough, I know I need to resolve something between them so that gets added to the outline as a bullet point to hit when it feels right. If I come up with a new detail about the Ominian, it goes in the worldbuilding doc. Most of the info in the worldbuilding doc was written in parallel with the story, not before. The outline also expands as I write. In short, I start with the end of the story and work backwards, but it's not a linear process. I consider myself something of both a pantser and plotter. Fair warning to all writers: what works for me might not work for you. Discovering your own writing process takes a lot of work. For this story, I also made a 'Calendar of Events' that I started filling in for the first loop, and then used color-coding to make myself notes about changes. For a time loop, it's a good idea to keep track of all the details (like weather) and major events, because they're going to be repeated so much. I've also kept track of what cycle we're on and the basic events that happen in each cycle because there is so much going on.

Xsardis

I'll definietly give it a read, I'm hungry for time-loop stories. Out of curiosity, what was your approach to planning this story? I'm guessing you had to world-build extensively before even starting, how much of the plot points and magic systems did you have planned beforehand? I'm in love with the depth of it all so much that it makes me want to write my own time loop story, but I have no idea where to even begin with a project this extensive.