westerngayfairytales:

ao3commentoftheday:

Bear with me for a moment while I talk about something that might seem totally unrelated: project management methodology.

There are two major ways that I’ve encountered for managing a project. One way is called Waterfall and the other way is called Agile. In Waterfall project management, you basically build the whole thing and then release a finished product. This is useful in a situation like baking a cake. Giving people the uncooked batter probably won’t go over well.

In Agile project management, you build something that’s referred to as the minimum viable product. This is a sort of stripped down version of the final product. It still does whatever it’s meant to do, but it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles on it. If you play video games, you’ll be familiar with this. They release the base game and then add more functionalities and levels over time, but meanwhile people are buying and playing the game and those sales help to finance further development.

So what does this have to do with writing a big fic? Well, writing longfic is its own kind of project management. Depending on your own personality, either a Waterfall or an Agile approach could work for you.

Based on this ask, I think you might want to take an Agile approach. Look at the overall story and think: what’s the core story I’m trying to tell? That’s the minimum viable product. You can add in all of the world building and the subplots etc. after you’ve got the main thread figured out, but that main thread is what you should focus on first. Any research on the main thread gets priority. Any research on the side stuff can wait for later.

And this can also be a way for you to get feedback as you write. That’s another core of Agile development - getting feedback from the stakeholders (in this case your audience) throughout the development process so that the final product fits the need. You can do this with a beta reader or by participating in things like Six Sentence Sunday.

You can also break your huge story down into a series of smaller stories that can be posted separately and grouped together in a series on ao3.

Decide what the most important part of the story is that you really want to tell and start there. Once you’ve got that part, you can build on it.

How do the rest of you figure out a huge story like this one? Can you offer anon any advice?

For a long project, so that I’m sure that I’m gonna finish it, I need to have it all written down before I start posting, otherwise the pressure of having to write it down combined with the pressure of having readers waiting for an update will scare me into never looking at that project again. I will certainly still edit it and maybe even add some scenes as I proof pread for posting day, but most of it needs to be written down.

Long fics scare the hell out of me, so what I do is focus on it one scene at a time, cause I will get overwhelmed if I know I have 5, 10, 20, 40 more scenes to write.

Just write the scene you have on your mind now - or do it chronologically, whatever works best for you - as if it is your only worry.

I, particularly, go back and forth a lot, though I leave all the scenes in their respective “space”, leaving little notes to myself so that I know that I need to add another scene in a certain place, a transition paragraph, anything like that.

I know a lot of people make a plan for the fic, and that sounds really smart, but it doesn’t really work for me. I go with the flow, always rereading what is already written so that I can have a feel for what needs to come next. This approach also makes me end up with quite a few discarded scenes, but it is what it is 🤷‍♀️