Ongoing sagas (Read 147 times)

[Kpatch]

I normally post stories that have an ending or stopping place, like a novel. Then I move onto a different story with either different characters, or different versions and settings for the same characters.

For those of you like heroicmuse and André DiMera who are posting ongoing stories, how do you come up with new ideas within the same serial.

[André DiMera]

Honestly, and I know this probably isn’t the most helpful, the ideas just kind of come to me. Sometimes it’s from a TV show, sometimes from a song, sometimes from just a random thought I have along the lines of, “what if this character did this next?”, and I just carry on from there. While it is nice to have a definite stopping point at times, I’m really enjoying the more serialized storytelling that I’ve been doing the last few years. I love the characters I’m writing, particularly the versions of them I’m currently writing. Also, my current story has several different storylines running through it, just like the real show; so while one storyline may end, there are a small handful of others that are still going on, and I can’t currently foresee a time when they would all wrap up at the same time.

As I said in the podcast I made for this year’s anniversary, I’m playing the long game, with regards to my story. In short, the ideas just keep coming, and I run with them.

[heroicmuse]

I often get ideas from what I don't like in the real show. For example, Sarah's alcoholism storyline came to me while writing a rant about how that's what they should have done on the show instead of whatever nonsense they were doing at the time. LOL

Like André DiMera, I often have other storylines that are unfinished, so I work on those while waiting for an idea for a new storyline for my main characters. I technically could have ended Breaking Ties when JJ got his Certificate of Conduct, because at that point he had gone from feeling alienated and alone to having a good relationship with his family, no more legal problems, and even able to tell the judge he would lean on his family in the future if he had problems. But that would have left Abigail's domestic violence story and a few others hanging. So I just went with that storyline and saw what developed.

Sometimes too a character will turn out to be more important than I originally envisioned and I'll get an idea while writing them. For example, I created Kenneth because I needed some other students for the conference JJ attended and then when I began writing the snowstorm keeping JJ and Paige apart I decided to let him stay with Kenneth for the holiday, and at that point I needed to make up a family for Kenneth, which led to some interesting stories.