Scaling back

Questions, skill improvement, and respectful critique involving game writing.
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SwingAndToons
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Scaling back

#1 Post by SwingAndToons »

I have been able to maintain motivation on this project and actually have a fair amount of story beats down. But as I am writing, I am realizing that I should probably scale it back a little bit. Initially, there was supposed to be a big magic element and they group set out on taking down an ancient evil order. But as I am writing the second half, I realize it would feel very forced and overly complicated. It seems to make more sense just to focus in on the simple college life aspect of things. I have a "mystical" aspect of the story that I can't change. But there may be other ways to get to that point

(It's reincarnation. I would need to figure out a way for all of their memories being jogged outside of "MC being targeted by an evil organization that survived decades and floating magic orb that they want to drain her latent magic power with". Cool in concept but seemingly very out of place given the rest. I'm stuck right now but I am sure eventually I will figure something out)


Any tips on making the over the top mundane? Or even just your experiences shrinking back your project in general?

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CatPalismia
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Re: Scaling back

#2 Post by CatPalismia »

I have a huge trouble of my stories getting out of hand. Oftentimes this is because I have no idea what is important in the story or I lost at one point the red thread. That's why it helps me a lot to write down short summaries of the plot threads that are happening in the story and then decide what to do with them.

First I try to identify all the plot threads in the story. If I had a story where the MC solves a murder, falls in love with their sidekick, and rekindles relationship with a family member, I would write what happens in them as if they are three different stories. If I want to scale back the story, it often helps to just cut off few plotlines from the story (to follow the example, I would maybe come to conclusion that the romance plotline is too much and cut it off). Anything that presents a problem and needs to be resolved could be considered to be a plot in this situation, no matter if it takes half of the story or full story to resolve.

What I understood is that you want to focus in the slice of life aspect of the story with an element of reincarnation. That means that since the plot of the college life drives the story, the side plot of reincarnation would get affected by its events. Maybe some of the decisions that the characters do/things that happen in their daily life end up initiating the side plot of their memories being jogged.
It also helps to shrink a bloated plot to just cut out big elements from it and make it more personal. Maybe only one person has something to do with it rather than a big organization. Maybe it's not especially world or even city-level threatening but poses a significant danger to MC or few people important to them.

I hope this helped even a bit!
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