But this method of writing is not the best to build the story arcs and plot. Usually, what I have at the start is a couple of scenes scattered throughout the timeline with only liminal connection. All I am interested in are those moments when my characters get the most of drama.
So the next step I do is building all the background, which often turns into a huge mess of notes, which I cannot all memorise. When I return to writing, it’s the discovery path all over again with hope that some of those notes will float to the surface when they are needed. Very messy, I know.

I may have an idea of what happens in the short span of time of the story, but foreshadowing still remains a nightmare. In the end I have dozens of pages, which I go through, leaving more comments for myself. The first draft has too much and still not enough, and though the editing is a gripping and fascinating process, it is also time-consuming, because the sieving process is horrendous. Some people just go and write it a new, but I don’t feel like I can do it.

As a result of those struggles, I decided to start taking my Plotting more serious. So this year I am looking into all the different methods I can devise to help me be tidier with writing. It’s very controversial to me, because what I love about writing is immersion – the fuller, the better. I want to live through the story rather than simply write it.
So I guess what I will be doing and sharing with you is finding the balance between the two

So I was going through it and, as a more experienced writer by now, I saw all the tell-instead-of-show moments flowing in abundance in the story. Now, because fanfics are secondary fiction, it is obvious authors do not go rewriting what the original already showed you, so they go for the tell. In my case I could obviously have shown more, thinking in retrospective. Perhaps, that’s what I’ll do when I have a spare moment to edit this piece, because honestly I really love it.

But back to telling-not-showing. Suddenly instead of seeing telling as a problem, I saw the benefits of it. My fanfic was in a way a very prolonged and detailed synopsis. Everything there was given chronologically, the events led to the climaxes and the resolution. It was a good retelling from a completely different angle with some juicy scenes and novelties. However, the crucial thing was – the fanfic was easy to work with.

I saw what needed expansion, what would work better as interludes, foreshadowing and flashbacks. I could see what scenes to add to reduce the telling and how to add even more novelty. I almost had the entire rewriting plan in my head.

I’ve heard before that some writers start by writing a synopsis, but those had always been my headache. Mainly because the publishers ask for rather short ones (recently I encountered the limit of 200 words for a novella). I also believed that I need to get down to writing as soon as possible. So there was no time to work out the whole plot and put it down on paper. The scenes were calling on me.

Yet now I would like to try synopsises as a way of plotting. It tricks your mind that you are actually writing the story. And it gives you the chronology, motivations and consequences – the bones to put the meat on. I am definitely going to try it for the next novel I start.

As I was translating science fiction and fantasy, there was always this thing with the new realia – special technologies, alien races, social rites etc. If it was something repeated on every second page, there was no problem remembering, but if you encountered it on page 12 and then the next time only on page 212, it made all the difference. How many times editing the translation I saw the translators forgetting whether they spelled the realia with a capital letter or a small one.

The solution for this was to make a glossary – nothing fancy, just a simple Microsoft Word document with a table:

Original name
Translation
Examples.

Examples were an extra category, sometimes you could go without them.

Now I know there are authors who create there own Wikipedias for the worlds, and I admire those people for mustering that. It takes a lot of time and requires imagining all those details, even the ones that don’t go into the text.

However, especially for the discovery writers such simple table can be a solution.

You can upgrade it into:

Realia
Explanation/How it works
Chapters where it is

It does not have to be a piece of technology . It can be an event (for the story arc) or a finding, perhaps, some motivation or clue for the story. I am still trying this out myself to see in what format it works best, but it can be something to consider to ease your writing process.