#it was a lot of fun to highlight sections of potent piaj foreshadowing and send them to a buddy who was in on the spoilers

[tenspontaneite]

How much of the plot did you plan out before you started writing PIAJ or Paper Cranes? For long running fanfictions like Paper Cranes, do you already have an ending in mind?

Interesting question! Thanks for the opportunity to babble about writing!

On endings:

Paper Cranes (Hikaru no Go), as I mention sometimes, massively outgrew my expectations since I went into it thinking it would be like 4 chapters long and maybe 50k at most, and now we're over 200k and like 23 chapters in, so. Please, laugh at past-me. I certainly do. So at any rate, the plot device that leads to the ending and the ending itself have been known to me since the beginning, though the circumstances and context have shifted a lot over time. I've got one of the most climactic scenes of probably the penultimate chapter already written, and have done since....probably winter 2017? Yikes.

Piaj (the Dragon Prince) is a different beast entirely. Since its events are fundamentally based on an ongoing canon, rather than a post-series thing like paper cranes is, I can't make an ending unless I decide to divorce myself from canon entirely, which I'd rather not do. I'm writing an extremely canon divergent AU maybe, and worldbuilding heavily, but I like to stay true to important canonical world and background details unless there's a very good reason for diverging.

On planning:

Paper Cranes was very much a by the seat of my pants thing at first. I had the basic idea and the ending, but it wasn't until chapter 8 that story arcs started spawning and the events gave me insight into how future things are going to go down. Planning for paper cranes at present is fairly loose, and includes a timeline spanning the planned chronology of the story, with certain days and/or months marked out for significant events. Day-to-day timeline is clarified as I reach that point in the story. I've been foreshadowing a bit in recent chapters, since I started getting my shit together re: planning out story arcs properly, but I could have foreshadowed certain things a lot longer ago if I'd had a better idea of where the story was going back then. That's life, I suppose.

Piaj was planned from the start to be a long and elaborate epic. Which, of course, means it's going to probably end up breaking 1mil someday, if it doesn't kill me first. Piaj is meticulously planned, but in a way that allows for more nebulous plot threads to grow and develop. For instance, I have significant events planned more or less down to the day for 60 days of the timeline, and those 60 days are split into 16 distinct sections, but it was only recently that a piece of worldbuilding I did started to clarify what direction I'm going to take Runaan's subplot in. I really had no idea what I was going to do with him before that. And a surprise worldbuilding bomb dropped on me by Opeli ended up tying in Amaya's subplot into some significant events later in the story, and considerably expanding Amaya's subplot in general (ha). I encourage that sort of thing in my writing because it always seems to lead somewhere that feels right for the narrative.

So I leave a lot of things up in the air, so that there's room to let plot threads develop organically and for characters to do things I don't expect. It seems to be working out, so far! When I first started writing piaj I had some main events in mind that I wanted to happen, and my Favourite Thing was actually one of the first scenes I wrote. The planning and complexity of the story has developed from there - and because I know so much about the bigger events I'm leading up to, I can foreshadow very very far in advance, which is pretty fun. Piaj is so different from paper cranes in so many ways, especially in terms of planning and story structure, so it really has been interesting to work with.