Discussion A Mighty Change of Plot--Your favorite examples of when a fic got away from you

This is a purely-for-fun thread to share things we didn't know about your fics. Have you ever started out with an action fic that turned into your favorite mush story? Have you ever ended up writing a 3000-page fic that was supposed to be a vignette? Have you ever just felt inspired to ditch your planned ending and go with something that made sense to you only later? Tell us about it! All fandoms welcome!
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I'll start. My first fic on the boards was called The Other Half. I was trying to work on my Luke and Leia characterization, so I wrote a series of vignettes about them in one thread. Then I decided to have them under arrest together for fun and Vader showed up against my will. 220 pages later, I finished the first part of what was supposed to be a short story at best. WHat's worse, I'd written ahead and killed off Leia towards the end because I couldn't wait to write it. By the time I got to that point, Leia lived, Luke became a Sith and the vignette turned short story turned long story became an epic trilogy.

 

Oh Lordy yes...

Kam and Schurke were supposed to be "side along" characters - just a pair of background characters that challenged the notion that Bi-sexual or gay characters were just 'smut fidder'. Just the one story, and just the passing along...

They had other ideas...

Out of nearly 40 stories (complete, vignettes, and unfinished works of my own) they feature in over 30 of them. Plus at least 3 other authors have offered up their takes on the 'family' which (at present) encompasses 3 generations.

I opened up Pandora's box it seems...

 

In November 2008 I started writing a NaNoWriMo Star Wars story named [link=http://boards.theforce.net/the_saga/b10476/29382902/r29640249]DNA I.D.[/link]

based on a personal experience and a PT rewrite challenge about the Millennium Falcon and a book about the early adventures of the Millennium Falcon changed that story into the big one it is now with the parts during and after ROTS being extended because the Falcon had to change its ID.

 

Most of my stories have gone roughly to plan. But the characters within the larger framework have been known to disobey.

In my CorSec-centric mystery Galaxy of Suspects, I created a crooked cop named Brigan DaRusso mostly as a foil character for my protagonists and future victim of the murderer in question. Due to a structure change to the plot during planning, his death got moved to a different cause and later point in the story. Another early change delayed it even further, and gave him more of a redemptive arc. Then at the very last minute his story changed again. IIRC it was as I was actually writing his death scene that he decided to survive. The guy refused to die, both within the story's context and in defiance of his own writer. I feel like I should watch "Stranger Than Fiction" now.

It wasn't at all what I planned for him, but I ended up getting a far more interesting character out of it. And that's no small benefit. I even hope to use him again in a future story within the series.

 

Well, my continuing fic Irony was supposed to be a short story, ten chapters at the most. But every time I start writing a new chapter, I end up writing something totally different and making it longer than it's supposed to be. Another fic, a Justice League fic, is the same way.

My other fic Alive has recently shifted gears unexpectedly for some reason. It used to be pretty simple with only the few main characters, but now it's got a whole bunch of other people in there, too. Now my head is spinning.

 

My five-part epic Wife of Deceit started out as a single scene, inspired by the interrogation scenes in V for Vendetta. I just wanted to see the final moments of someone close to Palpatine. I intended to go from that scene to the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. Instead, in writing this one specific paragraph about procedure, I realized that I wanted to draw a very creepy parallel. Instead of getting to Episode 3, I went to a few months before Episode 1 because I wanted to tell the whole story of how she got from being a 22-year-old in what was basically an arranged marriage to the woman about to be executed five years after Revenge of the Sith.

Most of my plot changes take the form of subplots. In Lest Ye Be Judged, I had a straightforward plot of the war crimes trial of Darth Vader. Then I realized that in order for Imperial involvement to make sense, I had to bring in the political atmosphere on Coruscant, which meant that I had to have a subplot about the truce between Empire and Alliance, which meant that in order to keep Isard in-character, I had to have the subplot of her political instability and military alliances, which meant...You get the idea. This is how it came out to 365,000 words.

 

My "From Scratch" series evolved from a single missing moments fic that has a series of vignettes, short stories, three (or four?) epics and a journal challenge before it was even remotely finished.

I'd never intended to take it as far as it went, but the readers wanted to know what happened next - and the characters kept clamoring for their time in the spot light... and things kind of got out of hand.

 

I wrote "Dropping In" originally as a humorous one-shot that was supposed to explain the cryptic answer Aunt Beru gave to Luke as to how she and Owen met and fell in love... it grew into a short story that is the first of the "Twin Suns' Romance"... I'm on the third part now, though I haven't updated it in over a year It went from mostly humorous romance to being very dramatic with some action in it.

 

For the most part, my plots have gone according to plan, except for an occasional character that refuses to die, be side-lined, or fade quietly into the background the way I had intended for them.

 

Most of my fics go to plan, there's more spontenaity in the small stuff.

I have killed off characters rather unexpectedly while I am writing. One was an OC Nalanda, Padme's replacement in the Jedi Padme trilogy. I killed her off in the middle of an action sequence, a very WTH moment.

Also, I did manage to find the ending in the second last scene in a fic.

 

Have a story like that... got this mental image of a character in a flowered outfit, thought it was going to be a viggie until I actually started writing it and discovered that it was way more complex than the flowered outfit.

 

My stories haven't run too far away from me- not yet, anyway- but my characters? Oh man. Take my oldest and probably craziest OC, Leiraya. She started her life as a light side female Revan the first time I played KOTOR. Somewhere in a box I have the notebook with her first story- it was a post-KOTOR standard 'dealing with the consequences of what just went down here' kind of story, and her character just kept growing and became more defined... and then the second game came out and her personality just did not at all work with developments in canon. Well, I'm a canon nazi and refused to make her AU, and she refused to change, so I compromised and let her run free in a universe where Revan is a man (which, at the time, was a great concession on my part- I love the story dynamics of a female Revan, but I've really kind of gotten attached to Aiden, too). Almost four years and several hundred pages worth of stories later, I'm still not finished telling stories from her slice of the galaxy. She's not even involved in half of them anymore, but they wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for her.

Those wacky OCs. They really run amok if you let them.

 

Human Cyborg Relations was supposed to be a funny little viggie. It was inspired for one of the crossover challenges, but I couldn't make it fit. *shrug*

By now it has mutated into a 20k story, and I am maybe two thirds thorugh, if I am lucky. The themes got more serious and I am halfway down to the Droid-Rights-Society.


Also, my last year's diary entry TRIDU was supposed to be a short funny misadventure of myself getting thrown into the TTT. I am still on it 80k later. EU keeps throwing over all my best laid plans with stuff I didn't consider important, TTT is the least of my problems, and there is a sequel looming ahead. It is also not so funny anmore.
Also, weekly updates are Teh Evil.

 

This is so much fun to read.

DWH, with my story Cruel and Unusual Romance, I set out to write the ever-stoic Obi-Wan on a blind date. Since I couldn't leave the rest of the Jedi out, I borrowed a friend's looks and sense of humor and gave Qui-Gon a date named Noela who was a very old friend, but coincidentally engaged to an actor named Liam. People liked her so much that the Noelaverse was born.

 

Whenever I planned to kill off an OC I liked or saw something of myself in, I refused to do it. The death of all my stories is for that reason - I simply cannot kill off a character I like.

Then again, I'm glad I don't have the issue where I unquestioningly destroy characters, like George RR Martin (fantasy author) tends to do.

 

I haven't had too much of this happen... well, there was the time when my first major fic, "Misguided Trust," decided to become a lot longer than I'd planned and then people started dying at completely inappropriate times. Another fic ended a lot more quickly than I'd planned. The worst it's gotten in fanfic are the characters who die despite my best efforts.

My NaNoWriMo projects always run away from me. The 2007 one was a Star Wars fanfic that had a nearly operatic body count and a lot more of the Dark Side than I'd planned. The 2008 one is original fic, and what I thought was a 20K word plot hole looks like a 50-60K plot hole...

 

I totally understand about the 50-60k plot hole dilemma. Especially in LYBJ. The most significant example of a character blowing me a raspberry and running rampant was, predictably, Pink 5. I had the idea for "Totally My Squadron" as a one-time spoof of something I loved. Readers gave me ideas that I still reference as off-screen jokes at times, but once FX_Guy said I had his go-ahead to start trying to build the PU (Pink extended Universe) off of it, I had to get a notebook to keep track of all of the plot bunnies.

 

Three New Sailor Senshi was supposed to be a cool little crossover between two of my favorite franchises. It mushroomed into a fic that lasted seven years and 414,986 words total.

 

Well, not a SW fic, but an original fic I wrote about me having a crush on a guy who ended up being gay- 700 words, at most- has mushroomed into an eight-chapter, 6000 word saga about how I can't for the life of me meet someone who isn't gay, a jerk, or taken.

As SW fics go, my Kotor fic, Holding On was originally supposed to be a one shot. And then my Revan decided that she wasn't done messing with Carth yet. And then Canderous decided that he wanted in, and now I'm working on chapter... 6, I think?

And then there's a Kotor/Firefly crossover I'm working on where I inadvertantly didn't put Inara (a Firefly character) into the intros and my keyboard decided that it'd be cooler to just have Inara be dead than to backtrack and try to fit her in. Go figure.

 

I think the most drastic case of this I've ever had was in the fic I'm currently writing. I had intended to wrap up a scene with a minimum of fuss and move on to the next part of the story when a canon character kind of kicked his way through the fourth wall, smirked at me, then sat down and wrote himself into the story and left me to wonder what in the name of all wonder I was going to do with the new plot twist. At present we're arguing over his eventual fate.

 

Aaaaaaah, yes, when a character decides to write themselves you just have to follow. But that's when the writing is more fun, eh?

I had one story where the point was to have Obi-Wan wearing only drawstring pants, sandals and a flower behind his ear along with a semi-creepy scene of writing on his back. And I took care of the antagonist and they were walking away......and this awful pun showed up. It made the whole thing look kind of like a shaggy dog story when I was just fishing around for a last line to end with.

 

My current work, "TIE Fighter: Unknown Regions" actually bears little resemblance to what I originally had in mind when I started putting words to Word. My main OC, Lek'Rortan has ended up becomming a much more sympathetic character than originally intended as well as a more prominent one. The Empire of the Hand/Conspiracy sideplot has evolved completely on its own without my planning it at all. The story was supposed to be a straight up squadfic but has grown into much more than that. I guess that's what happens when one does no planning before beginning to write the story.

 

Well TRRFMLD was never going to have a time jump in it. In fact I never intended to even get aboard Outbound Flight, but both of those things happened. And now it is much longer than I had intended already with more twists and turns than I had intended when I started it. Now the amount of things that happen in it actually outnumber the many things that goes on in my real life during the same time span. I had also originally written it where I was never there in the fight with Palps and Palps had been captured, but my muse ran away from that and now Palps is hiding around somewhere and I had been there for part of the fight. Not to mention the current situation with Depa. That definitely hadn't been in the agenda until I got to the first chapter that mentioned her. I never know what's next with my own story!

Of Sith and Tutus is actually the way I had intended it to be. A one-post humorous story. First that's what it was gonna be, then I was gonna add more, but I haven't so currently it's as it was intended until my muse says otherwise.

The Life of a Jedi I had intended to be before Obi was born,b ut my muse ran away with me and he is in it.

 

Let's see... this has happened to me many times! Here are the most recent examples:

1. NaNoWriMo 2008- I was teaming up with a friend of mine for NaNo (each of us writing for the same story with a goal of 75k). The story was supposed to be about this computer nerd who finds himself on the wrong side of the law. There were two supporting characters who were involved in the events surrounding our MMC, and they ended up stealing the show! We have complete backstories for both of the supporting characters, and next to nothing for the MMC! We did make it to 75k though!!

2. I recently adopted a plot bunny from jacen200015, which was supposed to just be a 20 or so chapter story, and is turning into a complete trilogy! I've got file upon file in google documents with story synopses, chapter outlines, characters profiles, etc, etc. I hope to start posting in the near future.

3.Currently I'm working on what was supposed to be a missing scene from Fury from LOTF. This missing J/J scene is pushing 10 pages and 5k! (Why couldn't I have been this prolific during NaNo when I had days of no word count?!)

~Celeste

 

"Tender Shadows", which is the story I'm co-writing with The Musical Jedi, was originally supposed to be maybe 20 or so chapters, and as we were writing the earlier chapters, we were also working on a few of the ending chapters (two of the later chapters and an epilogue to be more precise). However, we had to majorly change both of the later chapters (one which we just posted, the other we are currently re-writing) because our OC's decided a few of the things we had in them should happen much sooner than we'd anticipated, plus the two characters grew more in the story than we'd originally wrote those later chapters. Another thing that made it grow much longer was a few other OC's decided to pry their way into the story and go from minor to supporting characters.

So far, the epilogue is safe from changes. *crosses fingers*

Oh, and we are currently working on chapter 56. My word document shows 139 pages with 189,520 words!

EDIT: I didn't even mention that I even started a side-story about two minor OC's from TS, and viggie (that may turn into a short story... or longer, if my muse decides to get obsessive over it) about one of the aforementioned supporting OC's.