So I wanted to share this information, and I think this place is probably the only place I can express this, it's something that I enjoy, so I hope this is relevant. I want to talk about my fiction writing process because it's a whole thing with phases to it, and I don't know. I just think that maybe other people who are doing this might find it interesting.

My writing process normally starts with a text, like a notepad doc, that I have open all the time. I'm just writing down goofy shit and different ideas, and it centers not so much around situations but more around really specific pie hit bits. I'm just one of those guys who thinks the pie hit itself is kind of like the crescendo, so that's the piece that I focus on and then I build out from there.

There are things I always see out in the wild, on the sidewalk, around. I see some totally unrelated short clip on TikTok or YouTube, or I happen to come across something spicier and see a certain position. I just think in my head, "What if you inserted a pie here?" and then I'm seeing how this would play out. I just get a list of these things that would be really great, and then I'm going for five of them, and then I can start building around that. I try to figure out if things can be connected with all this, but they all have setups, so how many people do you need for that? What kind of equipment should be around for this? I figure out if I can connect them, and a lot of the time they can, unless it was a really specific and then from there that's where I would start. I get in my head like I create the characters, kind of what they look like, and then I just start writing. I power right for like two days, like two really long sessions of workshopping it out, putting it to paper, and then the next day, really finishing it and then going back over for an edit. That's done. It's like a couple years in between that, though, like the start of putting pen to paper. That's changed now.

So now, once I have those basic plot ideas, I've been going through deviantART and curating a real niche set of images. I start combing through that, and just casually, there's a lot of information and a ton of content. I'm just looking for things that kind of pique my interest, like, "Oh, that would be interesting," or, "Oh, that would actually fit this whole thing."

For the characters and the setting, I find an image, and then from that image I start setting up the story and the relationship between the characters. Who's who to who? Where are they? Why on earth are they? What on earth could be the possible reason for all these pies and cakes? How is this going to escalate to the point where they're hitting each other, blah blah blah?

Once I have a real solid idea that I can play out in my head, I've started doing voice-to-text and recording everything while walking through the scene with my voice. That is the springboard into the whole thing. Then I'm like, "Okay, now I can quickly go through this and piece together what the story is." I can almost quickly edit it into the final, whatever I want it to be. That's sped up the whole process and the ease of picking up the pen, so to speak, and getting back into it.

That's where I'm at right now. I've got my latest story. I followed that process, got the latest step, and I'm going through and putting the final touches on it, but that's my process.

I'm really curious to know what your guys' process is and if they overlap or if they're totally different.

My process for writing stories tends to be far less structured, and probably shows!
I tend to have a concept then start drafting out the details in a note book. The detail tends to flow and then once complete I then read through, simply adjust/edit and then submit. This sounds so simple but as you guys know its not quite that easy!!

I do find it difficult to include the sexual side, and tend to hope the arousement occurs from the situation, rather than the graphic detail.

The other aspect which I find interesting is the length of stories.
Is there an optimum length before people lose interest in reading?

The boring but honest answer is that it depends.

If I'm working on a commission, the process is far more structured and deliberate. A lot of back-and-forth emails - fewer of those if it's a repeat customer. Then I'll typically have about page of notes that we're both satisfied with. I have this at the top of every commission, so that I can easily scroll back to it if I need to check something like mess preferences, tone etc.

For my own stuff, it's way less considered. I'll generally have an idea, sometimes quite vague, sometimes so specific that it's hard to figure out how to make it into a full story. Like OP, this is just something I see in the world or in other media - can be as simple as another attractive person or as complicated as an entire TV show. For example, I'm currently working on a Superhero origin story because I got super into graphic novels this year.

From there, though, I just kinda... write. It's borderline stream-of-consciousness, at least in the beginning. If you're familiar with writing tropes, I'm very much a pantser. I'm also almost always a start-to-finish writer. Even if the idea comes from the finale, I'll usually still writing it from the beginning. Once in a while I'll start with a scene and work backwards, or around it, but nof oten.

Unforunately, this sometimes means I'll get a couple of thousand words in and lose focus/interest. Fortunately, it means I always have something to work on, because I've got a dozen or so half-started stories on my computer at any time.

When I used to write my English was still very limited (1st language is Russian) however I started with drafts that I had translated to English.

Usually when writing originally, I always select a concept in mind and expand to what I think will be interesting or fun to keep engagement. I liked reading older stories for inspiration to get idea on pacing as well.

Interesting thread.

Like others have mentioned I keep notes for upcoming stories. These are held in two documents, the first contains ideas for future stories which are sometimes just a title, a single line idea (e.g. guy inherits a circus) or at most a paragraph outlining the idea/potential story. These are drawn from a combination of real life, whatever TV I'm watching or scenes from novels I happen to be reading, and I also use comments posted on my previously stories for inspiration. I also maintain a second document of names I've previous used in my stories (or as not to keep using the same names repeatedly) or interesting names to use in future stories.

As for the writing itself, I have a weekly slot where I sit down at my computer and start writing. Sometime this is just half an hour and sometime a couple of hours. Usually at the end of these sessions I end up with anything from a paragraph to a page of new story. The stories I post are usually the result of six or seven of these sessions.

I did use to spend a lot of time trying to proof read my stories after writing them to fix issues but found that this delayed posting them and probably introduced as many issues as it corrected. So, I gave up on the proof reading and now post them, warts and all, as soon as I finish.

Great idea for a thread. I'm probably not well equipped to answer, since my output basically amounts to one huge series (which I recently learned is longer than most novels) and a single standalone story that I wrote to try and prove to myself that I was capable of writing something relatively concise.

For the series, I started out by establishing the basic premise and an outline of the plot, then worked out the cast of characters. I then decided how they'd each be eliminated from the game, along with some particular games that I wanted certain characters to play, which helped determine the order in which events would need to happen. Once I'd realised that it would need to be a series rather than a single story, I settled on a three-act structure and broke down what challenges the characters would need to overcome in each chapter.

From there, I wrote out a first draft of the complete series, amending the plan as and when new ideas came to me. Around a third of the way in, I plucked up the courage to approach a writer I admired and asked for their feedback on the prologue. The tips they gave me were invaluable, as at that point I hadn't done any creative writing since my school days. I don't claim to be a particularly good writer now, of course, but their advice definitely helped me improve.

Once the first draft was done, I then set about re-writing and editing, which I found to be the toughest and lengthiest part of the process. It's something that I really need to improve on, as even when I finally began posting my stories I still found myself rewriting sections right up to a few minutes before publishing them. At a certain point the endless edits produced diminishing returns, so I really need to learn when to just leave things alone.

As with others it depends.

I kinda have three types (though these can muddle together a little)

Character first - I have thought of an idea for a character or rivalry etc and write the story to showcase that.

Premise first - I have thought of an mechanism (usually a gameshow) for getting messy then come up with characters to display that.

Game first - I have thought of a game that requires audience participation so do part one to get character nominations or to set up a vote and then expand the next part based on what I get.

Love this thread, absolutely fascinating approaches! Will have to gather my thoughts on this (there's a process to writing a thread reply, too )

Interesting to hear other people's approaches.

Back when I had more time and wrote the long interactive WAMWORLD stories, they necessarily needed quite a lot of structuring and planning. In particular a messy maze in the third of those stories required a map of the labyrinth, then post-it-notes covering half the room to keep a note of all the pathways and links involved.

Nowadays it tends to be just a particular idea occuring, or a picture set or online chat might provide a trigger, then writing a few hundred words each evening for a few weeks, so time to reflect where next a little at a time.

Length is an interesting one for me. When in short story mode, 4-5k seems to be about my standard but I do occasionally enjoy the challenge of bringing one in at 2k.

I also tend to leave for a couple of months and re-read in hard copy before hitting publish, so essentially returning to the material fresh. That tends to help pick up typos and repetitions, and so far I've managed to avoid accidentally leaving tens of pages of sploshing erotica in the work printer...

I'd be really interested to know more specifics about the planning of your interactive stuff. My ADD brain does not have a good time plotting and planning, even traditional stories, so I have an almost mobrid fascination with interactive ones. Hell, I've tried writing some TTRPG stuff recently and it makes my brain shutdown at a certain point.

So this varies extremely widely depending on what kind of writing I'm doing.

If it's WAM stuff, I mostly just do a rough outline of the action and then fill it in as I go. All of this happens in the same draft document, which only exists digitally (these days, either a google doc or a writing draft on fetlife). If I'm honest, my WAM writing is very lazy, and at this point I'd say it's much more for me than for others.

If it's nonfiction, I usually find a handful of sources to use as a jumping-off point, then go over and over those sources looking for key phrases, images, or concepts. Then I'll copy and paste (or otherwise transfer) those keystone entities into, again, a digital draft (this time, strictly in google docs). From there, the writing process mostly consists of me moving from one keystone piece to another by way of my interpretation or argumentation. You can see the result of this in the AI thread - that's a very simplified version of what I do, but the end structure is basically the same.

For my serious fiction, the process is a good deal more involved. I always start with sort of a core idea of what the story is - kind of a combination of genre plus theme plus tone, I guess? Once I have that, I start gathering resources. Currently, for example, I'm writing a dark fantasy that's aiming to emulate some of the storytelling tricks from the Soulsborne franchise. So, for resources, I have a couple of mixtapes that I've made for myself to help orient me, a bunch of visuals (of architecture, weird science and religion stuff, etc.), some nonfiction references (mostly around philosophy and I guess secular eschatology), and of course stuff from the Souls games themselves. The resource-gathering process continues throughout, as I need it.

With the combination of my core idea and the resources, I then usually try to start sketching out characters in a way that positions each character in a specific way relative to the themes of the story. (This means that I sometimes struggle to make action happen, but I would rather get the themes right and then make the action accommodate the themes than the other way around.) Then, once I have a basic feel for some characters, I just start writing the first scene and try to go scene-by-scene from the beginning of the book to the end.

Along the way, I will continue to make notes for myself, both on paper and in the digital draft. For example, when I leave off for the day, I'll often put in a couple of line breaks and then add a little sketch of what happens next. That way, I can more easily pick things up the next day. Usually all of my notes are pretty loose, but in the current case they're extremely elaborate. (I had to make myself a spreadsheet and a campaign map and all kinds of other ridiculous nonsense.) As I said above, I'll also do more research or more planning if I find that I've hit a point where things are too nebulous for me to proceed.

I edit for consistency and voice/phrasing as I go, which everyone tells me not to do; sometimes this means going back and changing stuff from tens or even hundreds of pages ago, and sometimes it means sitting and reworking a sentence or paragraph for an hour or two until I'm happy with it. When I can't figure something out by myself, which happens probably three or four times per book, I'll have a mini-crisis and my wife will help me work out what I'm missing. Then, once the first draft is done, I'll send it to my early readers and make changes as I see fit based on their feedback. If any of my writing ends up getting published, I'll also obviously make changes based on editorial feedback.

So yeah - very different approaches for very different goals. Hopefully some of this was useful. Hopefully you all also feel confident and assured in your own process. I think part of what's important about writing is that there doesn't need to be just one "right" or "optimal" process, so I hope everyone feels encouraged to pursue things their own way ^_^

Thanks Zx, I do enjoy your stories, so that's a nice question to receive.

For what it's worth, my long interactive stories are all actually probably a lot simpler than they appear. Various sections go off in all directions, and I do enjoy hiding the random short stories (tbh, some of my personally favourite tales and characters) off up pointless side channels and then hearing (or not) if anyone ever actually finds them.

But the actual key narrative lines are always relatively straightforward, each apparently divergent plotline ultimately tying back in to a central point (like checking the scores at the end of a gameshow round) to link it all back in before the next phase. That helps control it all, if that makes sense.

I hope that's of minor interest, I look forward to your own next work!

Interesting, that makes sense. Thanks.

My writing process is absolutely terrible. I will usually write nothing for ages, until I get a flash of inspiration from a picture, set of images or something. I will then try to get it out of my head and onto my phone as quickly as possible. So most of my stories were written over the course of a day or so. I'll try and edit on my computer then post before I change my mind or chicken out. I really don't recommend it.

My fatal mistake if I write anything is to be constantly editing it, as I read through it again and again.