I'd be interested in those writing shortcuts 👀 (don't feel pressured though)
Yeah sure! This is in reference to this and this posts.
These are all pretty 'fic style' stories, because they scaffold off pre-existing canon. It's like you're walking inside of a pre-built house and you're putting up new wallpaper and designing the rooms. Novel style is like if you're building the entire house. So these are really great for fun and if you have writer's block or have problems starting a story. They're also really good if you're practicing your dialogue, scene composition, characterization, etc - they are not good for developing skills on how to build the house, but if you're trying to work on actually making a readable story they're great methods to practice. They're also a lot easier to make good lol.
While writing these out I realized that they're almost entirely AUs. This is because I like AUs. You don't have to do AUs, you can adapt these however you want if you just like writing canon. Loser. Anyway, these are my low-effort stories:
A series of disconnected scenes that take place over a long period of time. If you have an idea in mind (or you just want to use the OG work's timeline), then you can show scenes or moments over a long period in time. For example, ages ago I wrote an AU story following the life of one character. One scene for 2008, one for 2010, one for 2012 etc.
Rewriting canon. If you have an AU idea or have a way in mind to change canon to something you think fucks harder, then you can use pre-existing episodes or season plotlines and just add your own flavor to what already exists. If you write for BNHA you aren't allowed to do this. That's the rule. How is all BNHA fic 600k AUs where one extremely minor detail is changed. God they're boring.
Alternate viewpoint/missing scene of a story you have. Like you can do this for canon too but that sounds super boring. This is actually something I do in order to help the quality of the main story - if I'm finding myself writing a super complicated character, I write another story about him from his POV to help give me a handle on him. Or write her parts of the story from her perspective. It's a writing exercise to help me figure out the character and it is also easy and fun.
"X Meets Y". Do you really like Legally Blonde? Do you think your favorite character being Elle Woods would be really funny? Stuff like that. Would it be really funny if your blorbo was Sharpay Evans? Yes it would be. Yeah I DID write a story many years ago that was "X meets Teen Beach Movie", why?
I don't know how many other people out there have extremely convoluted entire AU ideas, but if you have the whole AU in your mind then it is incredibly easy to write little stories or snippets from the AU. Like, so easy. A stand-out scene in your mind, the life of one supporting character, an alternate POV, whatever. Literally whenever I want to write something absolutely 0 effort whatsoever I go back to one of my 3 bugfuck stupid AUs and write something for them again.
This is actually something I think everybody should do, because it is basically how I learned story structure: find the trashiest, most formulaic genre you can. Watch or read something from that genre, or just collect genre conventions. Use the pre-packaged and pre-written formula to structure your own story and fill in the blanks.
(Also, these aren't very tropey or reliant on shipping/romance beats, which is nice if you want to get away from that stuff)
Nowadays, I find all of that helpful when I feel like doing something 0 effort. When I was a less experienced writer and I deadass did not know how to build a house, then these were really helpful for learning what wallpaper looks good and what arrangement of furniture creates good fung shui and what couches go best with that coffee table. They're also good passing. Seriously, these are like the most popular stories on my AO3. People eat this shit up. Why. They're so lazy.
IDK, these are what I do because they're the kinds of stories I like to write! What you find easy to write will be different. This is all a very personal list. I can see my personal thumbprint (no romance, AU central) really clearly. I'm kind of curious now: what are y'all's favorite low-effort, easy, fun stories to write?
Also as a heads up if your story doesn't have any sort of conflict in it, then it will actually very difficult to write. Trust me. Conflict makes you voom. Do it. Please. Love of god.