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Hi!! I absolutely LOVE and admire broken road so much!!! I hope you don't mind me asking, but I was just wondering how you went about planning the fic!! There are so many important things you tackled and it all fit together so seemlessly!!! Like everyone's past traumas and dynamics with each other and the pov switches! Like that's so incredible and amazing and you did such a fantastic job at it

HI THANK YOU <3 i actually can’t believe i don’t have a post about how i outline/make things already, i’m really happy i get an excuse to write one!! my main thing is that i am definitely a very firm believer in outlining, i think it’s important to have a way to zoom out of your fic and a way to keep track of what you’re doing so you don’t flounder in the middle. in my very unprofessional opinion creating a good outline is its own skill w/ its own benefits!! so my creation process for this fic or any other has a lot to do w/ that. since i’m using broken road as my fic example here, content warnings for this post include very light discussion of child abuse, past sexual assault, & suicide. also this is a long ass post nobody is obligated to read all of it lol

so w/o further ado, PROCESS FOR CREATING A FANFIC/FIC OUTLINE:

step 1 - make a new outline doc. you don’t want this at the bottom of your fic generally because it may get long - mine usually end up having sections for different types of outlining/different character arcs (we’ll cover that later). this picture is one from my merlin outline doc, but my broken road doc had sections too, they just weren’t as neat and pretty. when i started working on it seriously, i was so sure that i wouldn’t finish that i didn’t adhere to my usual organizational standards lol so it’s not a good example

step 2 - write down everything you WANT to happen in this fic. like, i just make it a bullet list, i don’t worry about ordering anything, i don’t worry about making it make sense. i’m just getting things from my brain to my computer. why are you writing this? what scenes randomly popped into your head while thinking about it? so for broken road the very first scene i imagined was dean’s speech to john in chapter 6, and shortly after that was dean & cas in the impala in chapter 3. stuff like that. i really liked john and mary’s reunion from 14.13 proper, so i added it only with more hollywood romance lol.

step 3 - add the things you NEED to happen in the fic to make it work, the stuff you use to get from Point A to Point B, stuff that doesn’t make sense not to address. using broken road as the example, i need to have a scene where john comes back, i need to have a scene where sam and dean discuss flagstaff, etc. this also includes character combinations - i had a little table i used to make sure every major character had at least once meaningful moment with every other major character. this table was actually quite helpful because i realized once i made it that i didn’t have cas interacting with anyone besides dean, so i was able to go back and add ideas for scenes where he could interact w/ everyone else.

and then you also have what each character NEEDS - sam needs to be able to address his anger at john, sam needs the catharsis of being able to stop john from putting his hands on dean (hence the punch), mary needs to learn about the whole awful truth, including flagstaff, dean and jack need to address early season 13 where dean emotionally abused him into attempting suicide, dean needs to address his own anger at john, and cas (the only character not directly affected by john’s abuse) of course needs to see to dean’s safety, but also needs to figure out where he stands with dean romantically, since they sort of got together in the heat of the moment. so throw all that in there too! anything you can think of. you can always axe what you don’t use later. this is how i “remember” all of the important stuff and how i’m going to make it fit later.

step 3.5 - research. if you’re working with unfamiliar topics (if you’re writing about trauma and have never experienced trauma for example) this is a good time to do a little reading. it’ll give you ideas for things you might need to include.

step 4 - attempt to put your bullet points in some kind of chronological order. this is probably the hardest step/trickiest part for me and it usually takes many revisions to get it just right. like especially if you have a lot of bullet points how tf do you know which ones go first??

if there are certain arcs, you can sort the bullet points by type - this scene for dean’s anger arc, that scene for john’s snooping around trying to figure out what’s wrong with dean arc, this other scene for john and mary’s semi-divorce arc. i like to color-code them as well just because it makes things easier to keep track of and also because i’m gay. then you can sort of make sure you’re distributing things evenly, so you don’t have 6 scenes in a row about mary my beloved.

sometimes this is when i make sections in my outline. for example, i needed one for dean’s anger - because john is so quick to shift the blame away from himself, dean also learned to shift the blame away from john. so i needed a few scenes where he got angry at other people for john’s behavior - angry at jack for spilling the beans about dean going to hell (when he should be angry at JOHN for taking it poorly), angry at sam for yelling at john (when he should be angry at JOHN for threatening jack), angry at mary for breaking up with john (when he should be angry with JOHN for abusing his kids), etc etc.

within various character/plot arcs, there also needs to be a sense of escalation. for example, i also needed a section for michael’s antics and attempts to break out of the cage in dean’s mind. he’s not going to START with straight-up hallucinations, and he’s definitely not going to start with the hallucinations most likely to break dean’s will (i guess he could but it would make for badly paced fiction). so i had to organize them by order of how frightening they were, to gradually build up the intensity - he goes from giving dean headaches to making dean flash back to upsetting memories to creating brand new upsetting things to show him to actually moving dean’s body to make sure dean can’t stab him.

same with john’s “case” - he can’t find out right away that dean’s got an angel inside him, so first he finds out about angels in general, then michael specifically, then the apocalypse and how possession bloodlines work, etc. same w/ dean’s bodily autonomy and history of assault - first we talk about his issues & why they prevent him from being with cas, then they kiss, and then they do more than kiss. actually, if i hadn’t been so attached to the sex scene where it was, the smart thing to do would’ve been to put it after their fight in chapter 4, because that’s a steadier pace/escalation, but i had a very firm picture in my mind of how i wanted it to be, so i cheated a little.

the trickiest part of broken road was also selling my audience on the idea that it’s OK for dean to love john unconditionally, even despite the fact that john is an abuser, and that john might never love dean in the same way. a lot of john fics involve dean cutting his dad out or whatever and that wasn’t how i wanted mine to be. i actually wound up going back to restructure this after i had already written a good 60% of the fic. i had to organize things so that dean revealed more of his feelings about john closer to the end, rather than attempting to get all that out of the way right off. there’s a bit in chapter 3 where dean talks about john being the reason he learned to talk again - believe it or not, that was initially in chapter 1. way too early! so sometimes you will realize there needs to be an arc you didn’t plan for and then have to *gag* edit stuff.

typically, you want as even a distribution as possible. work on one arc for awhile and then switch to another. juggle juggle juggle. especially for things like dean’s anger - it takes time to sink in that john might actually be the one to be angry at about the abuse.

like i said, this sometimes takes a lot of tries to get right, it’s hard to nail it the first time, sometimes i find myself changing my outline even after i start writing, and that’s OK. whatever works best for the story!

step 4.5 - this is also when i make other sections in my outline. if you want to keep track of your timeline, for example, it’s best to do it as you go. this doesnt have to include precise dates or anything - just say x days later, or a few weeks later, whatever, so you don’t lose track of when stuff is happening. important for big projects. i couldn’t be assed to make one for broken road bc the entire fic takes place over less than a week but the fact that it’s not longer, in-universe, is actually one of the things i don’t like about the fic. 108k feels like way too many words for a 4-5 day fic. i also like to make a section for editing notes - anything i need to remember to fix in my fic. another section for plotholes that need solving, as i think of them. a section for blocking, which we will get to later, and another section as just a free space - if you think of something for your fic and don’t know where to put it or it’s just something you want to remember, you can write it down in the free space just so you don’t forget. the free space is also good for talking things out - when i was really stuck, i would simply start typing like i was describing my problem to a friend, and sometimes that helped me work it out (like the fanfic writer’s version of the rubber duck). you can also add a section for writing you have to cut, just in case you find a place you can stick it back in later. there’s no specific time you have to add your new sections, i add them as i need them, but yk.

step 5 - anyway, once your ideas are all in a loose chronological order, you can decide things like which items go together in which scenes and whose pov those scenes are from, and then also divide it into chapters if you like. i wrote a whole thing about pov here but the shorthand is to write from the pov that has the most at stake. for broken road, my rule was to stick to dean’s pov except for scenes dean could not be present for in their entirety, and then i switched to john. also sometimes you can combine multiple plot points into a single scene! for example i was able to have mary learning about flagstaff and dean and cas make up in the same scene, because they were thematically similar.

i don’t use my original bullet point for this, i save it for later, but i rewrite the outline by scene from scratch. when you finish it might look something like this or this:

this is the zoomed out scene outline for broken road’s first six chapters. as you can see, it’s color coded according to pov and the slashes divide it up into chapters - though actually, i didn’t start dividing up anything into chapters until i was 2-3 chapters in. to be honest, my chapters were so long that now i kind of wish i had made them shorter lol. sorry if u can’t read it, i like to make my backgrounds dark when i have a headache.

anyway, i find it very helpful to have scene numbers - i even type down what number the scene is in the fic doc (along w/ scene status but that’s for later) so i can keep track of it better.

step 6 - flesh out the outline. down further, i also had some “zoomed in” outlines:

i do this for every scene - i like to take my original bullet point list, the very first one i made of things that i wanted to happen in this fic, and make sure every bullet point is in one of these scenes. and if i think of more stuff i need to add later, that gives me an easy place to put it. for example i knew i wanted to address adam SOMEWHERE in this fic, and decided it fit best here, so in it goes.

sometimes i color-code those extra bullets. for example “sam tells john he went to hell” is actually a piece of evidence john uses to figure out what’s wrong with dean, so that’s part of that arc. but “sam tells john to back off” is part of sam’s arc, so that’d be in a different color. i didn’t do it this time but sometimes it’s helpful to see your arc distributions.

i actually wound up doing a lot of revising to my outline as i wrote broken road (bad!) so it’s not out of the question that i need to add scenes or swap bullet points around, and this makes it pretty easy to edit with copying and pasting w/o having to do a lot of retyping. in an ideal world, you’d really solidify this outline before you got started drafting, but sometimes you can outline too much and kill your drive to work on it, or outlining becomes a way to procrastinate on actually writing, and in that case it’s better to just fucking bite the bullet and get started.

step 7 - set up ur fic doc. i like to make sure i have important links at the top (to my spreadsheets if i have any, to for example the 14.13 transcript, to my outline doc) and make sure that it has the proper headings so it auto-creates that outline on the side (here are some pictures).

step 7.5 - spreadsheets! if you want to use a ticky-box spreadsheet to keep track of your arcs this is a good time to make it. if you like to use a spreadsheet to keep track of your wordcount you can make one of those too. (i don’t have a post about these, but it’s easy enough to do one column for the date and another for the word count. then you can make graphs! i was too lazy to do this for broken road but i like to do it most of the time.)

step 8 - blocking!! i have a whole post on blocking here (which uses merlin as a fic example instead of spn, sorry, but it should still make sense). this post is already super long so i’m not gonna rewrite all of that here, but essentially planning out the beats/dialogue of your scene before you write it will make the writing go faster. at least, it does for me.

step 9 - scene headers. this is the scene number, the pov, and the “status” of the scene, which will sometimes be in your spreadsheets - i generally use W to mean needs Writing, R for needs Rewriting, E for needs Editing, * for done, and a checkmark for posted. since google makes the automatic outline on the side this is a great way to quickly jump around, especially for long projects. it's also great to be able to see your fic "zoomed out" at a glance - the spreadsheets help with this too.

step 10 - actually write. FINALLY. as someone whose favorite part of the process IS WRITING i realize the rest of this may seem excessive to other people. personally i think it’s well-worth the payoff. my favorite resource on writing is the triangle method, aka an article called how to go from writing 2k a day to 10k a day, which posits that in order to boost your productivity to the max it’s best to have 1. time to write 2. enthusiasm and 3. knowledge of what the hell you’re doing, which is what my outlining process is about. if i block my shit out and i have a solid outline, it’s nothing at all for me to write as much as 2 or 3 THOUSAND words in just an hour or two. in fact, i wrote about 8k+ in a single day when i was doing chapter 6 of broken road (yes i actually did the second half of dean’s speech after the punch AND the entire michael scene in one sitting), because i knew what i wanted to happen and i was excited about doing it. my goal is to one day do 10k in a single day!!

i like to write in order, because i think it’s a good way to add bookends/callbacks to previous scenes and remember what you have where (also a good way to not accidentally plothole yourself), but you can do what your heart moves you to. also, when writing, if there is a scene you really just CAN’T get to go down on the page, you are allowed to skip it and come back to it! but my favorite thing is to quote something from close to the beginning of the story again near the end...it reminds us of how far we’ve come and it’s a good way to tug heartstrings.

step 11 - edit. BOOOOO i really hate editing, anyone who’s known me for 5 minutes has heard me complain about editing, but it must be done. the main thing to remember is to try your best to avoid editing while you’re writing. it’s very tempting, but that is the SLOWEST way to do anything. try to finish the whole draft first, and if you can’t manage that, try to finish the whole chapter, or at the very least the whole scene! what helps me a lot is when i don’t like a sentence or i can’t find the turn of phrase i’m looking for, i leave a note on it (or if you’re working with a program that doesn’t have that feature you can jot it down elsewhere) so i can assure myself i won’t forget/over the mistake and then keep moving on. when the scene/chapter/fic is finished, i can come back to it and solve all those issues one by one.

this is also where i can go back and restructure things if i need to, although sometimes you have to edit things before you can keep going because you need to know what you have written down so far. since i write in order, i have a hard time moving forward if i know one scene is going to change drastically.

step 12 - summary/tags/title. tags are easy enough as long as you don’t go overboard but summaries SUCK. it’s my pet peeve when people just leave excerpts because that doesn’t tell me anything...and then they wind up accidentally summarizing in the author’s notes. read some book jackets or watch some movie trailers to get inspired if you want, but even a bad summary is better than no summary, as long as it isn’t too long. “i suck at summaries” is an instant way to turn people away from your work so don’t type that even if it’s true

i wish i had better advice to offer about titles, but they usually come to me during the writing process - from a song, or a phrase in the fic itself, or just something else entirely. i can’t always do this, but i love being able to work a title drop into the fic. it just feels very exciting!!! and also sort of clues us in on what the title Means.

step 13 - post >:) i like to finish the whole thing before i post because otherwise i might just leave it unfinished FOREVERRR but then also i like to post the chapters one by one, then get to post as i edit (early dopamine!) instead of having to edit the entire thing first. and then posting weekly is a good way to have people read along and be excited with you. it’s also fun to blog about it and post excerpts! that’s part of how i wound up drumming up so much attention for broken road, i think. honestly the response has been so huge, i’m humbled every week. i can’t believe this thursday is the last chapter!

and...yeah. that was/is my process. idk if that’s interesting to anybody but me, or helpful to anybody but me, but it’s how i make sure things fit and that they’re paced well. i actually think broken road’s pacing could use a lot of work - probably my best paced fics are either anchor (teen wolf) or how arthur got his groove back (merlin), but like i said when i started it i never actually intended to finish, so it was more important to Go than to spend 6 zillion years on the planning process, or it wouldn’t have gotten done.

anyway, i know you said not to bother with this question but ty for sending it!!! i really love to talk about this stuff, it was a fun way to distract myself from vaccine symptoms lol.

[fic advice masterpost]

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