did you plan everything in "The Exceptionals" or do you come up with ideas on the go?
Aww good question! :D Well I’ll try to tell this from the beginning without rambling, but I feel like the whole story needs to be told.
Basically this started when I was at one of my best friends’ houses for their birthday with another bestie and we were watching Doctor Who when the Daleks In Manhattan two-parter came on and I hadn’t seen that in AGES so I was really happy. This was before I acknowledged it was my favourite two-parter in the whole damn show. We all chatted about things we analysed from it while watching and had a great time, although when Dalek Sec got killed at the end (despite me expecting it) I almost fucking cried.
A few days later that bestie and I were at this group we go to where everyone draws comics and stuff, and I drew a kind of crappy sketch of Sec freaking out at using a tommy gun, so we got to talking about the episodes again and I let loose about how salty I was and would forever be that a character I found so interesting and honestly kind of sweet got killed off needlessly. My friend agreed and we talked about it for ages, then about other concepts we would have loved to see in the show. I remembered an old fic idea I once had and told him about (which I won’t explain in detail for now yet because spoilers, but is hinted in the story description!), and it turned out he’d once had a very similar idea! But then it was HIS idea to combine those ideas with what we both wanted to do - save Sec. We came to realise it would only take one little change in the theatre scene to set things in motion and so that became the idea for the first chapter.
From there, we met up in Waterstones the very next day and spent most of that day planning out nearly the whole outline of phase 1 of the story, which is now completed and up there and I can’t bloody believe it! We planned out basic details of characters we wanted involved, some of which haven’t been introduced yet, and we wrote down basically as much as we could of phase 1 in advance which would take TWO YEARS to complete. Honestly we can both come up with ideas and interactions but if it wasn’t for this nerd’s ability to fire out words a ten times the speed I do, I don’t think the fic would have ever started. Fun fact: We were at Waterstones until pretty late because we decided to join in on their Harry Potter night… dressed like Time Lords.
So yeah a huge amount of it is planned in advance and I actually have the next 19 or so chapters/mini arcs written down in a notebook that we came up with together. When it comes to chapters we may come up with small ideas in chunks and write them down for later, but they’re mostly planned when we come to them and with a bit of ad lib thrown in during writing. The whole of the next chapter is bullet-pointed and I’m busy right now trying to flesh out some dialogue and stuff. If you ask nicely, I might even see if it’s okay to reveal what the next chapter is called ;)
If you or anyone else has questions feel free to ask here OR go ask at @theexceptionalsart which I made for the fic. And here, have a selfie from the day at Waterstones! Ahh, nostalgia.