Hallo! after your recent post (retrospective?) on the fics you are happiest with/are most revealing; I read basically all the fics you mentioned. What really stands out for all of them is how deftly you handle the escalation. You are really skilled at teaching the reader the rules (tony is de-aged, harry is de-aged, steve's in a time loop, future!draco is helping harry+friends, etc); and then you 'simply' extend those rules in a really unexpected way to raise the stakes and really force the reader and the characters to grapple with them more deeply. One of the most impressive (b/c it's so subtle, almost) is actually in The Pure and Simple Truth, where Neville and Greg meeting again is such a heightening of the basic premise of forgiveness and morality and hurt and healing that it feels unexpected but is in fact an extremely rational extension.
I'm wondering, when you're drafting a story, how you approach/think about these escalations. Are they the seed of the entire plot? Do you only get to them after thinking of the basic premise? After plotting them, how do you approach actually writing them? (Am I reading too much into this entirely?) And of coure, thanks for all of your writing!
Thank you so much for thinking I do this well! You're not reading too much into it, in that escalation is a part of story shape, and story shape is something I think about all the time. But I will say that I almost never think of escalation specifically as a thing I want to do, because your first guess is the correct one: usually the escalation is in the first idea I get about a story--or actually, it's a combination of the first several ideas, because I was unable to decide and combined them. Take the stories you mentioned:
Tony is de-aged: I wanted to do an MCU de-aging story and couldn't decide whether I wanted it to be Tony de-aged and Bruce taking care of him or Bruce de-aged and Natasha taking care of them or maybe a group of them de-aged. So I conceived the story in a way to write them all at once.
Harry is de-aged: I wanted to do an H/D de-aging story and couldn't decide whether to de-age Harry or de-age Draco, and if it was Draco I wanted to see him at a variety of ages. I didn't want to do Harry at a variety of ages because we already know how he is from 11-17, but I did also want to do both H/D de-aged at the same time with a second chance at being friends while kids. So I conceived the story in a way to write them all at once, except the arc where they're both kids couldn't be worked in.
Steve's in a timeloop: I wanted to do an MCU timeloop story and couldn't decide whether it was more interesting to put Bruce in the loop have Bruce outside the loop trying to help someone, or maybe Bruce would be in a timeloop with a few others. So I conceived the story in a way to write first Steve in a timeloop, then a small group, then the world, except I got tired of the story so skipped the small group in a loop.
Future!Draco helping Harry+friends: this one was a little different because I didn't start with a single trope, but two tropes I love that are somewhat connected--time travel (and paradoxes that result from it) and multiverses (which can be created by time travel). What I really wanted to do was write the multiverses, but then it would be a much longer story than I had the energy for, so that story is really just trying to write the bare minimum of the paradox I was interested in and squeeze in multiverses because I like them.
The Pure and Simple Truth: this is the simplest one because I didn't even start with a trope. It literally is just what if Harry and Draco go to the pub with ever combination of their friends that is possible to create? I literally made lists: 1) Harry,Draco,Hermione, 2) Harry,Draco, Pansy, 3) Harry,Draco,Hermione,Pansy, 4) Harry,Draco,Hermione,Ron, 4) Harry,Draco,Hermione,Ron,Pansy etc.
For that fic, as well as all the other fics above, I didn't "plot" anything; I didn't come up with an outline or rough list of things that would happen. What I did was come up with these ideas, then write the beginning, then continue to write in a way that allowed the rest of the story to be guided by a) who I think these characters are and what they'll do in certain situations, and b) what works in the canon universe, c) what works in the universe of the fic I set up in the opening scenes.
What I mean is that while I thought TPaST had to be about the themes you mention--morality, hurt, healing, forgiveness--because that's what a story about Slytherins and Gryffindors becoming friends should be about, I didn't plan at any point to have the Greg and Neville confrontation. What I did was think about Greg, the way he comes across in canon and how little remorse or understanding or compassion we see from him, but how he is someone with friends and feelings and fears and joys. And then I thought about Neville, about how of all the Gryffindors in the group I was writing, he was the one who was explicitly tortured by the Slytherins in the group I was writing, and about how that should mean something for Neville; he should see things differently and have different feelings. (I will say Luna was also probably tortured, but she's Luna and so sees everything differently always.) Anyway, once you think through who these two people are and put them in a room together it feels inevitable, what will happen. And that's honestly how almost all my stories come together.
I want to say that if you do admire the way my stories come together it's not actually a thoughtless, directionless project that just happens to work in a way that some people enjoy. I think all the time about the shape of stories, and shape includes escalation. But I'm rarely thinking about how to escalate, because it's baked into the premises I conceive. Instead I'm thinking about things like pacing, and laying character development next to plot pacing, and where to places all the necessary foreshadowing moments, and how to ensure I've kept all the promises made by foreshadowing, that sort of thing. When you've got a premise that escalates naturally, and you're carefully balancing the rest of those things, the escalation should happen in a way that feels interesting and propulsive.
Perhaps obviously the thing I'm terrible at and never think about is de-escalation, because by the time we get to the top of the escalator I'm where I want to be and uninterested in climbing down. Like the climax is fun but wow anything after it kinda bores me, and that ruins the shape utterly, oh well.
