OUAN503 - Story Development, Narrative

Since the beginning of the project I've been working on a document that gives details of as much of the story as possible. It has turned into a type of feed that displays ideas as they have changed and developed whilst I continue to change and further the story. The beginning shows the initial ideas I had and how they expanded into a longer narrative with additional characters. This thread of ideas has been beneficial to maintain because I can keep track of the different narrative threads, return to previous ideas and essentially make sure that the story world is consistent and that all of my ideas are kept in the same place. I've treated this like a bible I can return to and work on when necessary and making sure it is kept updated has meant that my ideas weren't forgotten along the way.

I've found it difficult to develop a full plot from beginning to end, so to be more efficient the approach I took was to simply start writing and see where the writing takes me. It felt a lot more intuitive and creative than simply plotting out every action or scenario that takes place, and reading back some of the work I've written up to now, hardly any of the finer details are in my plan. This demonstrates to me that it is important to have a good mix of both planning and intuitive writing when crafting stories especially in long form like I am attempting. A difficulty I did encounter was that sometimes I would hit a point in the story where I hadn't fully realised what was going to happen at a certain point, and this is the point where I would go back to my notes and make a decision on where the story should head next, once the idea is set to work towards for a certain stage in the story it is simple to write up to that point, it is just a case of setting a certain goal for a scene or chapter.

The speed that I am writing at has varied greatly up until the point. Currently I have about eight thousand words written of the main story with another five or six thousand in notes. My time has of course been divided between this and developing a final animation a long with artworks and the planning of a graphic novel so some days will contain no writing at all whereas on others I could perhaps write several thousand words with everything else in between on other days. I have tried to use what I've learnt in my efforts to develop original IPs to date and make sure each of the story platforms is used to its fullest potential and the segments of the story world that each displays is the best for that platform. There is other considerations such as the feasibility of what can be included in the animation for example based on my own ability and the time I have to create it so there is some constraints in place but this can be worked with to still create engaging and successful content. The novel will encompass an entire narrative from start to finish, the graphic novel depict some back story of two detectives from the main narrative and the animation giving a small window into the life of the main character extracted from the main narrative, so there is some overlap and some highlighting of key scenes amongst the different story outlets. The main narrative is still in development at this point and I am constantly working on different sections that have already been written. I think it will still be being developed until the deadline purely to ensure it is as good as it could be.