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Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

I'm considering cancelling a fanfic and rebooting it with a story based on the same concept, but with different characters. (I've had the idea for a while. ) Is this a good idea?

are you really sure a reboot wont just end up the same way? and are you prepared to rewrite everything, even do all the boring parts again?
 
I should clarify. It has the same premise - Pokémon in season 1 Equestria - but focuses on completely different characters. It was originally envisioned as a side-story.
 
I should clarify. It has the same premise - Pokémon in season 1 Equestria - but focuses on completely different characters. It was originally envisioned as a side-story.

then i'm not sure how it would be rebooting the current story if it's a totally different story just in the same setting that would have been a side story in the original. or is the overarching plot the same, but this is just a different viewpoint to it?
 
Originally it was going to happen concurrently with the original story, with a tiny amount of crossover, but now I'm thinking that since I'm not happy with where the original story was going, I might as well contradict it.
 
So with the Alola league in the anime coming to a close and the anime fandom likely to be in a small scale civil war one week from now regardless of what happens I wanted to share a very old and abandoned idea--not for a fic itself but for a specific development in a fic. One or two chapters of this fic are actually on BMGF somewhere from a decade ago (so it's also the fic's tenth birthday, so to speak), but life got complicated and it petered out. This probably turned out to be for the best since I doubt my writing skills at the time were really developed enough to pull off some of what I wanted to.

It was a sort of journey fic though the main character is already experienced at the start, and the "best and worst" idea was I was going to have the main character, Marcus, lose in the region's league to Ash in the final round.

Ash was not going to appear before the league or have any story importance after it--it was a parody what happened in the actual anime with Tyson and Harrison and (though he wouldn't appear for a year) Tobias, except with Ash in the role of protagonist breaker. I'd actually planned out a lot of how the battle would go, though I only remember a handful of details now--I was going to have Ash use his reserves instead of sticking with his "current" team, there was going to be a double KO between Snorlax and Marcus' Slaking, and Pikachu was going to win it by fainting Marcus' Espeon. More details might be stored on my backup writing disc.

This was before the Sinnoh league really started the trend of each league ending being heavily controversial, so I wonder how this twist would have gone over with readers at the time, and how it would have gone over now after said controversies.

I sometimes consider trying to reboot the story and finish it with a better league ending since I still really like some of the ideas I had for it in terms of characterization and plot that I didn't get to show in the few uploaded chapters.

(Sorry if there's a thread for dropped writing ideas, but I didn't see one)
 
I don't know if anyone here posts their stories here and also somewhere like AO3 or FF.net, but a thought occurred to me as I was updating In the Face of Adversity. For those of y'all that do crosspost, how do y'all do your formatting? Mainly thinking of things like italics or bolded text. I keep everything in one document, but I have to adjust the formatting for the forums and for FF.net since the latter won't recognize BBcode. Wondering how the rest of y'all do it, if anyone here does crosspost.
 
Fimfiction and Archive of Our Own both have an option that keeps formatting when you copy-paste something from a Google Doc. Unfortunately, the latter adds extra linebreaks.
 
when i write my document in gdocs, i put asterisks around passages i italicize (or just one in the front if it's a single word) and then when i post the text somewhere and the formatting is lost, i search for asterisks and delete them as i put in the italics. if the formatting isn't lost, though, it's easy just to delete the asterisks. i haven't run into the problem of needing to have actual asterisks in my text yet, but if i do, i'll figure out something, i'm sure.
 
That's how I've been doing it too, haha. I'll bold/italicize text in my document, and then I go back and add the BBcode when I'm ready to share on forums. I guess we can be chumps together!
Depending on where you’re planning on posting — I’m pretty sure BMG’s current version takes italics/bolds from the source, so if it’s formatted in your text doc, you won’t need to reformat!
 
Weird weekend for me. Wrote a short story and read a book in the space of 48 hours, pretty much, and did very little else!
 
About cancelling my fanfic: ScytheRider (author of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Silver Resistance) has a list of writing advice on his user page, and one piece of advice is that cancelling a fanfic and starting over is a bad idea because you've already built up an audience with the original and may lose motivation to write the new one. My "reboot" idea stems from a problem I have where I get bored of my ideas and want to start something different, but similar.
 
as UA has said, the decision on whether or not cancelling a story is the move is not something that other people can really comment meaningfully on. Whether or not it's a good idea is on you in this case.
 
@Nitro Indigo
From what you wrote in your post on Fimfiction, it looks like you plan for this story to be an introduction to the universe you've created? Secondly, you also seem to be close to the end of your story. In this case I'd recommend finishing the fanfic, unless you genuinely loathe even the sight of it. There's always going to be boring or difficult parts to the stories you write, which isn't going to change if you decide to rehash the idea in a new setting, or if you like the new idea more. If you're unsure about what you want to happen in the final bits of your story, you could take some time out to think about it - I'm sure your readers won't mind.

In the end, though, it's your choice whether or not to continue.
 
@lapisora Thanks! I'd like someone to talk to about how the events of chapter 8 unfold, preferably someone who knows stuff about Friendship is Magic. The actual fanfic is less than 17,000 words long so far, so it shouldn't be too hard to catch up. I've tried asking on Fimfiction, but ever since the person I originally asked for help left, I haven't been able to find anyone else.

My biggest issue with my own writing is that I tend to have the protagonist meet a lot of characters, and I want to do more with them, but the pacing of the story won't allow it. Chapter 6 of The Wayward Butterfly only exists to set up a potential sequel.
 
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