It's like at this point this thing I'm writing is actively trying to sabotage me.
As it's long (245k and counting) and convoluted, I've had to make mini-outlines drawing the broad strokes story and then others detailing the immediate bits to come.
Where I am now in the story, a war and its immediate aftermath have just ended, and now our heroes have some down time before the work's ultimate foe shows his true colors by trying to...uh, actually I'm still fuzzy on what, exactly, he's going to try to do in the later parts of the story. He wants to become the next xiandu--translated by Seven Seas Danmei sometimes as "Cultivation Chief" and sometimes "Chief Cultivator" neither of which I'm particularly keen on as terms, hence why I chose to just use "xiandu"--at any cost, but what his methods will be past the current outline phase, I'm not sure. (But this outline phase will likely last me until December, so... 🤷🏻♀️ Future me can worry about it.) In the current phase, the villain's plans are mostly political in nature. (Hopefully, they'll remain largely politcal even after, but... 🤷🏻♀️)
Anyway, until the villain makes his first move, the work's lead is unaware that anyone is plotting in the shadows...and since fighting to stop someone from seizing power is often a reactive process, particularly in the early stages, that leaves me with holes in the current activities of the work's lead.
The problem is compounded by the fact that this is a work of fan fiction, and the one who's the lead in what I'm writing is not the lead of the original work. So I have this alarming tendency to gravitate towards the original lead, especially in the outlining process...and especially especially at this particular part in the story, because the original lead is about to set off on a very important sidequest (in RPG terms) that only he can do, while his adoptive brother (the lead of the fanfic) has to stay behind and run the clan. Having them switch places or having them both go are not possible, but that also means that for a while the original lead has much more to do, plotwise, and that's no good!
I need to figure out what the lead's actual goals are both at this point in the story and overall, only the problem is that I feel like he genuinely hasn't got any goals more complex than the ones I had him outline to a potential new recruit early on in the war:
“So the question is, what are your goals here, Jiang-zongzhu?”
“My goals? I want to avenge my parents and everyone else from my clan—I want to avenge everyone who was killed at Lotus Pier.”
“And how will you know when you’ve avenged them?”
“When the Wen Clan is destroyed and Wen Ruohan’s ashes are scattered to the winds, then I’ll know I’ve avenged them,” Jiang Cheng answered firmly. If it wasn’t for Wen Qing standing right beside him, he would have said considerably more than that, but…
“A bit much,” the youngest commented.
“You’d feel the same if our parents had been murdered like that,” the middle one said. They were brothers, then?
“What do you plan to do after that?” the eldest asked.
“After that…?” The question took Jiang Cheng by surprise. “Restore Lotus Pier, restore the Jiang Clan, make sure my sister finds a husband who treats her the way she deserves to be treated…” He shook his head. “I don’t quite understand why you’re asking.”
“A man’s goals tell you a lot about the man’s character,” the eldest rogue cultivator said. “Your goals tell me you’re not the type to plan very far ahead.”
Jiang Cheng felt his face grow hot as the other two rogue cultivators laughed.
“But there’s nothing wrong with that!” the eldest added, laughing himself. “I was no different when I was your age. And maybe there’s not much point in having far-reaching plans when you’re about to enter into a war. What good is it having dreams if you end up dying before having a chance to act on them?”
So, yeah. I mean, that pretty much summed up his goals at the time, and with the war over (and Wen Ruohan suitably killed) those parts of his goals are now achieved. The only additional goal he's gained has been to see if he can get Wen Qing to marry him (which technically was already his goal then, too, only he couldn't say so with her standing right there (not that he'd have said it even if she wasn't, as he's very reluctant to ever admit what his feelings are (and sometimes that he even has them))) but that's got a long, slow ways to go before there's any action on it. 😅 (I kinda get the feeling from what little I've encountered of the original genre that any romance that gets to the "signed, sealed, delivered" stage before the final confrontation is one that's doomed to a horrible death. (Though I plan to flout that very thoroughly in this fic with the background relationships...))
Anyway, so the major problem is that where the lead is right now in his own personal story, he's in a stagnant position where the ideal is to reestablish the status quo that his father had lived by (or at least to establish his own status quo in its place) and then work to preserve it. Which is inherently dull. 😰 So it's like on the current outline, most of what I have for him to do is largely very dull, and/or just reacting to what others are doing. And that seems like a no-no, especially since during the war he was leading his troops into battle all the time, making this an even more jarring shift. I mean, I guess I could try to write him having some kind of psychological break because he'd gotten so used to fighting in the war and now that's been taken away from him, but the thing is that he didn't have any problem with it in the original work, in which the war was about twice as long, and even more horrible, and he was just as much in the thick of it, if not even more so. So it feels out of character to have him be particularly heavily impacted in my thing.
Gnnnnh.
This is very frustrating.
I mean, it's obviously my own fault for a) not realizing just how massive this would end up being and rethinking the whole idea, and b) not planning ahead more carefully regarding the motivations of the lead and especially the antagonist, but...I've been working on it since spring and it's closing in on 250,000 words long, so I feel like I have to see it through or it'll be a total waste of all that time. More than that, I just plain want to finish it. I'm just at a little bit of a loss as to how to go about it.
Well, no, that's not strictly true, either. I could just follow the current outline, virtually ignoring the supposed lead of the fic for most of the next 25k words, but that would produce an end result even more sloppy and disjointed than my usual writing. And my stuff is bad enough already; I don't want to go out of my way to make it worse!
Honestly, with NaNo coming up (though I'll be doing my usual rebel thing and not actually entering the official NaNoWriMo process), I may mostly take a break from writing between now and November 1st. Just sit down to work out what the heck I'm gonna do about the whole plot and motivation debacle, then rest my writing brain for a few days.
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So, everything above the line, I wrote last night, but couldn't post because getting the long-form quote to work on my phone just wasn't. Therefore, I put off finishing the post until today, and in my morning bath I came up with a good next scene, which not only addressed the lead's lack of known goals (thus putting him to thinking about them as he moves forward) but also referred back to the scene I was quoting above. Still doesn't fully answer what his goals are between now and when the antagonist starts making his moves (giving the lead someone to be working against), but at least if he's actively trying to figure out his own goals, that's something for him to do.
Naturally, this is all somewhat hampered by the fact that his goals in the original work at this point in the story pretty much were just "run the clan, restore its reputation, etc." He's a very dutiful guy, all told, which unfortunately caused a lot of friction between him and the original work's lead, just at the time when he needed support the most. 😭 But that's why this fanfic is changing the course of events, so that I--like the mentally-immature individual that I am--can have a version of events where the characters I like don't die, suffer horrible loss (well, beyond the loss of their parents and so on) and suffer needlessly just because...well, if I try to go into that, it'll take all day.
Anyway, I feel like I've yammered on until I've lost the thread of what I was trying to say (if there ever was such a thread), so I suppose I should stop here...
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