Hey guys, how’s it going?

More than a few people have been asking me for tips on writing a fan-fic lately, so I thought I’d do what I’d been meaning to do for ages, and share my planning techniques with everyone. Here goes...

Writing a long running fic is hard. Many people say they have trouble thinking more than a few chapters in advance; others say that they get bored with their stories after they write the first few chapters; and some just have no idea where to begin. For some reason I never had any of these problems... in fact I have exactly the opposite problems. I tend to think several dozen (perhaps even a few hundred!) chapters in advance; I have trouble thinking about anything but my story some times; and I don’t know where to stop!

So here’s how I came up with Soul Fire. I’ll use examples from my story, but you could use this system to plan out any fic you like. First thing you need of course is an idea. I started with the idea of getting Naruto and Hinata together. That was the basic foundation of the story. After that, I needed to decide a few things that would affect the story significantly. Such as:
. Are they ninja’s, or high school students, or something completely different?
. What point in the timeline am I going to set the story: after the time skip, before the time skip, or even before the start of the original Naruto story?
. Am I going to make any major changes to the core Naruto storyline, stick with the original story religiously, or just make minor tweaks as needed?

Once you’ve made these decisions, it’s time to start laying down the Overview for your story. The Overview consists of a list of events that will happen in the story, laid out in chronological order. Each event is listed as one simple point, such as: “.They go to _____ and do _____” To keep things simple, I try to make each point no longer than one to three sentences. I write out all my plans in Microsoft Word, and to keep them neat, I make sure each point takes up no more than one line. To give an example, here’s part of the plan I wrote for Volume 1 of Soul Fire:

Volume 1
. Hinata has been injured during a mission
. On her way home from hospital, Hinata runs into Naruto; they go out for ramen together
. Naruto walks Hinata home and kisses her on the forehead
. Afterward they are both embarrassed about it
. The Feudal Lord of the Land of Water and Mizukage are assassinated
. Naruto, Sakura, Kakashi and Hinata are sent to the Land of Water to gather information
. During the trip Hinata becomes friends with both Naruto and Sakura
. Sakura teaches Hinata some medical ninjutsu
. During the mission in the Land of Water, Naruto and Hinata prove to be a good team
. The team sneaks into the Feudal Lord’s palace
. etc...

For the moment, you don’t need to go into fine detail. The point of this Overview is to lay out all your ideas, get them in the correct order, and get a general idea of how you’re going to get from one point to the next. Don’t worry about where chapters are going to begin and end, how exactly the characters are going to get from A to B (such as how they get from the Leaf Village to the Land of Water in my story), or anything too specific. Once you have this Overview, you can start working on a more detailed plan, where these questions will be answered.

When you’re first starting out, don’t feel you need a plan that’s as detailed or organised as this. I actually started my Overview with just five or six points, which covered about half of the story I have planned now. I can’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something like:
. Naruto and Hinata go out for ramen
. Naruto and Hinata go on a mission together
. Naruto and Hinata leave the Leaf Village with an OC
. etc...
As I worked things out, I added to my plans, gradually building on them as new ideas came to me. I started with half a dozen points... now my overview covers more than a dozen pages! My simple idea of writing a story about Naruto and Hinata getting together, has well and truly exploded out of control. Believe it or not, my Overview covers around THIRTY VOLUMES!!! I do not suggest that you try to write a story anywhere near that long, but I’m not going to stop you from trying either.

Getting back to business: this Overview is intended to help you get your ideas in order and make sure you don’t forget anything. It doesn’t need to be exhaustive, and anything can be changed. I play around with my Overview constantly, slotting in new ideas, clarifying old ones, and making changes wherever I see fit.

Once your Overview is starting to look clear, the next thing to do is start planning out the individual chapters. I plan my chapters in the exact same way that I plan out my Overview; I just add a lot more detail. For a story as big as Soul Fire, I have to divide the whole thing into a series of Volumes. When I plan out the chapters, I plan not just one, but a whole volumes worth at the same time. I find it is vitally important to plan more than one or two chapters ahead. This is how I keep my story consistent and well paced. Here’s an example of how I planned chapter 1:

Chapter 1:
. Hinata is injured from a mission and is stuck in the hospital
. Kiba and Shino have been sent on another mission without her
. Hinata hasn’t had many visitors and she’s lonely
. She starts thinking about Naruto
. Sakura arrives and gives Hinata a checkup
. Hinata asks Sakura how Naruto did in the chunin exams
. Sakura tells her that Naruto passed; Hinata is happy for him
. Sakura finishes her checkup and tells Hinata that she’s ready to go home
. On her way home from the hospital, Hinata runs into Naruto (literally)
. Naruto is on his way to Ichiraku’s to celebrate becoming a chunin
. Naruto is sorry for hurting Hinata and invites her to join him for ramen
. Hinata thinks he’s asking her on a date and proceeds to faint
. etc...

The exact number of points for each chapter is not important; just write down as many points as you need in order to make everything clear. As with the Overview, I constantly add to my Chapter Plans. Nothing is set in stone until a chapter is written and posted online. It is common for me to change minor things, squeeze in extra scenes and even chop chapters in half if it looks like they’re getting too big.

Writing a clear and detailed Chapter Plan is vitally important in order to make sure that the story runs smoothly and you don’t forget anything. While writing my chapter plan, I constantly look forward and back to make sure I’m not missing any key plot points. The last thing you want is to finish a chapter, only to realise that you meant to have the characters do something else first, leaving you with no option but to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

If you’re planning on writing a really long fic (like mine) then I recommend that you don’t try to plan out more than ten or twelve chapters in advance. I originally planned to make Volume 3 of Soul Fire about fourteen chapters long. When I reached the half way mark, I realised that I’d missed several important things and I ended up having to plan out three new chapters to fill a major plot hole. Fortunately my planning system is entirely modular, so it was easy to just chop chapters up and write more points to fill in the blanks. That’s the advantage of this simple system. It can actually be a good idea to keep plans for later chapters a little bit vague, so you can fill in the blanks as you write the earlier ones.

Every time I finish a chapter, I take time to review my plans for the next chapter and the ones following it. Fight scenes in particular are left quite simple, with just a few points saying who wins and how. Then when I’m ready to write the fight chapter, I go over the fight in my head and plan it out step by step. I find that my fight chapters often have more points than regular chapters. While a lengthy conversation taking up several pages may only be covered by a few points, such as:
. Hinata asks Sakura how Naruto did in the chunin exams
.Sakura tells her that Naruto passed; Hinata is happy for him (as above)
I like to plan my fights blow by blow, for example:
. Character A uses technique X
. Character B avoids technique X
. Character C takes Technique X to the face and dies horribly
. Character B uses technique Y
. etc...
Of course you can use as many or as few points as you like, it’s all up to you. The whole point is to use a system that works for you. I’m still making changes to this planning system as I learn. One thing that anyone that bothers to read my Artists Comments will know is that I still can’t accurately judge the length of a chapter in the planning stage. I’m still coming up with a way to do that, but so far it seems to be down to instinct more than anything.

Of course before you start planning you need to have an idea for a story. Again, this is one of the things I've never had a problem with. My problem is that I have far more ideas than I could ever actually use. I've already come up with Thirty volumes worth of junk for Soul Fire, and then there's all the other ideas I couldn't fit in this one story. I've got ideas for rewriting the whole Naruto story from scratch, ideas for a next generation story, ideas for original works. I'll probably never get a tenth of it done, which really ticks me off. As Orochimaru said: "Sadly there are not enough years in even the longest life." So how does he come up with all these ideas, you ask? Well there are two methods I use. One is to just take an idea that has already been done and change it around until it suits you. That's how I come up with all my big ideas. If you think about it, every fan-fic writer is already doing that. Taking Kishi-San's ideas and changing them however they like. As a NaruHina fan, I have chosen to take Naruto and Hinata and figure out how to get them together. That's the major idea. The problem then is to figure out how to get your ideas to work. How to take the Naruto story as it stands and change it until you reach your goal of getting them paired up. That's where my other method comes in.

In order to get my ideas to link up, I just try to think things out logically, either working backward from the conclusion, or forward from the beginning. For example, when I was planning the first volume, I wanted to get Naruto and Hinata on a mission together. The question I had to answer was, how and why would that happen? Naruto and Hinata both have their own teams, so why would they be separated from their own team mates and put together? Now if you've watched the Anime fillers you'll know that they've gone on missions before, but that was with Hinata's team. The problem there is, in the Shippudden timeline, Naruto isn't allowed to leave the village without somebody that can control the Fox, such as Jiraiya, Kakashi or Yamato. I didn't just want to ignore that little technicality, so I decided that Hinata would have to join Naruto's team for some reason. That meant I would need a reason to separate her from her own team and a reason for her to join team Kakashi. I figured if she was badly injured and stuck in hospital for a while, that her own team could have been sent on another mission without her. And a good reason for her to join team Kakashi would be so she could fill a role that their team is lacking in, such as reconnaissance. That in turn led to the question of what kind of mission would they be undertaking. I tried to think up something exciting and decided that infiltrating a Feudal Lords palace would be cool. That led to the question of why they are infiltrating a Feudal Lords palace, which lead to another question, which lead to another and another. Before I knew it, I'd written the overview for a whole Volume!

So to sum up, this system is intended to help you get your story in order, before you run into any serious writers block or fall down a massive plot hole. As you write chapters, you will inevitably think up new ideas and your vision for the story will begin to morph and grow, but it’s often easy to forget ideas that you come up with as you write. This planning system allows you to look ahead and find the best place to fit in your ideas so they don’t get lost among the mess. By using this system I’ve found that writers block is rarely a major problem for me. I’ve already figured out where the story is going and how it’s going to get there long before I started writing. Being able to see everything laid out in front of you, also makes plot holes clearly visible.

Now I can’t guarantee that this system will work for everyone, but it works great for me. I hope that some of you will try it out and will write better stories as a result. Please feel free to ask me for any specific advice. I love helping people with their work. But I really should be getting on with my own fic. The next Twenty Seven Volumes aren’t going to write themselves.

~~~~~

Soul Fire volume links:

Volume 1: [link]
Volume 2: [link]
Volume 3: [link]

Also check out my collab with ~hinatannaruto4ever Team Eleven: [link]