#anyway I have a nice tag ramble somewhere about what I mean that the GFFA doesn't benefit from being constantly 'expanded' in tie-in materia

[frumfrumfroo]

My imagination usually gets captured by concepts first: a magic system, a setting quirk, a plot premise. All my ideas start out with "What if X?" and character development is, well not an afterthought, but it comes after and out of that other stuff. I am very much a plotter not a pantser so I usually don't even know who my characters really are until the plot has taken shape to reveal them. Is there a way to make this work or should I unlearn all of this and start from scratch?

There’s no wrong way to get inspired! Whatever grabs your imagination and gets you motivated to start somewhere is what it is, man, I wouldn’t say you can control that. If your process works well for you and at the end of the day you’ve written a good story, then it doesn’t need to change. What I’m getting at saying ‘it needs to be a story before it’s anything else’ isn’t about literal chronology of invention, I mean the story has to be the most important thing. ‘Before’ as in precedence. And a story isn’t a plot, it’s the idea(s) or feeling you are trying to communicate or express.

If you plot everything out before writing, you probably have the self-discipline to keep the story ‘first’ regardless of how you arrived at the finished product. Meaning, you may know all about how windmills are designed and built by magical sapient moles in your universe, but you’re only going to tell the reader about those moles if it actually adds to the story and not just to show off that you thought of this cool idea. Your worldbuilding can still be in service of the story becauseyou can still allow the story to drive any and all exposition. Middle Earth emerged from Tolkien’s recreational creation of languages, but LotR itself is a story first and the vast majority of the pure ‘worldbuilding’ he did is not in the novel at all. The fact that he did all that background isn’t what makes the world compelling and convincing, he just did that for himself because he enjoyed it.

SW still feels like a living, breathing world in spite of the fact we’re told almost nothing about how any of it works and Lucas clearly hadn’t made many firm decisions about what the background was- because it isn’t thinking of everything and making up a million details that makes a fictional world feel real. The characters authentically inhabit this universe, they take it for granted, and the audience will accept their reality very easily as long as the characters themselves remain convincing. Does some of this stuff make logical sense if you start to question it? No, sure doesn’t. Tonnes of it will immediately fall apart if you pull the thread. The treatment and nature of droids would be a gigantic problem if this were a science fiction story, but because SW narrative concerns are completely different it doesn’t matter. Vast majority of viewers will never question it because the universe makes emotional sense and this is a story about individual emotional journeys. This is why it’s such a huge disconnect to go from the vague emotional mysticism of the films to something like the old EU and its lightsabre katas. The GFFA is (or at least the OT version was) small in spite of feeling big because of its character focus. It doesn’t thrive on minutiae or ‘realism’ and trying to explain it or rationalise it too much actually makes it less believable.

Plot-driven narrative really requires more planning and a backward-construction kind of approach from plot to character, because otherwise your characterisation will suffer. If you already have fully formed characters, they need to drive development and plot needs to be flexible or you’ll almost certainly end up sacrificing their motivation and audience empathy with their arc to keep the plot on the rails.