TAKE X/The Centrality - Discussion

That's a question with a lot of different answer parts!

First, Take Ten. There was very little planned out aside from Sienna burning down the Guild and attempting to murder the top ten. I knew that would be the driving force behind everything, but I didn't plan past that. I had a few secrets up my sleeve (Ione being a shade, for example), but other than that pretty much everything was improvised in response to commands. Even Sienna killing Palmer! That one was a direct command someone gave during their battle.

In fact, without that specific command, I likely wouldn't have thought to give a Game Over, prompting Takes 11 through 14. And if it weren't for Takes 13 and 14 specifically, Take X would likely not exist! So Take Ten was very heavily influenced by commands.

The Normal Place wasn't originally intended to be part of the same story, even though it featured the pantheon from Ennen. As a result of Take Ten being so loosely planned, I was hitting writer's block pretty bad, so I wanted to take some time to do something unrelated. Once I started nearing the end, though, I began to see how I could tie everything in. Because it was a murder mystery, I had to plan out a lot of it from the start, although I did diverge from the original plans pretty significantly in the last few cases (I can talk about that more in depth if anyone's interested). So The Normal Place, plot wise, wasn't influenced as much by reader direction.

Take X hit sort of a happy medium between the two. I planned who each chapter would star in advance (though I had a star planned for this last chapter - Blue - and obviously that ended up not happening). I also came up with a "prompt" for each chapter: Palmer needs coffee and ends up in Khetaqa, Justice explores Emek and finds a mysterious orb, etc. As a result, I also had "win conditions" in each chapter too. Aside from the starting point and the ending point in each chapter, everything in between was improvised in response to commands. It was also possible to fail a chapter, and I knew that doing so would make the final chapter more difficult, which we can see in progress now.

I've tried to not railroad whenever I can. A good example is the choice at the end of Sienna's chapter. If readers had elected to go in the light door and not the dark, the final chapter would be proceeding very differently. That said, the final chapter has been the most improvised of all of them - I didn't have an outline for this one at all. I have a potential ending written, but it's just potential, and I'm constantly changing it as things happen.

The overarcing storyline for Take X is similar - I had a starting point planned and a rough ending point planned, but in between it was mostly improvised in response to readers.

I hope that answers your question! Thanks for asking (and for following the adventure for so long!) and I'd be more than happy to expand on anything I mentioned here, too.