User blog comment:Varkanax39/Q&A with Varkanax39/@comment-29517617-20140308130857/@comment-1788742-20151116104035

Alrighty, attempting to answer this now:

1. For worldbuilding I tend to start with a very broad overview detailing my plans for the story in the broadest possible strokes. Then I focus on one small part of the world/universe (say a city, and the area around it) and begin building the rest of the world around that location. For the Xaterex storyline, I started with the city of Intax, detailing it as much as the story demanded it be detailed, along with the nearby Ix outpost, the Circle. Having developed the city of Intax, I was then able to establish where it was in relation to the rest of the world. It became an independent state to the north of the Ix Empire, ruled by the Kodax (a species of Proto-Makuta). I'm also a bit of an amateur cartogropher (map-maker) so I would often spend hours mapping out the locations described in the XMS. Once I knew where everything was in broad strokes, it became easy for me to fill in the world.

I also draw inspiration from history. For example, the Ix city of Ecbatana was inspired by the ancient Median city of the same name, and I believe the Ix territory is also referred to as "Media." In real life the city of Media was surrounded by similar concentric walls as Ecbatana is in the XMS, which allowed me to devise an incredibly interesting challenge for the protagonists in the final volume of the story. That's just one example though, there are plenty more, the city of Akkad being one of the most notable. Incedentially, it's also named for another [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkad_%28city%29 real life city and its empire. ]

2. I spend about twice as much time thinking of storyline plots as I do actually writing. I also outline extensively before I commit a word to paper. This allows me to write much more quickly then many writers I know; the ideas are fully formed by the time I get them down on paper. This allows me to have a much tighter control on plotting, as I'm not (usually) just making things up as I go along. Always, always, always have a plan. When you have good ideas, don't just throw them in, but think how the ideas and storylines play out and how each character's story arc developed. Being able to tell a consistant story arc is one of my strengths as a writer, and I'm particularly proud that each of the three main XMS characters (that's Shardak, Fairon, and Valkyria) all ended the series with the fully developed character arcs I planned for them, with appropriate and foreshadowed resolution. Many minor characters, such as Nightwatcher and Blast, have effectively developed and resolved story arcs as well.

That said, I do have somewhat of a complexity addiction, and looking back one of the things that would've made the XMS better would have been fewer characters. Many were non-essential and underdeveloped, and although my overall plans for the story didn't change much from beginning to end, so many minor details were altered along the way that certain characters arcs suffered immensely. For example, my endgame for Saren (a prominent rebel leader) was always what wound up happening to him in Eternal Darkness, but the path he took to get there became somewhat lost amidst many other (sometimes more interesting) plotlines, and suffered as a result. Silver was another character for whom my vision radically shifted midway through the series, and so he never attained a status as much more than I plot device. Many other characters, such as the Illieran splinter faction leaders, were completely nonessential, as the storyline threads were dropped. Most egregiously, the Mindeater plot from Eternal Darkness was cut short due to pacing issues I hadn't recognized until far too late.

Since I finished the XMS, I have yet to attempt anything of a similar scale (the sort of ensemble third-person limited format the XMS uses, with upwards of ten POV characters per story, would be unimaginably difficult for me to write today and feel satisfied with, the XMS' biggest flaw was it's "let's throw everything in there" nature and the resultant loads and loads of characters; only GRRM can pull this style off lol)

TL;DR: Coming up with ideas is easy for me, the difficult part is determining which are actually good, and how best to sequence them. Learning how to tell an effective story arc is the most integral part of developing an effective plot. And remember, always ensure that the plot serves the characters, not the other way around. Many key details that ended up in the story did so because, as I was outlining or even writing the final draft, I realized how much more effective for the POV character's storyline it would be to write the scene differently (a major example is Valkyria's crossbow wound in The Darkest Light, which was unplanned and added during the final draft of the novella, as I felt it played better on both the tension of the action-based narrative and the romantic tension between her and Shardak. Incedentally, it also allowed me to work Nightwatcher into the story earlier than intended, and showed off his more "human" side when he saved the two of them.)

That said, I feel I succeeded telling the story I wanted to tell, so that's something.

As for where I get my ideas, the XMS was born out of me wanting to tell a substantive story, and the BIONICLE wiki platform became the best way to do so. It's important to note that, aside from a few species changes, the story could be "ported" into original fiction very easily; its links to BIONICLE

are too many and varied to list, and the number of shout-outs to various popular franchises (Star Wars, Halo) is frankly innumerable. I was at a stage in my writing career when throwing literally every literary cliche I could think of into a novel satisfied me. The XMS is essentially what happens when a teenage author, bored with all of these cliches, threw as many as I could into a series about BIONICLE, and then wrote his own plot overtop all of these, sometimes subverting and fulfilling said cliches at the same time. Plus the entire series has an undertone of existential desperation, something that probably also has to do with me being a teenager. Seriously, reading it now I'm shocked at how dark and messed up it was, more so than the majority of what I've written since. (And I was a kid when I wrote this stuff, jeez).

Bionicles and added existentialist desperation aside, the XMS is essentially a love letter to every novel/video game/movie franchise I enjoyed at the time, and so many of the overall ideas are derivative (i.e. the finale's "Luke, I am your father" twist with Skorpix).

This reminds me: A good analogue to the XMS in (slightly) more mainstream media that is nothing like the XMS but reminds me of the storyline everytime I watch it is the 2008 anime Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion'', which is essentially a love letter itself to all of the classic shounen anime. it uses the same approach I did with the XMS, starring two male Death Note-esque leads waging a mecha campaign against an evil empire straight out of a Gundam series while the series' main villain attempts to carry out the Instrumentality plan from Evangelion. (Oh, and all the characters attend high school, another classic anime trope) The show, though intensely derivative and kind of a mess narratively because all of these different plots don't always coexist well together (like the XMS) also has loads and loads of characters, and plays on all of these plot elements from other, sometimes better shows in new and interesting ways. Its derivative-ness isn't always even bad, and sometimes the show (also like the XMS) has startling moments of brilliance. I have no idea how well-versed you are in anime, however, so I'll let this end here. But yeah, if you've seen it, the XMS is basically the BIONICLE version of Code Geass-- too many characters, derivative, somewhat disjointed plotlines, and startling, yet occasional, moments of brilliance. Or-- it's Star Wars meets The Hunger Games meets Halo 3-- starring BIONICLE-in-name-only characters. You heard it here first. ''

That said, I still do feel at times the XMS contained flashes of startling awesomeness, and the main characters were, for the most part, more than stock archetypes, and felt real. I could talk about how I'd plot it differently now, but I think the only big change I would've made would be to tighten the plotting and be even stricter about how many "awesome" ideas actually ended up in the story. Yeah...'''come up with good ideas, then work them into the narrative in an organic and believable way. '''That's all I got.

And this comment ended up turning into a mini-essay. All because I was bored one night and had literally nothing else to do. I have no idea if anyone will ever read this, especially not the original poster, but if you do, Luka, I hope I helped.