DISCONTINUED

Big fucking shocker, I know. I don't really have a unique reason for not going further with it, I'm just kinda... done. There are a lot of smaller reasons as to why I stopped, but this is kinda the main one. This started as a fun experiment, which I'll always cherish as such, but over the years I've grown weary of sitting down and writing this huge ass story. Which, admittedly, is no other fault but my own. To put it shortly, the whole storystructure doesn't work. Everything is broken.
This is gonna be a little essay to illustrate where and how exactly I failed. I'm doing this because on the off chance that even one poor soul loses their way through this start of a story, they can at least learn something from my mistakes.

And now, without any further ado, let's get to it.

My first and arguably biggest mistake was the setting. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now safely say that there's absolutely no reason to set this story in between the 10 year time jump at the end of Bleach. It might have been a cool idea, but not much more. I could have just as well started where the last official Bleach manga chapter left off and it would not have changed a damn thing. The main reason why this is a problem is that, due to the fact that I wanted to stick as close to the canon as possible, no matter what I did I eventually had to establish the status quo at the end of Bleach again, or else it wouldn't have made a lot of sense.

My second mistake was scope and size. To explain this more detailled, this is the very first story I've ever written. And I chose to make it massive. These 22 chapters up until now make up what I like to call part 1 in my 5 part story structure. And just to clarify: those parts aren't equally long. Part 2 would easily have been the longest, with part 3 being about the same length if a bit shorter, part 4 coming much closer to the length of part 1 and part 5 being probably the shortest one, serving as both climax and end to the story. And all things considered, I think the structuring of each individual part minus the first one (where I was pretty much making it up as I went along) was solid. But all of the parts together? While still fine, arguably would have been way too damn long.

My third mistake kind of ties into my second mistake, which is I have too many damn characters. All in all together, going off from the stuff that I've written down and know about the story from the back of my head, I had 3 main protagonists, 1 secondary protagonist, 14 villains, 15 side characters who'd all get their individual fleshed out character arcs and storylines and... those are only all the new characters I was working with. Then added to that, we have the old canon character, which I admittedly wasn't going to use lot but still had to in order for the story to make sense based on the time setting.

My last but probably most severe mistake was my approach as to how I wrote this story. I took a couple ideas, thought up the most basic structure (I had about 8% of the whole thing together when I started writing) and thought to myself "I'll just make the rest up as I go along, that'll work out somehow."
Spoiler alert: it did not. Huhhhh boy, it really didn't.

Thing is, there are 2 different types of writing; discovery writing and outline writing. A discovery writer is just someone who sits down, takes a couple of ideas and starts to write. Whatever comes their mind, they take, integrate in the story and build upon it with new ideas that randomly pop into their heads.
Outline writing on the other hand is developing your characters, story and world fairly advanced before you even write so much as a prologue of your actual novel.

And here's the problem: I am definitely more an outline writer than a discovery writer. As I have come to realize while writing part one, I am not good at making shit up that I can just limitlessly build on for the rest of the story. So around chapter 18, I took a step back and began to massively outline everything. And by everything, I mean fucking everything. I did this, because I realized it doesn't matter what I do with my Hollow main character, he has to end up at the exact same point as he was in the prologue, which was a huge limitation. There were so many things I wanted to do with him, but couldn't, simply based on the fact that I already wrote where he ended up and where he started. And I did that, because I was just making shit up as I went along. See the problem? But by outlining everything, I came upon another obstacle: I realized for the first time just how massive this story really was. To cut it short: it was too much.

Now of course, I wanted to do this in a highly professional manner, since I wanna do this shit for a living and this is the perfect platform to practice. That's also why this essay might appear somewhat analytical. The take away is that everything started going wrong because of this first part. By just spewing out whatever I felt liked, I put some extreme boundaries on myself and it was not fun to write this way.

The takeaway from all of this and some additional advice I didn't mention yet:

- Think carefully in what time period you want to set your story

- Don't make your story bigger than it has to be. Starting with something small is not a bad thing at all, as a matter of fact I'd encourage everyone who wants to become a writer professionally or simply just for fun to start with smaller stories.

- Something I haven't mentioned yet: Write down every idea you hhave. I'm serious. If you're on this site then you have access to either a phone or a computer. Download an app on the phone or create folders on your desktop and make notes on your characters, your world and everything else you tink is important to your story. Don't assume you can just keep everything in your head, because you can't.

- Find out what type of writer you are.

Now of course there are a lot of smaller details as to why I've stopped writing this story, but I'm not gonna get into those. I might return to this story. One day. It's been an intense experience for me and I've definitely benefited from it. It's also the very first story I attempted to write, so it'll probably always hold a special place in my heart. If I return, I'm gonna majorly restructure the whole thing tho. Top to bottom upgrade.

If anybody cares to find out how this story would have ended, DM me if you want. I'll gladly explain it to you.