catharsis development session 1: structure and review

so, i'm going to say right now, these posts will feature A LOT of spoilers about the story... if you don't want the story spoiled for you, please do not read ahead. this is hopefully most interesting and useful to people who are interested in the inner workings of narrative writing processes.
i'll be putting a warning about this at the top of every post, but here's one now.

so, cleaning up a story's act is an undertaking, definitely. i'm first going to make a quick list of what i'll be going over here based on what i needed to do first:
1) reviewing earlier writing about felix
2) reconciling and condensing information
3) creating a SOLID story structure
4) synthesizing a comprehensible outline
5) starting to draw and clean up VISUAL referential material

1) reviewing earlier writing about felix 

this part is annoying and time-consuming and often pretty scrupulous. it can take hours and i'll get hit with a lot of innocuous but annoying or surprising things i wrote about the character.
i made a subsection in catharsis's document at the bottom called "collected notes" to hold everything i found to make it easier on myself.

things and places i knew i needed to comb through:

• continuity document i started up and didn't maintain
• old document for felix that i never bookmarked
• the "comics ideas" document i have to write down spare thoughts and ideas like plots for side comics
• a separate "comics drafts" document i have for the same purpose as the former for literally no reason
• the entire felix tag on my art blog for asks and concept art
• my art folders for more unposted concept art and drawings
• my sketch comics/filler folder for all comics with felix
• my "character shitposting" tag on my main blog for any posts about felix
• the two separate development streams i've done about felix
• the catharsis document itself (which was, at the time of starting to develop it after the poll results, only 5 pages long in total)

for any text i posted on my blog, like asks, i just screenshotted and skimmed, highlighting text and pasting it into the subsection, like this: 

the green is for things i already know/agree should stay in the canon, yellow is for things to consider and take to heart or axe, and pink is for things i seriously need to delete and disregard canonically.

i still haven't finished all of this step. i found a lot of interesting tidbits that i didn't remember at all. originally i was going to expand on that in this but because there's so many, i might in fact make another post entirely.
what i will say is that i got through all of the art blog backlog, the first development stream, a lot of the concept art, all of the scattered writing sessions i had with my wife on discord (not role plays, lol), and the comics ideas documents, the catharsis doc is now 56 pages long.

2) reconciling and condensing information

because i didn't review all of the info yet, i'll probably need to come back to this step. what i did do is pay special attention to anything about saga, izzi, and deadname, because i figured it's really likely that the latter 2 will be large supporting roles.

i understand saga better now -- partially due to how i understand myself better now -- as an alter who primarily functions by utilizing derealization to cope with stress. i think i still need to figure out why they lie... but i'm getting closer to something.
a while ago while developing the story more i decided that saga's Big Lie would be lying about an alter who doesn't exist. at the end of the story it'd be realized that saga's tail is in fact a separate alter... meaning things that they were lying about weren't really lies sometimes, but things they thought were lies, due to feeling unreal.
initially some big motivators i knew would be for saga's lying were being afraid of punishment, not really grasping how lies affect relationships and why it's not great to spin stories while passing them off as truths, and to obfuscate memories that they don't want other alters to know about.
something else i wrote about saga in the document at some point:

something i noticed that i wrote about saga in an answer to an ask was that their personality is hard to pin down because they seem to act inconsistently. i think saga may be less self-aware than i initially thought, which is important for the development of the plot.

i also noticed in a separate drawing that deadname made a small white lie about liking an outfit felix got them to spare their feelings, which made me think about how deadname could work as a catalyst to wrap up the story near the ending and expand on the themes of lying as a mechanism of self-control that has a time and place.

overall i have a better picture of which alters are going to be the most relevant to the plot and i feel more confident about not giving them all equal limelight or feeling obligated to.

going through the old writing, i also know i seesawed back and forth between a romance plot and a plot about therapy. i saw i typed at some point about how #2 has a latent attraction to women, too... so i thought maybe i could do 2 intertwining plots, a main plot and a subplot, and the main plot could involve the therapy, while the subplot involves felix developing a crush.
now if i could just figure out how to fit izzi into that relevantly... she might work as the person who introduces and pushes felix to try talking more with a girl friend they catch feelings for.
i saw in my comic ideas document a sketch comic idea related to felix, izzi, and saga:

... and it develops the themes of lying as well as saga's relationship with izzi. saga having a positive rapport with izzi could be extremely useful in the fusion of the subplots if it's developed right.

that's about all i can synthesize based on what i reviewed for now. for continuing to condense, i'll have to reread and rewrite the material to make sure i understand it in my own way, and write out some executive decision-making about things i highlighted in pink and yellow to clean up the canon. this might be better left until i've done a big skeleton to have some informed foresight about how these decisions would affect a plot long-term.

3) creating a SOLID story structure 

so, now we can look at the first image here... i did this earlier this month.

something i'm really unhappy with fresh meat for is that it's A LOT longer than i intended. but when i look at the script, and i see 40+ scenes. of course that's going to be long. even if every scene was only 1 page, it would be 40+ pages.

so i wanted to start from scratch and try something new to PARE DOWN THE LENGTH of the comic specifically. i've tried doing story mapping before, but i always tried using a program-- for a long time, i was using a version of sai that didn't have a text tool at all, and the idea of writing out the text by hand for story mapping was too daunting.

this is the first time i've done a map, and i'm ambivalent about it, but leaning towards positive. i tried to make it as vague and bare bones as possible, which was easier knowing i was still conflicted about how exactly the story was even going to shake out plot-wise.

i'm not sure how well this would work for something with a more webbed structure like drawing a blank, but i think the most positive thing is it helps me see any issues with the pacing.
the other thing is that doing this spurred me to spend half an hour searching for something about pacing that i never saved, and only posted ONCE in a discord chat. but i couldn't stop thinking about it since. it's a little guide i wrote for myself of things you can do to "slow down" and "speed up" pacing:

i think this is going to be really helpful when hammering out more of the story, but it was useful in this regard to have the examples right there of how to progress the plot.

now i know that the story needs to have a minimum of 23 scenes.

4)  synthesizing a comprehensible outline based on the technical

this one i'll probably save for later because just the first 2 steps really took the wind out of me.
i thought it was interesting to look at the skeleton i drew next to the visual story progression i drew on-stream earlier this year. i also posted that on this for comparison. it'll be a challenge to fuse these 2 into something satisfying because they don't exactly perfectly line up.

from the first 2 steps, i now at least know what will probably be the A plot and B plot: felix's lying problem and subsequent therapy, and a subplot about a relationship.

5) starting to draw and clean up VISUAL referential material 

this step is a lot of things. many of them will just be finding material i already drew. for example, i found drawn designs for felix's adoptive parents, biological dad, and roommate, in addition to several comics that feature what their room looks like, their bonsai and other plants, the inner tree, and what each branch looks like.
there was also a note in the continuity document that said felix's speech bubbles should be lavender, so that's good to know -- i try to make speech bubbles coordinate with color palettes, so i won't make the love interest pink, indigo, or purple.

i'm still working out some issues i have with felix's design. interestingly... i found design notes on felix from the first development stream:

this pointed out felix's fur as accentuating points on their design, which would conflict with the design choice i was most likely going to make to make them puffier. i might still do it, but i have some stuff to think about.

i think that's all i have for now... i wanted to make it clear i have been working on the story, but i should probably be trying to do it in more dedicated segments.
i might also extend the story development into november, but i'll see how the other development streams go...
this session in and of itself i don't think would be an interesting watch, even though it was indispensable work.
next time i'll make sure to have an outline based on the plot structure -- probably just going to number out the listed beats and write out a more literal event of the narrative to fit.