I would say that it is closer to the feedback having given me the confidence that I don’t have to fight my doubts so much. But it is also feedback from a lifetime of experience, from having read novels for 40ish years and having been doing online, text-based roleplaying in both chat rooms and forums/play-by-post for about 28 years. I can compare my technical writing against the works I’ve read, and I can feel confident that my ability to write a character is at least up to average.

My story feedback initially came mostly from my wife, but I also took a chance and started writing a serial story on Royal Road (my story here ). I am currently approaching 900 followers, over two hundred of whom have marked it as a favorite, and despite some clearly trollish or hostile/anti-competitive 0.5 ratings, my story has remained about a 4.3, with 5.0 remaining my most common rating. So I have developed feedback that complete strangers like my story enough to keep reading 100+ chapters later.

Now, for keeping track of my stories: All three of my stories are taking place in the same world/setting, so a campaign website is useful (there’s tons of them out there, they offer different things at the free level and have different organization, pick the one best for you). This means the general details of my fantasy world are all in one place.

The stories themselves: I am writing very character-driven stories. I only need to know a few details about what the future holds for me to keep writing right now and develop as I go. So for each story I have a ‘notes’ file, and I reference that to keep track of what I have already done or what I have named certain characters etc. And I have organized the notes into relevant sections, such as all of the royal family that has been named being grouped together.

To get into the headspace of a particular story, I just reread the last chapter. I know where I am at, what people are doing, and I can move on. If there are multiple character perspectives and I need to focus on a character we haven’t seen for a few chapters, I go read the last chapter they were in.

I mostly focus on little steps, but I have certain external forces set to act at certain time periods, but those aren’t completely pre-determined. It’s closer to “when these characters have reached this point in their story or development, that’s when event X should happen.” and I don’t worry too much about the details of event X until I get close to the point where it’s going to happen.

My antagonists have developed from the backstories of my protagonists, which I started detailing after the story got going. I didn’t need to know the details of the antagonists because the story of my protags is about what they are doing, and the antagonists are in part responding to them. This is a bit of a script flip from the standard fantasy story where the protagonists are reacting to the actions of the antagonists.

Though I suppose it depends on how far back you want to go about who is reacting to whom. But for the purposes of what you are seeing in the written narrative, it’s the antagonists who are responding to the protagonists.

That was quite the ramble. Sorry. That last bit had me looking at my story in a new light, this script flip was not premeditated. XD