forum What is the biggest most drastic change you've made to your story?

Started January 18, 2018 by @EternallyEris

tune

and why did you change it?

My story is a twist on the classic fairytale where a prince is destined by fate to find a princess to marry and save but is hindered by a sorcerer and evil queen who keep getting in the way. But, the sorcerer was once a prince "destined" to save a princess himself, but he failed and spiraled into depression over having failed and resolved to prevent any other prince from wasting his life on chasing after a girl. The evil queen is the princess the sorcerer failed to save, so she had to save herself and for a long time thought she was unloved, so she decided to prevent any princess from leaving their destiny in the hands of a prince who can ultimately let them down. (that is the original premise and is where I started) I decided to add in another character, an orphan who is too old for anyone to adopt him, so he takes care of all of the other children in the orphanage by earning money as a knight for the prince's castle. He is sent on the journey with the prince to defeat the sorcerer and save the princess. (no one knows the evil queen's or sorcerer's real intent or backstory) The orphan spends a lot of time with the prince and will ultimately become his love interest. I don't know why I decided to add in this new character, I guess I just felt like my story needed it. He has become my favorite character to write about and I feel like he has made my plot more interesting. (That was a basic overview, I'm bad at explaining but I hope you got the gist)

One of my characters, who everyone thought was human (including me), suddenly became a Kitsune (Mostly human but with fox ears and a tail). She changed because the person I was writing with had this grand background story for their character. My character was starting to become a side character, so me and my friend agreed she needed a change.

@Adrienne talk about a plot twist i wasn't expecting!! I love it. It falls into a good trope. But im curious about the sorcerer and evil queen now… do they get a happy ending too?

@isabel I have a character that is a Kitsune too! they are very fun to write in my opinion so i think changing it up was a great idea! Did you end up giving her a grand background as well?

Yes, though it's not as grand. Still, things don't need to be massive to be important. She's not the main character, so other characters' stories can fill in any "boring" time. My Kitsune's background is pretty simple. Her birth parents died, so she was adopted by human parents. She was a daughter to them, they even sent her to school. She was made fun of for what she is, so she started staying home. No one saw anything wrong with her staying home since her adoptive mother was very sick. When her adoptive mother passed, she gave my kitsune an orange gem. The adoptive mother had taught her to use some magic, so the kitsune wished, not to change what she was, but to hide it. Everyone would see her as human, only her adoptive dad knowing otherwise. She got into a habit. Later on in life, at age eighteen, she opened an adoption center for breeds/animalia (what i call other humanoids with animal parts). Now my kitsune lives in the fear that, if anyone finds out what she is, she'll have her beloved adoption center taken from her.

@TinyZombieKat Thank you! The way I'm having it play out is while the Prince and Orphan seek out the sorcerer on their long journey, the Evil Queen keeps trying to get the princess to be a stronger person to stand on her own without a prince and accidentally goes too far. The princess ends up in a situation where she gets very seriously injured and the queen is forced to take care of her as she is in no condition to be returned to her kingdom. The Queen and Princess are forced to interact and speak about what happened and why. Throughout the weeks they are forced to spend together they are introduced to new ideas and the princess learns about how she doesn't have to rely on how her parents traditionally did things and that in the war her kingdom was thrown into (her kingdom is at war with another) she can save her people and have a Prince Charming just like the stories. The princess helps to heal the wounds in the evil queen's heart the open her up to the idea of ever being loved by anyone again.Throughout their time together, little by little the evil queen and princess began to care for each other, not something clear cut like a mother and child relationship, but more like confides, for the evil queen was one of the first people to value the princess's opinion and the princess was willing to care for the evil queen after no one had in years. The prince and orphan travel to where the sorcerer is rumored to live and instead of facing this all-powerful, very dark wizard, he finds a man who is depressed and has regrets throughout his life, so they, throughout all of their other issues between them, eventually set off to try and set things as they should be and rewrite their stories how they should be. The evil queen decides that after weeks of healing and rest the princess needed to be returned to her family. The evil queen has learned that the princess's kingdom is at war throughout their time together, so she accompanies the young lady on her journey home to protect her. On their way back to the kingdom to get the princess home, the Evil Queen and princess end up having to go way off course and end up meeting up with the prince, orphan, and sorcerer, all 5 having to work together to get back? The ending is more up in the air then the rest of it, but I do know that I want to have the queen and sorcerer end up together as friends at least, if not romantically. Thank you so much for your input, it's really helping me work out some kinks in my story!

Uh, changing everything about the entire story besides some characters' names.

Yeah, nationality, age, personality, location, plot, and basically EVERYTHING besides some basic defining characteristics completely changed about my story from when I wrote an incomplete first draft of over 100,000 words when I was 15. But somehow, I can't separate what it is now from what it used to be. Weird, huh.

So my story has people called the 'Fated' and basically they show up every few hundred years, two people who's fates are tied together, and they're destined to be either the greatest of allies or the worst of enemies, and no matter which it is, it almost always results in a lot of bad stuff happening. wars, catastrophe, etc. anyways, my two main characters are Fated, and in the second book one of them turns dark and goes to live with the bad guys, and so you think 'oh, so its going to be enemies then' but of course the other main character goes after her and turns her good again and everything is sunshine and rainbows. but after that i had struggled to come up with another big bad for them to fight, so i was like, 'hey! why don't i make the other protagonist go dark'. and so she does. like, scary dark. very powerful, very evil, and very scary.

My story revolves around two characters who have been "gifted" with magic in a world where magic is hated and feared. The idea was for them to be "yin and yang" - two opposites. Female and male, running and standing firm, drawing strength from themselves and from others. I had all these ideas - I wanted the first character to run, and the second character to stay with the law and hunt her down (despite the fact he might be deemed "dangerous" and killed by the very people he serves). The second character… I didn't really "know" him. I felt like I was just a puppeteer, and the character was fake.

And then, the thought arrived. "Why don't you kill him off?"

I don't want to kill characters lightly. This was a MAIN CHARACTER in my story. I had all sorts of ideas - he had so much potential! But I kept thinking. His uncle, the leader of the division this character is serving, has taken the character into his home after he was orphaned. The uncle is sort of an idealist, believing in strict "right" and "wrong". So when his nephew, who he loves as his own son, becomes a daemon, he has a lot of thinking to do about the world. The order comes from above to kill the character. And the uncle is bound to obey. The character doesn't run, just faces his death calmly. And the uncle realizes that his nephew, despite everything, is still his nephew. He takes up the character's sword, and swears to uphold his memory, "repent for his sin", by protecting the other character he was chasing. And then I had to rewrite the WHOLE plot for this new character.

(I don't regret it, though.)

My biggest change has to be from my main character accepting another characters affections and becoming his girlfriend to her rejecting his affections and pushing him away. It went from her world being mostly focused on him and his safety to absolutely rejecting him and only admitting her feelings when she was dying.

Not a big one, I know, but it was a big change personally for me and I had to rewrite several chapters of my story so shrugs

Well, I was originally just going to have my MC be a single mother for the whole story (it's a slice of life sort of thing) but then one of my background characters was like, "Nah, I'm gonna marry her." So, bam, my originally single character gets married. And now I'm obsessed with the pairing.

Originally, when they were just a roleplaying character in a premade universe, I gave a character the ability to reset time by a certain amount at the next midnight by scratching one of four mysterious clock tattoos on their shoulder. It was a bit complicated, and as they were ported to my new universe, I realized in its current form it wouldn't fit. I'm still reworking it right now, and trying to come up with a way for it to be fatal after a certain amount/type of use, since I plan on killing them off at the end.

Kind of a surprise for me, but it turns out one of the characters I originally planned to have as a protagonist turned out to be an antagonist, though not quite a villain, instead.

I came up with the idea for my story when I was in primary school and didn't really know how to write, aside from the fact that I had a natural talent for syntax. Anyway I started writing it as an alien invasion on earth story, where the aliens wanted revenge for some reason. But I then abandoned it after two 500 word chapters (again, I was a terrible writer then) for another story.

In the past I've re-written my old work, so I was going through my google drive and found my original chapters and decided to re-write them, now that I'm a lot better at writing and have a greater understanding of the human psyche/realism. So what went from an alien invasion story, became the humans being the alien invaders on a different planet, with a much older cast and more extensive goals and worldbuilding for the aliens.

This happened because I stayed up really late one night trying to think of how to make the story less of an overdone premise by doing a google deep dive (in which you drink a lot of either red bull or some kind of caffeinated drink and randomly google something to see where it takes you and eventually end up on the weird side of the internet in order to jog your brain into a creative state or end up on some weird website with the perfect idea right in front of you) and figured it would be more interesting if there was a role reverse.

i had originally planned to have some small magic elements in my story, just little things, like healing spells, or a defensive cloak. but as it went on i decided that no, i don't like that at all and instead removed every aspect of magic that ever existed in my story. along with that i also got rid of a large part of my story, so instead of a big twist appearing at the end, the story is going to go an entirely different direction.

Hmm.. Usually I like to stick to the original backstory of characters. However, one of my characters (Spirit) had a bit of a drastic change to her. At first she was sent to train with the god, Cirrus, to gain the Focus Ability. Looking back on it, it is very out of place in her story, as well as a bit Mary Sue-ish. So, I changed it to where her whole family and extended pack has the Ability, after it being passed down for generations from Cirrus.
Edit: This indeed has stuff to do with the whole story and universe, it changed the way magic worked in a way and made way for many other plot lines.

Literally the entire story. I changed the story from main character turns into a dragon to main character has her family kidnapped and has to time travel. I don't even know how or why I did that.

The biggest change I've ever made to my story, was changing the main character into a villain. It really helped my story in the end, and the new protagonist was much better suited for the plot.

The biggest changes to any of my stories were always either cutting out a full part of it, changing a character entirely, or changing if the character dies/how the character dies. I decide to kill a character horribly, but then suddenly the character is chosen to live. I decide to keep them alive for a bit long due to an incomplete part. That and setting changes.

Originally, my character Avalyn was supposed to live among the Evolutions with her brother Creed, but I changed it to where Avalyn is hiding out in the NYZ Lost Zone with her brother Creed because they're both currently wanted: Avalyn for being a "Prototype" (She shares the same basic powers that the ruler of the Evolution has, which is forbidden) and Creed is wanted because the Antagonist (WHO IS THE RULER OF THE EVOLUTIONS) has learned that Creed is one of the most powerful hive-readers in Evolution history and Creed is evading capture because the Antagonist is going to make Creed start his trials early if he does capture him.

I was also going to make it where Avalyn has been alive since the Evolutions took over, so she remembers a lot about her life before. She's basically like a wise mentor, except super deadly and probably doesn't age.

At first, my main villain was just evil for sake of being evil, same went for his right-hand man. After a drastic rewrite, my main villain now wants revenge upon those who killed his parents, and his right-hand man is a friend of his who he brainwashed in hopes that he would be able to make him stronger. Ironically, his right-hand man is the one who killed his parents. During a war that happened prior to the story's events, there were a bunch of villages that refused to pick a side in the war, as such they were all killed. His right-hand man and a few of his friends dressed up as soldiers so that they could scare the villages into revolting against the armies that were slaughtering them. They used a young child's parents to make the example and forced the child to watch. That child grew up up to be the main villain, and by pure chance he made friends with the man that killed his parents (He doesn't know that he did that by the way) and eventually a bunch of crap went down and now there is no one left alive who knows the truth behind his parents's death. And he is forever left with the thought that the countries he fights against are responsible for their deaths, and that his right-hand man is the most trustworthy individual he's ever known.

My story originally started as a one-off joke, but then I decided to add my main character and take the joke 100% seriously, and now it's an expansive multi-chapter monster with dozens of characters and settings and I can't stop! Send help!

Hmm, I'd say the setting, characters, and goal of the story. It used to be a story where the main character's goal is to save the forest from dark forces and crazy stuff like that. Now the goal is saving part of the forest and saving herself from a realistic cause. (And by "herself" I don't mean just her, I mean anything that is vital to her) The main setting used to be this, one repetitive boring setting where it is unable to produce any new development. I changed the main setting into a setting where it's important to the plot because I was thinking the old one was too lame. And the characters? Don't get me started on this. The characters used to be elemental animals from around the world. I got rid of them for some reason that I can't recall.
Currently, I still need to fill in some blanks while trying to find some ideas for my story. At least I can see some potential in my story and hopefully it's a story that I should be proud of.

Sorry if I got a got a bit too pessimistic.

My story is based on a select group of girls called the "Chosen" (very original, I know XD) and these girls are taken from their homes; some at a very young age, some at a later age (no later than 16 though); by dragons adn are brought to a school taught by teachers that are either fully dragon or part human part dragon as they haven't fully turned into a dragon yet. These girls have special talents, but are also taken from their families because their families were forcing them into unwanted marriages, jobs, etc. and the dragons only wnat to help them. When my main character, Scarlett, is taken from her home, it doesn't go as planned and Scarlett gains a head injury from fighting against being taken, which results in amnesia. She doesn't know who she is, where she's from, or what she's doing here but she knows she's special for everyone there is special. You find that the girls who go to the school are trained to fight with and without weapons, they're taught to read, write, and control their magical abilities, and that they don't need a man (the teachers are biased, them all being female and all and only talk of how horrible men are) and as they get better, they begin to transform and grow scales. For dragons are not born, but chosen. As the story progresses, Scarlett is sent out of the school on a quest with some of her friends to scope out a potential new arrival when she runs into Isaac, thinking he is evil as she has been taught, she finds herself hating him at first but they keep running into each other and get to know one another better and Scarlett starts to fall in love with him. (Here's what I changed:) Scarlett and Isaac find that some of the teachers at the school are evil and teaching falsehoods about dragon-kind. These teachers forbid Scarlett form seeing Isaac ever again and lock her in her room in solitude except for when they come in to try and get her to forget Isaac. Still not sure on the end yet, that's kinda up in the air right now.

i turned my original villain into the main character's side kick. and then i changed the story to the 'hero' making worst and worst decisions "for the greater good" and ultimately, the 'hero' fights what ends up being younger version of themselves at the end of the story, and they both fall into a time slip to the past. the younger version kills the 'hero,' befriends aforementioned original villain (again), and the story starts over without anyone realizing time-travel is involved - the 'hero' only thinking they've jumped realms.

time travel and realm hopping was never in the original story