I had some private conversation recently about a character of mine who has appeared in a significant role through various ficlets but only in snippets and scatterings and primarily when feeling playful or trying to keep things light, which en brief, led said conversant to not particularly like the character because they felt shallow.
It made me really think about it. I have deliberately put off writing the stories where this character gets full development—even though they were linchpin pieces for the entire series—for very particular, but entirely subconscious reasons. Today, I realized why.
A long time ago, I talked about how I was an immersion writer. I know that about myself and when I'm galvanizing my output, I start prioritizing fics. I don't tend to like shifting mindset, and perhaps that's exactly why I'm not burrowing deeply enough into Niko's psyche for "Everything is Blood," because it would shift my mindset from the Kingdoms & Thorn post-operative mindset I've been needing to stay in to finish this collection into the operative mindset, which I need to do, but not just yet.
When a new story comes to me or some real depth of understanding on a story I've got on the docket, but not on the table, I tend to put it off if it doesn't fit with the mindset I'm buried in. Sometimes, I'll be writing and realize I need to know something and instantly will shift gears to write the piece of information I need, then finished with the story, get what I want out of it, then dive back into the story I wrote it for.
The character that I haven't really written is in the Kingdoms & Thorn storyworld, but he's not an operative. He's never been an operative. Digging into his mental space throws me out of Rachelle, Ashen, Red Wolf, Shift, Cate, and Justus—all characters I'm trying to plow out some serious fic for. But I can do it. I know his mental space. I know his character so much that I didn't even catch the lack of depth in his portrayal in the few ficlets I'd dropped him into.
But I wrote full-on in the mindset of another non-operative in that world when I wrote "Acceptable Cost." Why? Because I needed the background on healers and the medical system in Kishet for "Dowse and Bleed" and I needed the background on Alaine and her family for "Collateral Damage"—both of which are linchpin fics entirely within the post-operative mindset. They're focus pieces for me, so I went ahead and wrote Alaine, stemming from the original snippet I gave her in the first draft of the story from inferno and Mira's commentary on Alaine in "Collateral Damage" as it stands so far.
But I didn't explain anything. I wrote the incident, her mindset, her heart, her experience, then stopped. It was a worldbuilding piece, and I was okay with keeping it as that. The other character's stories aren't worldbuilding pieces—they are character studies, deeply interrogative of setting and history, etc. They are bona fide linchpins.
Do you write multiple projects at once? How do you prioritize them?
