My friends usually ask me where I get the ideas for my stories, and I usually don’t really know how to explain it. It’s not something I come up with on a whim, all of my story ideas have a long backstory so I’m gonna spill that here if anyone is interested.
I think it’s appropriate to start off with the first story that I posted on this platform, OVERPOPULAS. Surprisingly for being the first story I ever worked on, it’s not the first one I came up with. NED was actually the first, and it’s way more complicated to explain than any of the four.
*SPOILERS*
OVERPOPULAS started almost three years ago. It started with the concept I had when I was a sophomore, about a guy who would invite anyone to come and kill him. That was basically the starting prompt for almost a year where I wrote a short story about that idea. I completely scraped it because it wasn’t very good, not the worst work I’d ever done but it’s up there.
I had that concept in my mind for another year until I finally came up with another idea to take that story. I was in a sports bar with my parents and their friends, and during that I whipped out my phone and wrote down the prologue to OVERPOPULAS. It was pretty short and not as long as the official one, but it was a great start. The next day, after expanding the prologue even more, I came up with the characters to put in that world.
I came up with the idea of a world gone to shit due to overpopulation from my original concept, basically giving a reason to why people would wanna go fight Runasi.
Originally, the story was going to revolve around Runasi Haruhiko and his facility. Then, I came up with a better idea than that. I decided to make him a more antagonist type character and wanted to make the protagonist weaker, and a character to root for instead of despise. That’s when Lee Pulpis came to life, alongside his family.
The story has changed so much from the original draft. First off, Lee was supposed to be 18 with Eric being 21. Eric was supposed to be a more loving brother than he was, but that was changed down the line to make a more interesting brother dynamic, or that’s how I see it anyways. Lee in the beginning of the story already graduated two years prior and then took the Yurinami class.
Secondly, Slinca was never meant to be a best friend to Lee. They were originally gonna meet at the Yurinami school and become rivals. The rest of the cast hasn’t really changed all that much, just small little personality tweaks. Nancy and William came to mind at around chapter 12, cause I already knew that I wanted Lee’s whole family to die early on and Alice to have a new mother figure.
Jesse only changed in appearance, she was always meant to be the love child of Runasi Haruhiko from the start of making this. Yurinami was a character that also didn’t change much, it was just the color of his mask really.
Enough about the characters, let me get into the story. The original plot line was going to be that Lee was the main provider for his family, and would go out and scavenge for food. During one of those raids he would run into the Yurinami fight school where they invited him in. This was a trick by Yurinami and he got him trapped in that facility alongside all of the others we see in the story today. It then turned into a whole SAW ordeal, with only one survivor coming out on top. That would’ve been the beginning arc to the story but I wasn’t even a page in when I scraped the whole idea and started over. I thought about the story all over again and came up with the plot while still keeping the Yurinami school.
That’s about it for the original draft and the changes that were made. Hopefully you found this interesting at the very least. I realized how long this is and probably might cover my other works in the future, but for now I have to work on INDESTRUCTIBLE. The chapter is finished but not ready to be published yet, I still have to edit it and such.
Have a great day and I love you all!
From, Skinny
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