#adrien agreste…..kissing your forehead my love. tucking you into bed. agreeing with you about tamaharu | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

anna-scribbles · 3 months

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can you share some of your writing/planning process for thirteen? i adore the non-linear format - how do you decide what scenes to put where?

ahh thank you!! idk how much of a defined process I have, but there's definitely a lot of planning that goes into it and i can show you some of that.

i keep all the chapters in one doc organized by month, and then i plan everything out in bullet points in a timeline at the beginning. here i just have october and november as examples bc after december things started to get more detailed/messy

all of the scenes (especially at the beginning) set the stage for things i’ve planned to happen later, or establish something that feels relevant to adrien’s character by the time we meet him in canon. the task of condensing an entire month into about 2-3 scenes has been a bit difficult; i’ve found out that i’m a very present-moment kind of writer so it’s harder for me to describe the passage of, like, weeks of time. so i’ve been pinpointing specific threads of adrien’s story that i want to be sure to tell and choosing scenes from each month that build on that.

i’ve had the idea for this fic in the back of my mind since about 2021 so i’ve had several scenes cemented in my mind, ways i’ve decided things played out, etc. some of the writing process has been building the narrative around those things or figuring out how we get there. that’s what i love about prequels in general, honestly - it’s inevitable where we’re going to end up, but how do we get there?

adrien’s situation, at the moment we meet him in origins, is SO endlessly fascinating to me. he is in the process of doing something reckless and rebellious and bold - running away - against the will of his father, a man he spends the rest of the series struggling with his compulsion to submit to. we find out, via the rest of the show, exactly how difficult it is for adrien to stand up to his father. and yet, in his very first appearance, adrien is running away from him.

how did he get here? what, exactly, pushed him to this point? was this the final escalation of a steady build of rebellious behaviors, or an impulsive breakthrough after one awful day too many? what has this small boy been through in the last year, and why does public school seem to be his only fathomable escape?

and WHY, if his circumstances are so dire as to compell him to rebel so boldly in the first place, does he still throw it away to help the old man in the road? what makes him so kind, when he has everything to lose? what happened? how did he get here?

i’m interested, obviously, in the character of émilie. i think that the hole she leaves in the narrative is a compelling silhouette and i’ve been having a blast trying to pencil in its details. it’s obvious that adrien loved her deeply and had a stronger connection to her than with gabriel. but also, adrien was still shut off from the world while she was alive. he was still, presumably, an exploited child star while she was alive. she was an actress and a mother and died by broken magic and never told her son the truth about any of it. figuring out who i think she was and then how to show that through young adrien’s eyes has been a huge part of planning this story for me.

as far as the twenty three year old adrien sections, those have been less involved as far as planning goes. i only recently mapped out which areas of the house i want him to visit during the different months. i wanted his sections to line up at least thematically, if not physically, where thirteen year old adrien is at in his story. for example, in december twenty three year old adrien cleans out the dining room where thirteen year old adrien was having terrible christmas dinner. and in january they’re both in the garden, etc.

it’s a bit harder to map out twenty three adrien just because it has to also make sense geographically - i can’t have him running back and forth up and down the stairs, let’s be real he doesn’t have the energy for that. i’ve also opened up the agreste mansion page on the miraculous wiki so many times while trying to map this out 💔💔 did you know that apparently there’s a third floor we never see in the show. yeah i have to figure out what to do with that now

ANYWAY long story short: the planning process for thirteen is kind of a mess, but the whole story is built around some central plot points that i knew i wanted to hit from the beginning. the details change a lot (as you can see from the outline above - it’s not quite right) but i keep the end in mind. just have to figure out how we get there.

thank you for asking!! mwah<3

#thirteen #anna rambles #asks #sorry for writing SO MUCH #in my defense i’m sleepy #and i just started rambling #adrien agreste…..kissing your forehead my love. tucking you into bed. agreeing with you about tamaharu #i don’t even know if this answered the question this is just truly my process #the process is that i think about adrien agreste and then write it down #ml

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