Notes from a work in progress. Might not be very coherent, as I suspect yesterday's wasn't, as I'm running on a frustrating sleep deficit and words are much harder than usual.
I'm working up a new story from a bullet-point outline. The outline details backstory and 'forestory' i.e. the events that I was expecting to happen 'on the page'. In my own... I guess I'd call it a 'personal writing manual', I break the writing process into five stages: Concepting, Development, Breaking, Writing, Revising, and Feedback. It's not actually a linear process that advances between those phases, but they represent the broad trajectory of a piece of work, and each have different lenses and techniques that are helpful.
Bullet-point outlining is one of my breaking tools. It's where I take all the information from Concepting and Developing and trying to organise it into something the shape of a story. It forces me to get somewhat structural and specific, and start spotting gaps or things where I'm vague. It's still, though, somewhat loose.
Where I've progressed from there today, and what I really consider 'breaking' the story: I started by breaking it into scenes (dramatic units, if you will). Some of this is intuitive, in that elements in the forestory go together in sequence with logical breaks. But it also means thinking about backstory and where things get surfaced, specifically (where they need to be at all).
For each scene, I broke out Content, Effect, Framing and, because this is a video game, Verbs.
Concept: What is this scene trying to accomplish? What information does it need to convey? What, essentially, is its function in the narrative?
Effect: What do I want this to achieve stylistically? How do I want it to reach the audience? How do I want them to feel? Chaotic and action-packed and high-stakes, or subtler, creepier, etc.
Framing: What's the in-fiction context to this scene? Where does it take place, what are the characters doing, when do we come into and leave this scene? This can just be a way of thinking about 'cool stuff' to get into the story, but it's also an opportunity to support other aspects of the narrative. If I'm worried about space to convey everything in Concept, can I bake something into the framing? Can I just better support things by using scene-framing?
Verbs: What is the player actually going to do? Ideally this is super-specific and potentially unusual, but if nothing else, it's a forcing function to ensure that they are doing something and not just talking or passively receiving information.
Once I'd got all this down and eyeballed it till it just about makes sense, I moved on to breaking into form-specific units. In this case, that meant using a spreadsheet, mapping those scenes onto the specific units of the game. Translating from a dramatic layer to how this actually works 'on the page' [screen], and adapting accordingly.
I don't quite do Concept/Effect/Framing/Verbs with each of these. That would take ages and have fairly low returns. But, I refer back to the scene-level CEFV when constructing, and try to mark up each unit with what information it's conveying or how it's moving the story forward (and if it isn't doing those things, I capture what its function is). It's a good forcing function to be super clear about what I'm trying to do, and spot duplication, wishy-washy non-specificity, and gaps where more is needed.
Working back through this list, I looked for opportunities to collapse or eliminate elements with a view to the overall 'weight' of the story. Sometimes, units or beats end up doubling up, or are better collapsed into one another. Other times, it's the reverse, and things need more room to breathe/I anticipate needing more space to do what I need to with the writing. Generally, though, I'm keeping tabs on the issues that are sticking out to me while stretching the skin of the story over some bones, and trying to resolve what I can at this stage.
It's also important to compare the final result to the aspirations for the story from the previous stages of the process. Some things may change because the ideas just don't survive contact with applied narrative. Other things may just have slipped my mind or have been mistakenly assumed.
This is one of the most fun (and tricky) bits of the writing process for me. It's where I feel like I'm doing most of the real work, and it's looking to snap everything together nicely so that first-drafting doesn't feel too painful. It's where, for a little while, everything feels like it actually might work.
For all this, you can't actually write the story before you've written it. This is all just trying to make that work as direct and enjoyable as possible. And then you need to write fast.