Hey Pandas, How Has Your Written Story Changed Since You First Thought Of It?

Here we go!

So, I thought of the very first iteration of my story when I was a young child, 10 or 11. I was obsessed with wolves at the time, so it was a story about five wolves who had to work together to get out of a dogfighting club. I actually finished it with around 53 pages, which is impressive for a young child.

But then I was like 'hey, I'm no longer obsessed with wolves, but I still like the core of the story (a group is forced to work together to survive something and end up becoming a found family)' so I started writing something that I ended up abandoning. It had the same basic story, but it was sci-fi because sci-fi is cool. The characters were called mako (who was an arrogant noble and basically just a jerk) avai (a serial killer because children think that murder is very cool) shona (basically the muscle of the group) koban (pretty much the opposite of shona) and nuka (shona but more mean). Don't ask me where those names come from, I was 10 or 11.
After that, I decided that sci-fi wasn't my jam, so i took a break from the story entirely and got super obsessed with designing fantasy worlds. I still am tbh, magic systems are a fun as hell.
When I was 12, close to turning 13, that old story reoccured to me. I was like 'oh, I still really like this!', so I decided to make it fantasy.
This is where we start getting something close to my current work. It had seven main characters, who's names were Aris (the heir of the country, vain and sheltered), Roen (a bounty hunter and hired assassin because children think murder is cool), Ajax (a soldier who had been raised to hunt and kill anything with magic), Amrit (a boy who was hell bent on getting magic and had been obsessed with it since he was a kid), Candle (a woman who was part of the country's cavalry and an experienced soldier), Teras (a cheerful kid who shared a mind with an immature forest spirit), and Fen (a half devil (humans are trying to wipe ot devils because of sheer human xenophobia and racism) who's entire personality was emo tbh its very funny looking back on this). I got like 60% of the way through this, around 130 pages, before I was like 'hey, I could make this so much better if I rebooted it' and there it was.
The characters changed to Eris (vain, sheltered, princept of the whole damn country, generally a bad person) Roen (bounty hunter and hired assassin because I didn't have the energy to change her character and I like her a lot) Ajax (similar backstory, but predictably he's struggling with depression and ptsd) Aspen (he's sort of addicted to blood magic, a type of magic that harms the user) Candle (experienced warrior and the only adult in the entire group) cal (cheerful and sweet kid who's followed around and occasionally advised by a forest spirit who's a bit creepy) and Fen (a devil who is very not happy about this entire arrangement). The ships have also changed from Feris in the first book (really sweet, otp, very good) to aspjax (the chances that they're both gonna survive the book aren't great) erez (very sweet and sort of domestic, they've been dating since before the book) and feris (toxic as hell, neither of them are great partners to the other despite romantic and physical attraction and it falls apart quickly).
The plot hasn't changed much tbh. There's a train now though and trains are cool!

Thank you for reading my unbearably long entry

I first came up with the idea of a really cool horror novel in my art class, and the story takes place in a camp near a quote “abandoned” satanic cult compound, and one of the characters is the daughter of the leader of the cult, and the other characters are a group of lgbtq teenagers, but I kind of got a bit bored of the idea, so I scrapped it, because I ran out of motivation, and I decided that I was going to rework the plot, and make it involve a bunch of haunted animatronics wandering near a camp in the woods, and then they stumble upon the camp where the main human characters are, and one of the animatronics decides to spare one of the characters because they are the only one who knows what happened to the souls that are trapped inside their mechanical suits.

Well, the original plot wasn’t very clear because funny enough it started as a Terraria mod! But made into a somewhat solid plot, a boy named Chris discovers he is the Chosen One and is destined to fight someone else from his bloodline, a broken witch named Pyra. Along the way he would meet friends such as the merewan prince named Animakka, the two siblings Aries and Mira, hotheaded pyrokinetic Aspen, Ronin the earth bender, and more! (This will be a long read, prepare yourself!)

Current Plot:
The Asphalian human prince Mako Fleurex is finally allowed to go to a boarding school in Euphoria after being home schooled his whole life, reasons being his legs are weak after being born with a disease (although he became strong enough to use his legs) and for something Mako’s father Kika refuses to tell him. One day he is asked out and agrees, but his dad obviously says “No, do yo homework”, so Mako sneaks out. But this girl is a nymph and attempts to kill him after isolating him, and Mako thinks he’s going to die because nobody would know where to find him. He’s saved by Quartz, a high ranked member of the Guardian Guild (might change that name). After lots of begging and a physical fight, Quartz agrees to train him.

He spends like, a year training before he gets the thumbs up from Quartz to try out for the guild. The next tryout is in a month, but it’s summer and he’ll be back in Asphaleia! He manages to sneak away from home and goes to the nearest tryout (they hold multiple as the Guardian Guild does stuff globally). The nearest one is in the South Korean mountains. He flies over there, and begins the tryout.

It’s an insane challenge. First was to test physical strength, then seeing how they developed their weapon techniques. Then, for the last and most dangerous, they send them out into an arena and they gotta survive against weak nymphs (even then, still a challenge for most people). Mako teams up with Ares Sadiq, a Turkish boy who is joking the guild in hopes of finding his sister who was a member who went MIA.

They are some of the few people who made it out alive. But as they are receiving instructions on what to do next, Kika bursts in and drags Mako back to Asphaleia, grounding Mako until he’s old enough to take the crown.

A month later, Mako receives a mysterious package from his bodyguard Torrent. In it, a uniform and Katana. Mako later attempts to run away again so he can start life as a nymph hunter. But as he is escaping, a nymph attacks the city. Mako turns around and comes back to fight! He succeeds, but lots of people died. Including Torrent.

In the hospital, Kika salutes Mako for what he did. He allows Mako to join the guild so long as he stayed alive. Mako spends the rest of his recovery reconciling.

And so he begins, a legendary saga.

Yeah that’s only the tip of the iceberg lol sorry this took so long

I have a lot to talk about on this one, oh dear.

So first off, the first story I officially wanted to write was a fanfiction about HALO in 6th grade. At first, I was just going to try and write exactly what happens in HALO: Reach and just write my character(s) in. That was the first version. Second version: I tried to make it sound more realistic, but looking back I want to burn it off of the face of the internet. Third version: completely changed the story so that my character gets sent to the beginning of the universe. Still sucked. Fourth version: made it so that there are 2 main characters and made them queer. It is so bad that I wrote in both 3rd and 1rst person at the same time. Fifth version, the current one, has more character development, is FAR more realistic than the others, and I only have about 1 page.

On another story, I originally intended for it to be just a fantasy world where this young kid was trying to live off of the scraps they are given, but now it's going to be a bit more emotional and has a better plot line than before. I have less than 2 chapters of it.

Another one was just going to be this very, very disturbing, heart-wrenching, nightmare inducing horror/thriller/fantasy, but now that I'm writing it with a friend, it has improved by a lot. About 1 page total.

mine started as: a guy running through the street in a city and a girl dropping from the roof. Of course, you can see how anything couldn't improve that- a plot, characters, short stores, ect.

The original villain became the main character and isn't a villain anymore. Context: I write historical fiction. I did research and I think my main (historical) character had been slandered by chroniclers and historians.