There’s nothing like typing “the end” in something like a book, a tale that you’re poured blood, sweat, and many tears into. It’s almost a surreal moment, when you finally sit back from that doc, staring at the screen, wondering how on earth you got here.
That’s what happened to me with my heart story, an English light novel series called The Brieltas Chronicles and its first season, Protectors. October 12, 2025, marked me officially closing the doc for the last time until I’m ready to move on to draft 5.
Yes.
Draft 5.
Protectors was first drafted in 2023, and since then it has gone through 4 drafts. Not all of these drafts were finished, as I had a horrible habit of not realizing that I had more holes to fill in until about halfway through the draft. Thus, between other projects, it has taken me two years to complete a full rewrite.
Protectors is a very precious story to my heart, and while it won’t be the first thing I publish, I do plan on publishing it someday, and I decided that today, while the topic was still fresh on my heart, I would write a reflections post about some of the things I learned in the long, arduous process of finally getting this story to the place where it is today.
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#1. The Story You THINK You’re Telling Isn’t Always the Story You’re GOING to Tell
The bare-bones concept for Protectors– a socialist world economically stabilized by underground human trafficking– came to me in a sprint long before 2023, but figuring out where I actually wanted to go with the concept took me a long time. In 2021, when I first wrote a 300 word snippet about a girl named Ashleigh in a foreign town called Liberty City, I was already working on what I believed to be the book I would publish, and the subsequent burnout that came with that, and the next novel I wrote, led to me spending most of 2022 and the start of 2023 on fanfiction– specifically, Ninjago fanfiction. The fandom of my childhood became a safe place for my weary writer heart to grow and learn to hone my craft in a way that would prepare my heart and skill for the return of that idea– along with a proposition to take some of the characters I’d created and loved within the fanfic, and turn them into their own beings with their own story.
Originally, I thought I was telling a story about a street orphan girl and a boy with an obsession with protecting everyone, the cast was all based off Ninjago characters, and the whole plot was their mission to find a supposedly extinct people group to help them take down an evil government. And I wrote like there was all there was to it. Indeed, on the surface level, that is all that there is to it.
But through each rewrite, no matter how incomplete, I realized that there was a lot more to this story than what I first set out to write.
The first draft was fully for the fans of my fanfiction. It had references to books they were familiar with, characters with inside jokes only they would get, references to elements of my fanfictions– and in that sense, it was really fun to write. It fell apart at certain points, and I did not handle certain topics very well… but I still had a snippet series following with raving readers who loved it despite its misgivings.
Despite this, however, the story I was trying to tell was not the story I was meant to tell.
Because what I’ve realized now is that I was confining my story to too small of a box. I didn’t see that Protectors was a much larger story than just a spoof of a fanfic with a fascinating worldbuilding concept. It was, as one reader put it, a saga– a saga about struggle, not just with the authority, but with our own selves. My theme went from a very bland and awkward fitting question of what it means to be heroes to “how do we define what is worth protecting?”. Protectors is ultimately a story about the pains of creating a change when others have failed before us, about breaking generational curses, fighting for truth, and rising again when you fail over and over and over.
It’s still a story about a street orphan girl with an anxiety disorder and a book-nerd boy who believes everyone good is worth protecting except for himself. It still has their story to take down the government.
But it’s not just a story about taking down the government anymore. I don’t know all the facets of what this story will become even now, but I do know that it’s a complex tale, one I hope will shed light in darkness and bring hope that even in dark times, there’s still people out there trying to fight for justice– sometimes, you just can’t see them.
My takeaway? Be open to what the story could become. Hold onto your core idea, but don’t squish the tale into the box. Let it spill out and color over the lines– sometimes that’s the key to finding the heart of the story.
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#2. The Difference Between Therapy Writing and Using Your Hard Times to Add to the Story
In the past, I have had a problem with trauma dumping into my stories. A lot of authors use their stories to process their own emotions and events in their life– a common cliche I see on TV shows and in books is the “writer” character who literally puts everything in their lives into the fictional world of thier books. Me? I’ve had a problem of throwing my whole heart and soul into a book, only to get ripped to shreds when editing came around. I couldn’t understand how authors did it: if you know me, when it comes to things I love, I can’t go halfway. So how was I supposed to give only half my heart to writing something so personal as a book?
Writing and rewriting Protectors taught me how. There are many facets to the story that are based on personal experiences, and I wanted to put my experience with that into the soul of the story so my readers could feel understood. But some of these elements were very sensitive– how was I supposed to throw my whole heart in without getting burned by the refining fire of edits?
I learned to split my story.
The most sensitive, heart-wrenching pieces of my characters’ stories were written on paper, in the background. My “therapy” snippets, as I called them, allowed me a safe place to get to the heart of the issues while having a distinct line between what would eventually be edited and what was for my own processing. I could still write the same characters in the professional setting of the story without throwing all the raw parts of my soul in as well.
My takeaway: yes, you can use the same characters in a story for both professional and therapy writing. Just provide clear distinctions to train your brain and yourself, so that you don’t rip open your scars in the process.
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#3. Killing Your Darlings Isn’t Always Cutting Out Scenes Entirely– Sometimes, It’s Shuffling the Deck
As writers, we hear over and over and over: kill your darlings. Sometimes it could be a line, a scene, a plot line, a character. I struggle with this because I am so attached to so many pieces of my story. But in an attempt to shorten the draft, I would viciously not just kill, but slaughter my darlings. Scenes were gutted out, inside jokes thrown away, characters tossed aside– and in several of the drafts between draft 1 and 4, I found it lacking spark.
Ironically, many of the jokes and scenes and even a character I had gutted out in previous rewrites found their way back into draft 4– not the same place or same shape, but instead shuffled into better places in the story. A main cast character took a supporting role; a silly action in the climax became almost a bittersweet moment before the final battle; a random love interest became an important supporting character in elements of the battle prep.
While I still cut a lot, I learned that could cut less than I thought I should.
My Takeaway: yes, still kill your darlings as necessarily. But don’t let them die forever. You can always revive them a different way in a later draft.
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#4. Use Every Character You Have to the Fullest Extent
This is so true of small casts, but it’s also true– and possibly even more important– with large casts. The issues with large casts is that people lose track of them, and some of them end up standing off to the side doing nothing. Before you create even a minor, random character that you will never see again, ask yourself whether you can use a character you’ve introduced before. Keep track of the characters you create. Recurring faces have more impact than one and done characters. Sure, there are times when you only need an “extra”– but I actually got a kick out of bringing back minor characters to play different roles within the plot. It also allowed me to round them out more and create more of a feeling that this was a real world with real people in it.
And don’t let your protagonists have all the fun in the climax! Give the rest of your ensemble cast roles too. I enjoyed shuffling between them and having them rotate around the sets, helping out with different things and getting their own mini spotlight moments. Something I learned: if a character in your ensemble cast has NO role in the climax and you can’t think of one for them, they probably need to get cut and given a lesser role.
My takeaway: every character you have should be used to their full potential. Don’t have a bigger ensemble and background cast than you need. Readers connect better with recurring characters.
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#5. A Time to Describe, and a Time to Insinuate
When you write about really tough topics like suicide, self harm, abuse, and trafficking, the balance between description and insinuation is a very fine line to walk. Too little, and you water down the topic: too much, and you may end up creating a very harmful story in its own right.
Protectors deals with self harm, suicidal thoughts, sexual abuse, and human trafficking, and several times I worried about going too far. But what I learned is that learning the moment for each depends on the scene you’re writing, and what you want out of it.
I could have gotten through the whole story without specifying what kind of abuse my mentor character Bay went through, and it would have probably worked. Bay choosing to go back to a city that holds nightmares for her gave her a strong element in herself.
But I chose to tell about her sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Why?
Because I wanted readers to have that extra layer, I mention the type of abuse, show her fear and her horror when she faces her father again, but never does she go into details about what her sexual abuse was like. There are no explicit details about her backstory. I gave enough details for the reader to understand, without them needing to see it in full detail.
Then there are times, with other characters, where I did show more detail. Monty struggles with a past of self-harm and suicide, and we get more details about his past with that, especially since those elements come in play again in the series. Monty constantly wrestles with feeling like he doesn’t deserve to live, and it ties so deeply into his later arcs that I do give more details about his self-harm moments via flashbacks. I’m still sensitive to treat the topic with a lot of grace, but I also wanted to show his depression as it is: a mental fight for his own life in a world where he’s being constantly told he deserves to die.
Protectors was a practice in finding that balance between detail and insinuation, and the feedback from my alphas so far is that I handle the topics well!
My takeaway? Never show more than you have to, but don’t gloss either. You can be REAL about a topic without being graphic about it.
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I feel like there is more that I learned than I have here, but I think that this is a pretty decent summary of my main points. I don’t know when I can officially share Protectors with the world via publishing, but I hope that through my process of creating this story, I can continue to learn and grow as a writer and hopefully, get it to the point where it can truly impact peoples’ lives and I can hold it in my hands as a physical book.
Tell me below in the comments: what did you learn from writing your heart stories? What were your takeaways?