I'm currently stuck on my current project deep in the editing processes, so I'm currently writing a spin off mini-story based on the same world that my main project it is in. It has different characters and a different plot but the same events still happen. It actually helps me get the story line for my main project right, since so much happens. Does anyone else do this?
Most definitely, I tend to write with my characters in a totally different world setting, but the same characters, in some ways to see how they would interact when they are taken out of their own comfort zones. It has helped me to develop and evolve the characters into more real feeling people, plus it gives me more background, and in one case, has caused a spin-off novel that I am now writing concurrently with my main work.
The original characters make cameos, but this is about an entirely different set of characters. I don't expect it to go much further than 10,000 or 15,000 words (at most, which I'd be incredibly happy with), but it helps build the world up.
All the time. I have so many spin-offs and side stories that I don't know what's my main story anymore I think it's a great way of keep discovering the universe you created, and to flesh it out even more. When I really like an universe I created, I can't stop myself from constantly writing different stories in it. Some times with the same characters that I started with, some other times with a completely different set of them.
Sometimes the spin offs are more fun than the originals. You don't have to be dedicated to it like you do with the main one. In the one I'm working on now, pretty much all the characters are going to be dead in the end. It's also nice to have the spin off leave an impression on the main one, explaining an important event or something.
I do. I write up supplemental scenes and vignettes, that have the potential to add something beneficial to the project I'm currently working on, irrespective of whether they'll end up getting used or not. Sometimes they read like short stories and can stand alone.
I have only done so once. It was on a novel that I started writing, not as a writing project per se, but as a means of dealing with a hurtful situation. At some point, I started thinking of it as a writing project but never really established what I wanted to do with it. I finished a first draft of sorts, but then bogged down in the editing. I sketched out two spinoff stories before I decided to just put the thing aside. I may go back to it, I don't know.
A good majority of my characters are in the same universe and started from the same story (the MCs anyway)
