So I want to make a science fiction novel and it's coming along in drips and drabs. One of the difficult things about trying to write a novel is that you don't necessarily know how to go about it. My dad just starts writing and sees what comes out which to me is sort of "meh?" because then I just end up writing kinky port (BDSM or ABDL - whichever your mileage may vary). Maybe I'm more love based and he's more I want to blow shit up so that's how he ends up writing about war and I end up writing about sex...is it an ID thing? Doesn't matter. I'm poor and living in the ghetto and my family doesn't give a shit about me so it's a wash. The point here is that just writing 'straight' (as it were) ends up where you just write whatever happens to be on your mind. Which I find to be OK and doable for "scenes" of a couple pages to a chapter, but I find it difficult to organize the plot as a whole.

I'm sharing some of my notes on what I'm working on currently, which will probably not matter as my notebook will get lost/stolen/burned and the story will be stolen or destroyed or I'll just die before it ends up getting written. I'm working on a space battle adventure story slash novel. So you're like OK, what are the scenes? Clearly there has to be character development, space battles, and then there has to be exposition on what the setting is like. Also politics. If you think of it like a television serial you can break it down into multiple interweaving plots where each couple of chapters has a theme. What I've done is have it so that each section is either a space battle, a description of what the characters are doing (often romantic, sometimes platonic drama), and then what the overall good guy/bad guy situation is with conflicting politics from the command and country level down to the individual characters.

For the space battles themselves I've organized them using diagrams of what the ships will do in three dimensional space. So in this case there's a fight over a portal ring that can warp ships across the universe after a space station blows up. It's a bit similar to football except with space ships. Momentum and acceleration play a large part, as the larger the ship the slower it can speed up or slow down. So this is one of my brainstorm sheets. I'm sure this will then be used to drug and torment me because I'm not "doing it right" by hiding what I'm writing. (I've had my notebooks stolen and read and had people drug me in San Francisco and then wander around in costume according to what I wrote - it's just that fucking terrible here. They're just horseshit. It's a depersonalization and torture method to prevent people from writing or creating anything - they'll steal the idea and then drug and torture you after parading around in costume according to what you wrote. I wish there were prisons here and the hospitals were staffed with people that weren't crooked.)

So the next space battle takes place in a pirate lane where ships follow in the wake of a gravitational singularity (which if it doesn't make sense you should read about my spaceship concepts here). So here is the map of the space battle itself, which the story slightly modifies. It takes place on the deck of the command ship, and the main protagonist is a reporter which is good for exposition. It has a meet cute between the reporter and an officer and then there's a moralistic lesson and a death before the scene closes which leads to dramatic tension leading into the next scene and providing character development. It's difficult to write scenes likes this when they take place on a command deck and everyone is staring at a screen, but I thought it turned out okish even if the dialog is a little trite in places. In other space battles I would have the point of view be from different angles. It turns out that writing a spaceship battle scene is difficult to make 'dramatic' as it's a bunch of cans running around in space and then every now and then one of them blows up.

Here's the map -

And here's the battle scene itself. Bear in mind that if you were running a tv pilot this may only be as long as between two commercial breaks, and I wouldn't even consider it a full chapter. It's mostly to come up with the idea of how you would use the map as a brain storm device and then translate that into story. From there you could put various story fragments together on a board or use a tool like https://obsidian.md/ (which I've used before to play around with story ideas and is quite good) to make a larger story arc.