A fiction series, or maybe a novel.

Basically, I want it to be a single cohesive unit, like real life. No holes or retconning.

I want to do that, though, while still referencing the past quite a bit, rather than avoiding it.

The idea I want is that it starts off with a collection of friends having a reunion of sorts, and talk all about the adventures they'd had before. There are jokes that are made that are clearly inside jokes, but we don't know them. They talk about events we don't know. Etc.

So, then, the rest of the thing is a series of those stories. They all have a place in time, but the order they're presented in doesn't depend on that. It's neither all backwards, nor forwards. Just a collection of stories that all reference one another.

The hope, then, is that once I'm done I'll have basically covered every interesting point in their friendship and summed up everything. Every joke and reference will be explained.

Certain things will be intentionally misremembered, sometimes things might even be argued about how they really happened by the characters. Then, though, the reader will get the objective actual story.

Certain things, I'd like, for neither person to be right, nor wrong. Like, one person remember one set of things and the other person remembers another, but actually both happened.

Sometimes I'd like one person to recount the story but have it actually be some composition of two events.

At least one of the inside jokes, potentially one of the most pervasive ones, I want to be really simple.

Like, when it finally comes time to explain that one it's just like:

James sat down at the table and looked around. "Hey guys, what's up?" The assembled group struggled to maintain composure. Jill was the first to burst into laughter. "What? Ok, now I'm troubled. What is it?" James looked down; he'd just sat in David's ice-cream.

Or something. Told like the story, but clear that there's basically nothing to this one, yet it's become something that almost defines James. It comes up at least once everytime he's around in some sort of reference.

I'm thinking that we learn right in the first bit, the reunion, that James had died.

Then in basically every other story he's present and this comes up.

I'm thinking that something like the above, then, be the last chapter. That's all of it. Kind of an anti-climax, just a small nothing to fit that last piece together. In a way it sort of trivializes the whole thing, which I like.

Writing It

Because I want everything to be resolve before any part gets written, I'm going to have to build some crazy mind-map. I think I'd make a node for every event that happened in order, with a rough outline, then draw lines between them all being "This one references that one" etc.

I just have to make sure I have the whole thing in my head before I start so I don't screw something up.