icloud

We bought an iPad with lots of memory and very little of it has been used because everything including my photos keep getting stored and saved in my icloud storage. How do I get my icloud to stop downloading everything. I want to use all that space on my ipad and free up my icloud but anytime I think I’ve saved something on my ipad and I go to delete it off my icloud it makes it look like I’m deleting it everywhere. Now my icloud storage says it’s maxed out and I need to buy more, but I just want everything on my ipad… you know, like how computers used to be. If I want it on icloud so I can share it to another device, I’ll just put it on icloud later, but initially when I creat or save a doc I just want everything to automatically be saved in my ipad storage.