Story, plot, and making us wait for it
Jul. 9th, 2018 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethAo3 has been down All Day
(possibly it is someone's sleep cycle)
(possibly things went boom in spectacular way)
(lets hope sleep)
I have a long fic to read, but it is making me realise that usually I hop around a lot.
I suspect I read shorter things whenever I get frustrated with the speed of the plot elsewhere.
Fic on Ao3 can get really, really long
and even the good stuff isn't always paced like a novel.
I think sometimes it's trying to be a whole season of TV?
But the pacing for that isn't there either.
We just tend to get A Lot of story out of our favourite canon sources, and then you sit down and write a long fic and realise how many words it takes to cover that much plot, and compare it to say comics or TV or film and it all comes out different, and then just, we have no limits, we can keep going and going and going.
Which is great, except, it doesn't always do the... push. Like, TV with commercial breaks has a little cliffhanger or tension to resolve before the break, to make you come back after the break. But people who write for the BBC have said this is still a good idea even without the breaks. Because it pull pushes you along, making you want to see the next bit and giving you a little buzz of fulfilled potential to get you energetically into the next section.
Some people change chapters to change point of view, which is cool, but then sometimes the tension doesn't pull push through the change, you get a bit of a catch up on what we didn't need to see is all, and then you're just... waiting for the slack to wear off and the action to come back?
I am not criticising that which is written for love, have at it, I'm just saying
pull push, pacing, tension and payoff
it's awesome.
And if you pace it like a soap opera, which goes on forever, then what you have is little tensions for each character, that pay off by turns, so you leave a cliffhanger with one guy to pay off a previous cliffhanger with someone else.
It's like juggling, you give each a little push and keep it on course and bring it in only to push out again.
... I haven't written for so long. I studied this stuff, but I haven't written. It has been five years since college and much longer since complete fic.
But this is what the outline is for too, the setup and payoff, the things to tide you over the commercial breaks or wait for the next post. Why do we want to see this next bit? If we don't, bit of a problem.
It's what turns a story from Lots Of Stuff Happens to a really satisfying set that feels complete.
I should do things instead of just crit them.
But I'll probably go back to the fic I was reading where I strongly suspect I've got a hundred thousand words to go and they're barely talking to each other yet.
(possibly it is someone's sleep cycle)
(possibly things went boom in spectacular way)
(lets hope sleep)
I have a long fic to read, but it is making me realise that usually I hop around a lot.
I suspect I read shorter things whenever I get frustrated with the speed of the plot elsewhere.
Fic on Ao3 can get really, really long
and even the good stuff isn't always paced like a novel.
I think sometimes it's trying to be a whole season of TV?
But the pacing for that isn't there either.
We just tend to get A Lot of story out of our favourite canon sources, and then you sit down and write a long fic and realise how many words it takes to cover that much plot, and compare it to say comics or TV or film and it all comes out different, and then just, we have no limits, we can keep going and going and going.
Which is great, except, it doesn't always do the... push. Like, TV with commercial breaks has a little cliffhanger or tension to resolve before the break, to make you come back after the break. But people who write for the BBC have said this is still a good idea even without the breaks. Because it pull pushes you along, making you want to see the next bit and giving you a little buzz of fulfilled potential to get you energetically into the next section.
Some people change chapters to change point of view, which is cool, but then sometimes the tension doesn't pull push through the change, you get a bit of a catch up on what we didn't need to see is all, and then you're just... waiting for the slack to wear off and the action to come back?
I am not criticising that which is written for love, have at it, I'm just saying
pull push, pacing, tension and payoff
it's awesome.
And if you pace it like a soap opera, which goes on forever, then what you have is little tensions for each character, that pay off by turns, so you leave a cliffhanger with one guy to pay off a previous cliffhanger with someone else.
It's like juggling, you give each a little push and keep it on course and bring it in only to push out again.
... I haven't written for so long. I studied this stuff, but I haven't written. It has been five years since college and much longer since complete fic.
But this is what the outline is for too, the setup and payoff, the things to tide you over the commercial breaks or wait for the next post. Why do we want to see this next bit? If we don't, bit of a problem.
It's what turns a story from Lots Of Stuff Happens to a really satisfying set that feels complete.
I should do things instead of just crit them.
But I'll probably go back to the fic I was reading where I strongly suspect I've got a hundred thousand words to go and they're barely talking to each other yet.