Yeah, so! My best effort at articulating what I think is happening here:
A thing I’ve seen some multichapter fanfiction do lately is doing really big timeskips between chapters, such that each chapter has a very standalone mood/atmosphere/mini-arc. Like, let’s say you’re writing a postgame slowburn Claude/Lorenz fic (I’m not describing any particular fic here, just some plausible amalgamation):
Chapter 1: Claude PoV, with the two of them chatting right after the war ends.
Chapter 2: Lorenz PoV, an entire year later, while he’s sorting out some stupid internal politics stuff with his house, so we get a vivid portrait of the responsibilities/difficulties he’s facing, but there’s only a glancing mention of the letter from Claude that he hasn’t replied to.
Chapter 3: Hilda PoV, an “interlude” scene that feels a little bit like the author just wanted an excuse to have Hilda hang out for a bit, but does also fill in some gaps in our knowledge, in a sideways sort of way.
Chapter 4: Claude PoV, featuring his inevitable reunion with Lorenz at some diplomatic event a month later…
It’s easy to see why this structure would be appealing to fanfic authors: if they’re interested in a slowburn sort of dynamic between two characters, but don’t want to futz with the endless ramping-up-of-tension you’ve gotta do to make that plot structure work, this gets you there. The reader keeps reading, not because they’re like “oh my GOSH i cannot BELIEVE they have not KISSED yet they were SO CLOSE” at the end of each chapter, but because each chapter promises to illustrate some surprising new setting or dynamic that we haven’t seen the character in yet. It’s basically the longform, more sophisticated form of the “5-times-then-1” structure, lmao.
There’s a bunch of potential pitfalls with this approach, which is probably why I haven’t seen it much in mainstream genre literature—if the plot is actually the point, all these endless character moments may be just an annoyance. Or, if you don’t have enough dynamism or variety in your characters, you’ll just be hitting the same emotional beats over and over. Or, most likely, if you haven’t built enough connections or filled in enough gaps for these pseudo-standalone-scenes to make sense together, people are going to get confused why people are doing what they’re doing, or just plain not care enough about them.
But I think this novel’s a good example of how to pull this off. Even though we never see, e.g. Nainoa at Stanford, the shadow hangs heavy enough over the plot that it feels palpable and doesn’t really need to be fully spelled out. And what Dean/Nainoa/Kaui were up to was all sufficiently dynamic and distinct that I kept wanting to read. It’s a really cool effect!
(it’s entirely possible this is common in some other mainstream writing that i’ve just totally missed, lol, but fanfiction is where i know it from, so :P)
And, there was one other, more basic aspect that felt fanfiction-y to me: there are more sentence fragments than I think can be attributed solely to character voice, e.g. the “She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder for a second” in the excerpted bit above, instead of “She leans back from my head and touches my shoulder for just a second”… I’m neutral on this choice, as both styles read fine to me, but I definitely see the fragmented structure more often in web fiction than printed fiction.
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Date: 2021-10-04 08:39 pm (UTC)A thing I’ve seen some multichapter fanfiction do lately is doing really big timeskips between chapters, such that each chapter has a very standalone mood/atmosphere/mini-arc. Like, let’s say you’re writing a postgame slowburn Claude/Lorenz fic (I’m not describing any particular fic here, just some plausible amalgamation):
Chapter 1: Claude PoV, with the two of them chatting right after the war ends.
Chapter 2: Lorenz PoV, an entire year later, while he’s sorting out some stupid internal politics stuff with his house, so we get a vivid portrait of the responsibilities/difficulties he’s facing, but there’s only a glancing mention of the letter from Claude that he hasn’t replied to.
Chapter 3: Hilda PoV, an “interlude” scene that feels a little bit like the author just wanted an excuse to have Hilda hang out for a bit, but does also fill in some gaps in our knowledge, in a sideways sort of way.
Chapter 4: Claude PoV, featuring his inevitable reunion with Lorenz at some diplomatic event a month later…
It’s easy to see why this structure would be appealing to fanfic authors: if they’re interested in a slowburn sort of dynamic between two characters, but don’t want to futz with the endless ramping-up-of-tension you’ve gotta do to make that plot structure work, this gets you there. The reader keeps reading, not because they’re like “oh my GOSH i cannot BELIEVE they have not KISSED yet they were SO CLOSE” at the end of each chapter, but because each chapter promises to illustrate some surprising new setting or dynamic that we haven’t seen the character in yet. It’s basically the longform, more sophisticated form of the “5-times-then-1” structure, lmao.
There’s a bunch of potential pitfalls with this approach, which is probably why I haven’t seen it much in mainstream genre literature—if the plot is actually the point, all these endless character moments may be just an annoyance. Or, if you don’t have enough dynamism or variety in your characters, you’ll just be hitting the same emotional beats over and over. Or, most likely, if you haven’t built enough connections or filled in enough gaps for these pseudo-standalone-scenes to make sense together, people are going to get confused why people are doing what they’re doing, or just plain not care enough about them.
But I think this novel’s a good example of how to pull this off. Even though we never see, e.g. Nainoa at Stanford, the shadow hangs heavy enough over the plot that it feels palpable and doesn’t really need to be fully spelled out. And what Dean/Nainoa/Kaui were up to was all sufficiently dynamic and distinct that I kept wanting to read. It’s a really cool effect!
(it’s entirely possible this is common in some other mainstream writing that i’ve just totally missed, lol, but fanfiction is where i know it from, so :P)
And, there was one other, more basic aspect that felt fanfiction-y to me: there are more sentence fragments than I think can be attributed solely to character voice, e.g. the “She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder for a second” in the excerpted bit above, instead of “She leans back from my head and touches my shoulder for just a second”… I’m neutral on this choice, as both styles read fine to me, but I definitely see the fragmented structure more often in web fiction than printed fiction.