Very Tumbler 2010, but aren’t we all spiralling anyway?
Writing in the webnovel format is somewhat close to writing the TV Series script. It’s episodic, you have a limited amount of time/pages/words to tell the story you want and it has to make sense in a broader narrative. However, it’s not supposed to be as straight forward as the screenplay and it has to have more to it than just the actions and descriptions of places.
I’m currently working under Tapas.io guidelines: keep it under 1500 words per episode (although I’m not really able to keep it that low but I don’t think I’ve surpassed 1800 words in any of the episodes I wrote so far) – it’s supposed to be a fast read, something someone can read on their daily commute. Originally I thought it might be hard to keep such a low word count per episode, but in the end it’s neither too low or too difficult to say what I want to say within such limit.
While learning to write screenplay I’ve always loved the fact that there was a format to adder by, better yet that there are actually apps/programs that will make your life easy by already having such format specific delimitation while you are writing. I do believe that when you are proactively learning to write, following a pattern might help you gather the courage to put those first words in the paper. And I think choosing webnovel as my first real prose writing venture was the right choice for me.
I am, however, also trying to play-around with this format and with the genre (I call it Isekai-Medieval-Romantasy). So even though I am following the guidelines, I’m making sure that my own writing style is reflected in the story I’m constructing.
Right now my goal is to get to 10 episodes, closing what would be a first season. I’m also open to maybe make it further to episode 15. But I’m also not really establishing a narrative timeline, as I’ve said before I’m just going with the flow and flow is flowing, my friends. I don’t want to reach episode 100, though. I know most novels go up to the hundreds episodes but I don’t know if I have that in me.
One thing from my screenwriting years that I have mostly abandoned in this project is the three/five act structuring. I don’t want a structure, I want the story to be what it is. Maybe in the future, if I ever get to re-edit it into a full on romance or novel I might want to revisit this decision. But I often feel that these same rules I love in script-writing have been leaking to books in a way that do more harm than good. Story are not supposed to be constricted by their pages or word counts – at least in my perfect imaginary world.
Oh! I decided to give me a few more weeks and moved my deadline. The novel was originally supposed to go up this past Tuesday, but I decided to keep it on the oven for a few more weeks, so I’ve been feeling a little less stressed about it. I do still have to make all the promotional thingys for it, even though I honestly have no intention to do a whole social media blow-out about it.
See you guys next week!
(Next time I’ll probably talk about writing a graphic novel, so hey. That’s a change!)
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