hey, blog! 🌸 anon here. I think there are probably other posts about long fic, but I was wondering if you or others have any advice on sticking to a single long story instead of jumping to another? I'm mostly of a short fic writer myself, and I'm so interested in the secrets long fic writers possess. Anyway, thank you for running this blog! An awesome project :)
I'll give you my secrets as a fellow short fic writer who sometimes dips into medium-fic and the occasional long fic.
Be obsessed with your story. This can go a LONG way to helping you maintain your motivation. Daydream about it. Make playlists about it. Talk to friends about it.
Try to make each chapter feel like a oneshot. Give it an opening, a middle, and a closing. Have some character development or achieve a plot point or drop a clue that will be used later in the story. The more you can give yourself the satisfaction you get from a oneshot, the better.
Do jump to oneshots on the side to keep you going through the long fic. Sometimes you really do need to get the feeling of "done" to be able to continue something that's still in progress. Don't deny yourself that feeling just because you think you should. Life needs dessert and short fic writers need completed works.
Embrace a B plot (and a C plot and a D plot). These side plots can last for a single chapter or can be threaded through the whole story or they can bridge from chapter 12 to chapter 18. Whatever their final form, these smaller stories-within-the-story also help to satisfy the need for a short, punchy hit of dopamine when the story is starting to feel huge.
I'll leave it there for now and open it up. How do the rest of you go about writing longer stories? Especially if you typically prefer to write shorter.
Honestly? Just allow yourself to jump to another story if that’s what you’re feeling that writing session. I have about two dozen WIPs right now. Usually I’ll be loosely focused on a handful or so at any given point, but that focus can shift. And that’s fine; if I put something down for now I’ll still come back to it eventually. Right now I happen to be relatively laser focused on a single fic, which means the last time I updated anything else was Saturday and Sunday.
The fic I’m lasered in on at the moment has a lot of relatively short (~2-3k words, with a few exceptions in either direction) chapters, which isn’t how I usually work. Finishing a chapter does give me a bit of an “I did the thing!” boost. When I’m writing a longer non-chaptered story, I pat myself on the back every time I finish a scene, instead. (This has turned into an unexpected perk of using Scrivener as my writing software; having the scenes separated into their own distinct documents in the story binder means a finished scene adds to the “pile.” I know there’s other software out there that also does this; yWriter and Liquid Story Binder are ones I’ve used in the past, though I’m not 100% sure whether LSB separated scenes or just chapters. Been a hot minute.)
Also: Walking helps your creative brain. Like, there’s science. I will absolutely turn scenes over in my head as I walk. At this point it’s become habit enough that it happens automatically; if I’m walking alone, I’m thinking about the blorbos. (If I’m not alone I’m probably engaged in conversation, and I have yet to master the level of brain multithreading that will let me carry on a conversation and mentally put guys in Situations at the same time.)
And yeah, having at least one friend you can talk to about the story can help immensely. Nothing like a friend being excited along with you to hype you up!
