Kuzey­tac via Compfight

Melanie Edmonds is one of those indie-authors who’s man­aged to make a a suc­cess out of the web-serial.  A real suc­cess.  She pro­duces smart, con­cise, pro­fes­sional look­ing tales and she does it all by the seat of her pants.  Imagine!

My own ser­ial flopped tremen­dously, plot holes and incon­sis­ten­cies abounded, and I couldn’t, so close to the end fig­ure out how to fix the flaws.  I thought that a seat of your pants web ser­ial was impos­si­ble to pull off…at least for me.  Accord­ing to Melanie, there are some rules or not rules to keep in mind though.  This is what else Melanie had to say…

Plot­ting a web serial…

Or, how to keep your pants on fire.

There are many ways to approach writ­ing a web ser­ial. Some writ­ers have the whole ser­ial writ­ten before they start to post. Some have at least a large por­tion of it com­plete: half, or three quar­ters, or enough for sev­eral months’ worth of entries. Oth­ers always have a hand­ful of posts in hand.

I’m not one of those writ­ers. In some ways, I’d like to be, but it just doesn’t work like that for me.

On my first web ser­ial, the Apoc­a­lypse Blog, I had a strict sched­ule of at least one post a day. For the last eight months of the year-long project, I was writ­ing, edit­ing, and post­ing in the same day. Every day. It was insane, and I loved it.

Writ­ing that way doesn’t leave much time for plan­ning, so I fell into the dis­cov­ery, ‘seat of the pants’ kind of writ­ing. This works well for me, but it has a num­ber of pit­falls that are worth keep­ing in mind. It’s easy to write your­self into a cor­ner or mean­der through the posts with­out direc­tion if you don’t have some way to con­trol the plot.

So how do you plot a web ser­ial you’re writ­ing by the seat of your pants?

Have strong, fully-formed char­ac­ters. These are the peo­ple you’re tak­ing this jour­ney with, and they’ll help you through it. When you get stuck, they will help you get out of it. Trust your char­ac­ters to help you tell their story, and you’ll be fine.

My writ­ing is character-centric. The action (and plot) is dri­ven by their per­son­al­i­ties and deci­sions, their steps and mis­steps. Hav­ing a good mix of peo­ple is essen­tial, even if they don’t all get along (in fact, it can be more fun if they don’t!).

Even the gaps they can’t fill can help to drive the story. Do they need a mechanic but don’t have one to hand? Then they’ll need to find a way around their bro­ken gad­get, or go find some­one who can fix it for them. And maybe that will lead to an impor­tant lack that they’ll need to work around later on, or they’ll have to deal with some­one who exacts an awk­ward price…

Have a  plan in mind. You might be writ­ing by the seat of your pants, but that doesn’t meant you can’t have a long-range plan you’re work­ing towards. In fact, if you don’t, you’re likely to end up with a long, ram­bling story that goes nowhere at all. Your read­ers will be able to tell and this isn’t a good thing!

You don’t have to have a 3-act struc­ture and you don’t have to have every twist and turn nailed down before­hand. You don’t even have to have it writ­ten down. But if you have an idea about the plot arc (or arcs!) you want to cre­ate, where your story is going, then it will help your story main­tain a direction.

I use the ‘step­ping stone’ method of plan­ning my sto­ries, includ­ing my web seri­als. I know spe­cific plot points I want to hit and the rough end­ing point I want to get to in each ‘book’ (roughly 100,000 words in a web serial).

This helps cre­ate arcs for the story to travel through, allow­ing it to have crescen­dos and pay­offs, which is less exhaust­ing for the audi­ence than a con­tin­u­ous level of excite­ment (or, worse, lack of excite­ment!). In the project I’m cur­rently work­ing on, Star­walker, there are three books planned out, each one with its own arc which builds up into a big­ger arc run­ning through the whole trilogy.

Every­thing in between those stepping-stone plot points is writ­ten discovery-style. I might know where I want them to get to but I don’t always know how they’ll get there! I take the jour­ney with my char­ac­ters, and that’s part of the fun for me as a writer. I ask myself a lot of ques­tions, exam­in­ing my goal, options, and char­ac­ters, to pick the best path for the story.

Doug Geisler via Compfight

For exam­ple, I want them to get to point D, but how do I make them want to get there? If they don’t want to get there, how do I make it nec­es­sary for them to go any­way? Do I need to throw in a road­block, or have them remove one? Do they need to go through points B and C first? What choices will this group of peo­ple need to make? What won’t/can’t they do? How can I jug­gle the pieces I have at my com­mand to make this happen?

What­ever you do, don’t force the plot. You should never need to. No-one wants to see the author’s hand in there, push­ing the story towards where you want it to be; you should be invis­i­ble. It’s impor­tant to stay true to your char­ac­ters and the rules of your game; your audi­ence will hate you if you don’t.

A lot of this comes down to expe­ri­ence, exper­i­men­ta­tion, and keep­ing your options open. You will get bet­ter with prac­tice! There is always a way out of where you are, and a way to where you want to get to. Find the one that fits your char­ac­ters, story, and world.

If you find your­self stuck in a cor­ner, or with no idea what to do next, find a tac­tic that works for you. Ray­mond Chan­dler famously used the ‘man enters the scene with a gun’ tac­tic when he didn’t know what to do next. For me, I tend to ask myself ‘what’s the worst thing I can do to this/these character/s at this moment?’ I may not do that worst thing, but it tends to gen­er­ate some inter­est­ing ideas!

Lastly, don’t for­get to have fun with it. Writ­ing as if your pants are on fire is exhil­a­rat­ing and some­times exhaust­ing, rather like try­ing to keep con­trol of a sack­ful of fer­rets. But it’s worth it!

Strap in, light the match, and let your­self get car­ried away!

*****

Melanie Edmonds is a tech­ni­cal writer by trade and fic­tion writer by love. She has a degree in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture and Cre­ative Writ­ing, and has been writ­ing since she was old enough to hold a pen. She writes pri­mar­ily sci­ence and spec­u­la­tive fic­tion, and her pub­lished work includes web seri­als such as the Apoc­a­lypse Blog and Starwalker.

You can read Melanie’s work at: Apoc­a­lypse Blog and Star­walker Blog

You can fol­low Melanie at: Face­book, blog, Twit­ter