That I could understand, but it has POV/scene changes, demarcated by *** Why?? (it's also 26k words of extremely dead dove. Maybe that's why they did it, so you see the tiny, tiny scroll bar and despair along with the main character.)
5200? really? i wouldn't think there'd be enough words to support 5200 pages. and i get 4.99 if i divide 25978 by 5200.
Oh it's definitely good! The reason I'm so "ARG" is I really want to finish it, but it's going to take me awhile. And I'll have to slowly scroll through to find my place every time.
Oh whew, I fucked something up somewhere. It's only 52 pages. That's still way longer than I want to scroll. On mobile it scrolls me back up to the top occasionally.
I find that kind of neat really, if inconvenient for readers on certain platforms. Structure is a thing I like, and I'm used to 10k or less one-off fics and anything above that being multi-chaptered. I can imagine it must be a pain in the ass on phones though. I tried reading fic on my phone like once and decided I hated it.
My phone is my favorite way to read fic because I can read it in bed or wherever. My attention span can be really inconsistent so I may read obsessively all the way through in one sitting. But more likely I'll take a while to get into it, and while that's happening I'll be in and out between different tabs and apps. And even once I'm into it I'll probably need to stop from time to time and do other shit, or I'll stop and come back in a few hours/days. I have a lot of respect and even sympathy for authors who want to use structure to do a thing for the story. I think that should come first in their considerations. I may find the experience slightly annoying though. And I do think that if the specific effect you want to create is emotions regarding the scrollbar, it might be relevant that many readers are probably on mobile and the emotion they feel may not be the one you were intending.
Yeah I can get that. I just hate the tiny screen and weird things my phone does with the size of shit. Also I can multitask easier on my mac, which I'm often doing. Like I can do things like that on my phone, but I can't have it all conveniently open on the same screen like I can with my laptop. I feel like structure and form get sidelined a lot, honestly. In a variety of ways. It's one of the more fascinating aspects of writing to me. Really, form is one of my favorite things to look at artwise in general. Like I adore analysis of shot composition in films. With at least the English classes in things like high school it doesn't seem to be taught particularly well, or much at all. Fanfiction has resulted in some lovely structural trends though. And some that are less lovely, but at least interesting.
I think structure is one of those mostly invisible things that affects the entire experience drastically. I wish I’d learned a lot more about it in writing classes because it was the thing I was looking for and couldn’t puzzle out on my own through instinct, like composition in art. I was watching a movie with my parents earlier. I’d seen it once before and liked it. I remember thinking vaguely about a three act structure and how they were probably using that, and that the pacing was good and I could probably figure out where we were. And then realizing it was late act 1 with rising action, and they’d accomplished the things one might expect. “End of Act 1” was one of the most satisfying thoughts I’ve had recently.
I like when I can do things like that with movies. Like when I can solidly point out when we're gonna have an explosion because we've been following 1, 2, 3, boom! editing to a t. But yeah structure is a bitch to figure out. Form too. There's definitely reasons to go with a single thing for 25k worth of words, and there's definitely reasons to break even that up into chapter bites.
Horror movies were some of my first great experiences with movie predictions because horror as a genre plays on expectations. If it’s gonna scare the audience there needs to be anticipation, which you can build via use of tropes, but you’ll also want to selectively subvert them because too much predictably isn’t scary. I adored The Babadook because of what it did with some of the tropes it invoked. I love noticing things about how movies work. I’ve infected my entire family with “notice the importance of eyes in connecting with people in a performance” disease, which I initially contracted from the judges of So You Think You Can Dance. Some movies are pretty clever about managing to work around various eye-obscuring headwear. When they’re more straightforward I think it’s easier to be forgiving if you understand why the FBI agent lost her protective head gear in the terrorist cave. We’ve also come down with a mild case of “observe the direction of movement across the screen”.
Tbh I wrote a single-chapter fic that was getting up to 30k words once. I think my reasoning for it was because I wrote it more or less backwards and I couldn’t be bothered figuring out chapter division’s that actually worked.
That makes sense to me. I guess like every other element, chapter breaks say something whether you want them to or not. Sometimes it probably doesn’t matter much but I’m sure it can be awkward sometimes too. If it’s a really tightly woven plot, I actually do appreciate the ability to scroll around within the story now that I think about it. It’s something I notice more in comics because I’m poor and read them digitally, so trying to navigate between entire issues gets to be an undertaking every time you have a feeling you remember something potentially relevant.... somewhere? But it’s still definitely a thing with text story chapters, where having to click back to a different chapter feels less doable than scrolling within a chapter, even if the chapter is very long. Oops I have been served a new webpage, the past is behind me now.
Spiders PR, who opens 300k+ fics in "show all chapters" mode and just starts going ham with the scroll bar, is an outlier adn should not be counted?
If I'm on mobile, I prefer to go to "show all chapters," because I usually binge on a tag or author in big chunks, and it's easier to hit the back button twice than twenty times. But my mobile browser is set to re-open at my spot on a page when I close it; if I had to scroll every time, I imagine it would be a different matter.
Oh, hahaha, it me. I guess in my vague defense, I don't often write plots that are plotty enough to justify breaking up the story in my head? I think that one prowlmegs fic hit 35k or so and could have been split up, but was pretty tightly focused in a short overall timespan, and seemed fine without. If the one wip I've been sitting in clears 50k, I'll probably have to give in and do it there, just for the sake of not driving away readers :p But even in novels, I love reading without chapters, and I don't think I've ever read an ao3 fic by chapter. A big part of why I got frustrated with ff.net and drifted away (like... ten years ago) was having to manually click from chapter to chapter, and I've manually saved probablyyyy... tens of thousands of comic book pages for the sake of endless scrolling (a lot of those are probably the ghosts of laptops past at this point, which is a distressing amount of work to have lost XD). Also in my vague defense, my no-chapters thing is at least almost definitely better than the brief no-paragraphs phase of my youth :V It was like when I decided that the downstroke at the beginning of an n or m was unnecessary and I wasn't going to do them, except it turns out paragraphs are KIND OF a little important (and ao3 has a minimum character requirement for a chapter, but it's something SERIOUSLY tiny. Word by word chapter breaks is probably doable, if perhaps only a matter of time until irritated people report you to the fanfic police)
I was about to say, I have an ~18k one-shot that was about 40 pages in the Google Doc. (The reason I didn't split it is that I couldn't think of good places to do it that didn't interrupt the flow.)
