On writing a Web Novel
How do web novel authors do it? Or serialized mangaka?
They produce quality content day after day, week after week, and yet stay on track, in character, with consistent narrative voice and style. Whatever weakness in their writing can be overlooked by virtue of the sheer volume they’re able to write. It astounds me. Takes my breath away.
I certainly can’t match that productivity.
Most of 2022, I worked on an untitled web-novel. I’d felt my writing slow a little in recent years, and thought if I could learn the skills of a web-novel author, I could overcome my shortcomings. Part of my writing falling off was work and life, part of it was the pandemic and the stress brought about by uncertainty, isolation, and no small amount of exasperation with the world at large.
I was happy enough with my web novel premise — a post-apocalyptic time travel story from the perspectives of a woman and her murderer. I liked my protagonists and their friends. I wanted to explore the horror associated with time travel. I wanted extradimensional aliens made of, not carbon and matter, but static and music and energy.
I tried to set that deadline for myself, a word count each day. For a while I succeeded, but that high quickly wore thin. What started as a chapter every other day, became a chapter a week, and then I was mired in the stuck-ness of it all.
Something in the process of writing a web novel conditioned me to write each second, each moment of the narrative timeline. No time skips, not even short ones. No skipped dialogues or abstracted moments. No exposition in the ways I was used to them. It taught me a lot, but I also learned I can’t do it for a whole project. If I return to this web novel, I need to learn how to manipulate timeline and plot momentum better.
I’ll think about posting this WIP here sometime! I’m proud of some parts of it, even if it’s ground to a halt at the moment. Here’s the blurb for one half of it.
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Working title: STORM BY STORM
After his girlfriend was found meticulously mutilated and murdered, the hero moped for two months, righteously murdered a few hundred villains, was inevitably changed forever, etc., etc.
His girlfriend, however, wakes up wet and bewildered in a collapsed high school washroom, seven years before her death — and, more importantly, on the day the world ends. Armed with memories of a terrifying future, Kita Lee-Avery must find her long-lost fight or flight instinct, resist her hero’s advances, and twist the end of the world to her advantage.
