That awkward moment in fanfiction when...the hiatus bites back

That awkward moment in fanfiction when...the hiatus bites back

3 December 2013

Sibling Intervention, Chapter 24

When it comes to chaptered stories, going on a major hiatus is the worst possible thing you can do. Seriously.

You actually forget certain aspects of your own story, how far you are in the plot, how you’ve characterized everyone and what your end game was when you started it i.e: this character ends up like this; the story ends here because; have to bring up and resolve this issue, etc.

There’s no real cure that I know of other than to reread your own story and hope the inspiration that came from writing it in the first place comes back.

And that can be a huge pain in the ass when the story is long…

Mine wasn’t so bad, but the word count from chapters 1 to 23 was about 101K so that was a lot of reading to do, and since it was something I wrote I tended to jump over things I shouldn’t have.

Fortunately it gave me a chance to do edits and re-familiarize myself with the story I had left behind.
Unfortunately it made me forget how much time had passed since the readers had seen the story.

I mentioned a conflict that happened two chapters before the recent update.

Not so bad.

The lapse between updates was almost a year.

Now it’s bad.

I knew that with chaptered stories, updates could be irregular, so I always added a “recap” section at the beginning of each chapter.

Sadly I forgot that my “recap” always involved what occurred in the previous chapter and not before, and frankly it wasn’t very descriptive.

Word to the wise: When writing chaptered stories, keep reminders up where necessary. Not enough to be repetitive, just enough to give readers (and yourself) an understanding that the information you’ll mention isn’t new.

Any tips of your own from bouncing back from hiatus and carrying on a story? How does it feel as a reader to carry on a story that hasn’t been updated in awhile?