Bah, my horrendously terrible internet connection ate my response.
One reason I've started looking at comics rather than TV for structure purposes is because comics splits into much smaller pieces in order to tell a complete story, and it's easier to plot in five or six parts than it is for twelve to twenty-four, like TV usually goes. Plus, comics do something really interesting in that it's a serial, which is initially released as a serial, but ends up being collected as a whole without the break points included in the trades. So even though I own the trade paperbacks (and the omnibuses, in a couple of cases), I went back and ahem-ahem'd the individual issues just so I could see how they had originally been split up. John Jackson Miller, who wrote my favorite Star Wars title, does trivia and author's notes for every issue, and he said something that I think of a lot as someone who writes and posts WIPs:
I think many comics creators find that third issues of six present some unique storytelling challenges. They are often spent in transit, getting all the pieces in place for the revelations to come in the second half -- and given their position in the events of the story, they aren't as amenable to true cliffhangers. (Having seen a lot of "false cliffhangers" in third issues, I try to either end on something real or on a joke -- here, we did both.)
In collected format, the role of third chapters changes completely, fitting in much more organically. That poses, in fact, a temptation comics creators actively have to resist -- it'd be easy to tell a 132-page story and just chop it up into comics-sized chunks without mind to where things are breaking in the serial. As a comics guy, I do work to make the story play "both ways" -- Episode V was a completed thought despite leaving almost every big issue "To Be Continued" -- but it's not always desireable to give every chapter exactly equal amounts of action, revelations, etc.
So that's something I think about a lot while structuring and writing, because I know there are a lot of people in fandom who don't read WIPs but since I'm writing it as a WIP/serial...
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Date: 2014-03-18 10:20 pm (UTC)One reason I've started looking at comics rather than TV for structure purposes is because comics splits into much smaller pieces in order to tell a complete story, and it's easier to plot in five or six parts than it is for twelve to twenty-four, like TV usually goes. Plus, comics do something really interesting in that it's a serial, which is initially released as a serial, but ends up being collected as a whole without the break points included in the trades. So even though I own the trade paperbacks (and the omnibuses, in a couple of cases), I went back and ahem-ahem'd the individual issues just so I could see how they had originally been split up. John Jackson Miller, who wrote my favorite Star Wars title, does trivia and author's notes for every issue, and he said something that I think of a lot as someone who writes and posts WIPs:
So that's something I think about a lot while structuring and writing, because I know there are a lot of people in fandom who don't read WIPs but since I'm writing it as a WIP/serial...