As another year draws to a conclusion, I reflect on my use of installments to publish stories on the Station. I recently took the time to weigh the good and the bad—the advantages and disadvantages of using such a method. At the time I started to publish longer, more involved stories on the Station, doing so in installments seemed like the best idea. Now, it seems like it is adequate at best.
Installments in literature are parts of a larger work published in separate pieces. This includes separate publications, such as book series and trilogies, or serialized writing published in magazines. For the sake of this discussion, I am going to focus on serialized writing posted by chapter rather than book series, which I have no experience with.
The subject matter overlaps a little bit with Rambling 5, Passion Project, where I briefly mention my use of installments in my writing. However, I want to take the time to dive deeper on the subject and my experience with it. It is a long overdue reflection on my part, after over two and a half years of employing the method.
I will go against convention and start first with the disadvantages I have found, particularly when paired with my writing technique. I am a non-linear writer. I don’t write from start to finish. I may kick off a story, then stop where I am and jump ahead if an idea springs into mind. After exploring it a bit, maybe even polishing some of the writing, I go back to the point in the story I was working on. I do this with all forms of writing, even posts like these.
Essentially, non-linear writing jumps around as it is written. Which is fine, if it gets the work done, and there are advantages to this method of writing. However, it is a bit tricky to do when you are writing installments, particularly one chapter at a time rather than one book at a time. This is because installments must be published linearly to make any sense. If you were to jump ahead, that is work you cannot show immediately. If you were to work elsewhere, it adds more pressure to finish the writing for that week, as there is typically a schedule a writer must meet. In my case, my schedule is self-enforced. Because I essentially have no discernable following, I could reasonably take a week off and not post anything; as much love as I give it, the Eighteenth Station is a side project that takes lower priority over what provides me income. But if I want to treat this project as the long-term opportunity it is, I guarantee that rationale will only harm me as a writer when it is time to take the next step. Taking a spontaneous break will not fly with a publisher. Holding myself to those standards, I would even consider the practice of posting what I have and finishing the post later, as I often do nowadays, to be as bad as taking a week off. So I continue to bash myself each time it happens, even if that harsh criticism discourages me.
To bring it back, non-linear writing has an inconsistent workload if you are writing in installments. If you jump somewhere else, maybe even jump backwards to revise an earlier chapter, given the ability to with online publishing, you still need to finish the writing due for that week, increasing the work. Whereas, once you reach the point at which you did that extra work, the workload is less for that week. That is a tradeoff some may prefer to take, but since this reflection is focused on me, someone who prefers consistency, that is a disadvantage until I learn to embrace it. In reality, most writers do not stick strictly to one method and employ a bit of both, thus the tradeoff is not as entirely black and white. I find myself writing non-linearly for the majority of the time, however. I would reckon it is a seventy-to-thirty percent split of my time.
The second disadvantage is the rigidity of its structure, particularly if I want to go back and revise. What if, down the line, I decide I wanted to merge two chapters? Or add a chapter? Even moving around parts from one chapter to another has extra headroom. These are, of course, issues only because of my particular implementation of installments, interweaving them with the weekly writings I do on the Station. If I wanted to add a chapter in between two that were already written, I cannot create a new month of posts in between those two weeks. Or shove the possibly dozens of stations that were released after that timeframe ahead by four weeks. I could just add in the chapter parts as the newest posts on the Station, and then curate them to the proper order on the story cover page, but that is not ideal. This would not be an issue if the posts were not tied to weekly posts that cannot move. If each installment was a standalone page with one cover page linking to all of them, it would be easier to edit and add in new chapters anywhere.
Leaving my experience for a moment, I can imagine installments published in magazines would experience a similar disadvantage. Publishing a story one part of a chapter at a time means the writer is pushing out the plot of the story very frequently, giving them little time to think about what they are pushing out compared to, say, publishing one book at a time. Depending on how involved the story is, this frantic schedule could lead to errors, inconsistencies, underdeveloped characters, and general confusion about the story’s direction. The workaround is careful planning and writing far ahead of the release schedule, though not all writers have that luxury. Very few can earn a living off of publishing alone, and are often pressed for time. The other solution is to write the best you can to make ends meet and, if the story is popular enough, compile all the chapters into an anthology later. Anthologies are a great chance to reorganize and polish up. The writing is all there, so most of the effort can be focused towards refinement, which I have found to be a completely different mode of thinking.
(in progress)