Tune in next time, for...what exactly?

[Karn's Return]

How many of you out there have ever tried writing in an episodic fashion? I don't mean via script or screenplay, either, but just, episodes of things that happen in your worlds? Standalone chapters, I suppose they could be considered, but each one self-contained?


And for those who have and who continue to, how do you find your ideas for the next batch?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I do short stories linked to my wider worlds. Does that count?

 

[Karn's Return]

Not quite...


Think of it like episodes of cartoons, more like.

 

[AlexH]

I wrote a short story where the PoV is thirteen years old. I've started a follow-up where she's late-teens. And plan another, later in her life.

I've started a sequel to another short story, set a few years after the first. The people are different but live in the same house, and discover something the previous occupants left behind.

For another, I'm considering a prequel set a couple of years before.

I didn't think about ideas - they came to me so I thought I'd have a go at writing them. The third one I mentioned is a snippet of backstory in the original story.

Does that count? They seem further apart in time than what you're asking for.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Kind of did that for the Purple Demon serial on Kraxon (which you should definitely give a look, not least because it's free) and the Wandering Phoenix and Roaming Tiger episodes on Amazon/Smashwords. It's a stylistic imitation of Chinese classics, which often end a chapter with something like "Did Wu Song meet his end fighting the tiger? Read on, if you would know."

 

[Karn's Return]

Just a place for the thoughts of those who might have chosen this kind of approach to writing and see how they dealt with it themselves.

Episodes aren't quite like that, AlexH, not the way I'm thinking. Tooninoot episodes have been kept pretty well to flash fiction size-I think the largest episode I've put on only reached about 4k words, if that. I might be wrong about that and it might be only half the size.


There are indeed time differences, but not quite so dramatic. Think more like how most television shows go, except that it's in prose format, not script.