#thank you for giving me an excuse to explain the entire batshit structure of this fic i probably won't even be able to post

[thegeminisage]

pls talk about structure. we love structure in this household. what's your favourite? - bma (also hi dunno if u remember me)

BESTIE OF COURSE I REMEMBER YOU <3 sorry it took me so long to answer you, i had a lllllong day yesterday. this is such a long rambling ask i don't even know if it's what you wanted to know and you are not at ALL obligated to read the whole thing lol but here we go!!!

i actually remembered you asked me a semi-related question one time before which is here and at the time i was thinking of structure as in, like, Acts. acts of the story. and my answer was that i basically don't think about it too hard it usually organizes itself in the outline process. which is still semi true but what i referred to in THIS post (the one that prompted ur ask) which i am so excited about is the Layout Of The Scenes re: whose pov they are from and in what time period they are taking place, especially when you depart from sticking to the close third with one character for the entire fic. which is like BUBBLE BATH LAUGHING WOMAN.mp4!!!!!!!! i don't know if that's the kind of structure you get excited about but i am excited about it

what i mean by that is like. ok so like in anchor my structure was "alternating viewpoints," right, between the two guys i am writing the fic about. EVERY time the scene swapped i swapped povs between character a and character b. i was very very strict about this and even casually kept an eye on my scene length to try and give them the same amount of pov time. (who says you can't have two protagonists!!!) that worked out to both my benefit and detriment near the end of the story when i needed two big things to happen in a row where both scenes needed to be from character b's pov. i struggled with a long time on what to do about it and then figured out a way to slip a breather between them from character a's pov, and then it wound up that the story was actually better that way - not only did we need to calm down from the last thing before we built suspense for the next thing, but it allowed for some character a perspective for the previous scene, in which he was unable to really speak or act to tell us how he felt/what he thought because he was drugged. the structure in anchor was also fun because i got to plan out versions of a specific story that character b, an unreliable narrator, told (both to us and to himself), and in each chapter i had the goal of making the story just a little bit closer to the true version. i have a really good time doing gradual escalation like that (more on that in a minute).

so i really liked that alternating a/b/a/b/a/b etc structure, but it is hard to pull off! i don't know if i could have done it if the fic didn't have those guys be so incredibly isolated for most of the runtime. another structure i did that i really liked was for enter night, which was nonlinear but (for the most part) contained. this DOES involve acts - there were 3 "sections" to this fic. there was 1. everything that happened before sam and dean left bobby's house to protect the seals 2. the actual seal-protecting and then 3. the finale where meg enacted her grand plan. so while the chapters individually had everything happen out of order, we for the most part did not tend to put anything from one "act" in the section of another, except in places where you might put a dramatic flashback or flashforward anyways. (the prologue actually took place near the end of the fic, and near the end there is a flashback to something that happened at the beginning.)

and speaking on gradual escalation i also really enjoyed doing that in how arthur got his groove back. initially i really wanted to do an a/b structure for this one as well but it wasn't working because i didn't WANT to place equal importance on both characters (you will notice there is only One Guy with his name in the goddamn title and it is the one i am unfairly obsessed with). so i threw that out and instead adopted a system where with each chapter, the events of the plot would force arthur peel back one layer of anti-magic bias until he got to the heart of the problem (daddy issues with a side of existential crisis). i got to do other fun stuff in the spaces between that, but each chapter had a very precise goal, and i think the final product wound up being much tidier as a result (than, say, a fic like broken road, which i am proud of but which also had a much looser structure - the only thing that really gradually escalated there was how alarming dean's possession was becoming and it wasn't the Point of the story).

finally the structure i am working on RIGHT NOW for the undisclosed thing is something i am having fun with. instead of one structure for the entire story (it's too big!) i am having fun with a lot of little mini-structures. the story sort of has two halves, and three main pov characters. character a is actually the protagonist in this fandom, but i really also like character b and wanted her to have more screentime even though in this fandom she's usually someone who doesn't show up much, so i did the first chapter, the ENTIRE thing, from her pov. she and character a start the story in separate places, so i completely cut out her pov until they met one another, did an a/b structure for the first chapter they spent together, and then when they went their separate ways i have a character b scene at the start and end of every chapter, until the first half of the story ends.

meanwhile character c gets only TWO pov scenes in the first half of the story (one during her introduction, another during an event in which neither of the other two pov characters can logically be present) because in the first half of the story she is carrying a very big secret, and it's 1. hard to write around that from her own pov and 2. more immersive not to be able to get to know her in this time, since she is playing it all close to her chest. but later, in the second half of the story, after the secret's out, character a is...taken out of commission for awhile, and she gets ALL the pov scenes he might have had during that time, had he not been uh. unavailable. there is ALSO something of a verrry minor teeny tiny timeskip between the two halves, so in the second half of the story i am opening up the povs to include lots of the side characters, and at the start and/or end of every chapter i am using those scenes in a non-linear fashion to 1. explain what happened during the timeskip 2. solve a mystery about where an ancient-yet-advanced people disappeared to (are they dead, did they leave, not just what happened during the timeskip but what happened before the story even began).

to actually answer your question instead of rambling, i think i prefer that a/b structure and/or something nonlinear (never shall the twain meet, most likely, although i did get tempted to try for 12:46pm which is a deancas thing i will write eventually - part of why that's taking so long is that this kind of structuring is something i am struggling with). sorry for rambling so much! i hope at least some of it was a little interesting to you <3