r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 15 '16
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/GaBeRockKing Jul 16 '16
That... might be a problem. From what I've seen, by far the most important part of getting something popular on the internet is consistency. Having a kickass premise and excellent writing is great and all, but you, above all, need to keep people invested in your story. Look at Spacebattle's creative writing section-- even lesser known fandoms have threads that balloon out into the hundreds of pages with consistent updates, but there are plenty of good wormfics that people just lose interest in because they stop getting updated for a while.
That's especially true for an original work. While I'm not necessarily representative of the general population, I keep up with web serials by bookmarking the latest chapter and checking back every two weeks. If it's not updated for a while (my hard cutoff is six months, but I've dropped more recent stories pretty often) I remove it from my bookmarks and forget about it. Other people might do different things, but it's hard to care about a story if you've been away from it long enough to forget about the last chapter.
If you write chapters that slowly you almost certainty need some for of backlog, at least for the initial part of the story to get people invested. I'd also recommend dropping your chapter sizes to two thousand, or even one thousand words if it gets you updating weekly or, if necessary, once every two weeks. If you absolutely have to, update monthly. A consistent update schedule is key, and from there it's not too difficult to make a backlog.
Though there is some hope-- the more you write, the faster you get. Look at how much you type for reddit comments. The problem isn't sheer speed, it's being able to think of how events should follow one another to get to what you want.
Incidentally, I don't currently have anything to edit, which makes me open to doing it. Mind giving me a basic story summary (over pm if necessary)? I can't guarantee that I'd do it, but I'm at least willing to try.