I’ve written quite a bit on Episode, and recently I’ve been thinking about what I taught me as person and as writer.
It taught me to not give up easily, if I didn’t get something right I worked until it was right.
It taught me how important a plot actually is, in my first story I just focused on the visual part and forgot about an actual story basically.
So what are some things you guys have learned from it?
Definitely show and not tell. This is something I taught my students in 7th grade literature back in 2014, but never really practiced before writing on Episode.
It also taught me to be creative with limited resources, before there were so many outfits in LL, and before there were so many background and overlay creators.
Writing on episode… I didn’t do much writing on episode however I learned a lot from reading stories. It taught me a lot about ways to make things funny in writing.
The actual writing aspect taught me how much work goes into things and to have patience with yourself. On Episode you really have to have what you want in mind when coding. I’m a pantser so this was hard for me and one of the reasons I don’t write on episode but wish I did. In actual writing books even though I have trouble expressing the scene visually I don’t have to worry about getting it just right. On the patience aspect, I learned partly through episode that you’re not always going to want to write. So sometimes you have to be patient with yourself and wait until you have more ideas instead of just jumping into it. So many bad works/unfinished works I got from just jumping into it without taking time to think about the characters.
I don’t plot the story or anything, it’s usually all in my head. If I’m going to forget something I write it down but usually I don’t. But it’s important for me to think about the characters and the story a few days or even a few weeks before I start to write the first draft.
In some ways? It is super helpful. In other ways, definitely not.
When it comes to dialogue, it helps to improve writers a great deal. Episode writing is very dialogue-heavy, so when people can’t write good dialogue, it shows up a lot more than it does in conventional prosaic stories. It is much easier to tell that an Episode story has bad dialogue that a Wattpad story, for example, because the dialogue is all you get and you’re watching people move their mouths and effectively “say” the words. So you get a lot more people pointing out if your dialogue is awkward or flat, which means much more scope for change that you can carry over into other mediums.
However, I read some stories from Episode writers on Wattpad not many of them make the jump from Episode to conventional stories very well. They rely too much on that episodic structure without realising that chapters and episodes are not the same thing and should be handled slightly differently. They haven’t developed the ability to describe events, characters, places and actions without exposition dumps and bland “she had blonde hair and blue eyes and was an average height” descriptions. They’ve relied so much on images that they don’t know what to do when they have them other than bombard their stories with them until they basically become picture books. Plus, flashbacks tend to be handled quite badly because you don’t need the same level of build-up to handle a flashback well in an Episode story. You can just literally do a different transition to show it’s a flashback with a little bit of build up so people understand the context. In a conventional story, you have to choose whether you want a character to narrate the whole flashback or start another chapter and do it all in italics. Then you have to choose how to explain to the reader that it’s a flashback without pulling the out of the story.
Episode is somewhere in between a book and a tv show and people need to understand that. The skills you learn from writing on Episode aren’t going to be completely transferrable and that’s ok. You just gotta learn a few things here and there and not rely on your Episode knowledge to help you through.