Every writer has their own approach and will develop their own voice with practice. There used to be more rigid rules around writing fiction, but nowadays these have been completely abolished and you can write however you like. For example in French literature (and I think English as well) it used to be that plays were written in a certain rhyme structure. Since the 60s or so with the new movements in literature, they decided you can just do whatever you like. There’s stream of consciousness writing for example. I’m not saying all these methods are popular though, but they certainly exist and can be used, mixed and remixed 😁

In the late 19th century novels used to be published as serials in magazines, usually one chapter at a time. For most of human history fiction was a work of command, made after an order was placed. Therefore chapters used to fit a certain length set by the editor. Before that, artists worked for the aristocracy who would commission them periodically.

Nowadays you can do whatever you like, use or not use tropes, change narrators, make anyone or anything a narrator, there’s no strict rules to it.

There’s not one true way of looking at it. If you build it, people will come. As a designer I like asking myself “what am I writing here, what’s new, what am I bringing? Who am I writing for? What do I want to convey?” but you can also just write for yourself, the kind of stories you’d like to read yourself. They don’t always have to make it out of the drafts.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the use of the canvas (the page and the words). The role of the narrator, and what the narrator can and can’t be. I almost never write in the third person because to me the narrator has to exist so that they can relay the events. But maybe I’m getting into wiseposting shit and I don’t want to turn you away from writing lol.

You can also look at poetry for this. It used to be very strict in terms of rules (12 syllables to a line, AABB scheme or ABAB if you were feeling inspired, rich rhymes only – which in french are rhymes made over 3 sounds, because in French rhymes are stricter than in English where sound-alikes can rhyme). Then after the 50s and 60s, again, the writing revolution made it so that you can write poetry any way you like. You don’t have to follow any rules. They also started playing with the space on the page. Look at these two layouts of the same poem:

The spacing of the words is different, the case is different (e.g. all caps in the title for one), the position of the author’s name is different as well, making you naturally read it in a different cadence. “In a station of the metro by ezra pound the apparition of these faces” versus “In a station of the metro the apparition of these faces”.

One thing I can recommend, if you want to write stories, is to plan them out as much as possible. This is something most authors do, keeping notes etc. that don’t make it in the end product. They used to do that even more when novels were serialized, and would normally have the general gist of it written down, with the ‘details’ (the actual writing) done on the spot. This is something they taught us in school, which I absolutely hated back then (four times a year we had to pick a book, read through it, then make all those charts and lists like in that meme), but it’s definitely valuable for an author. You have to know at all times who’s who, who’s who to whom, what they did, how they act like, what’s gonna happen in the novel and why, etc.

My manner of writing is to have a general gist of what I want to write about, usually spurred on by a single idea, and then make it up as I go along so I surprise even myself with what I can come up for the story lol. It’ll depend on how you like to work, but definitely those charts and lists help provide some coherence to what you write and avoid the “actually Dumbledore is gay I just never wrote it in” retcon.