Story Story Structure Suggestions?

[KiKi Kitsune]

Hey all!

I am in the process of writing a little fiction story. I'm basing it around the concept of the Hanahaki Disease.
(Basically, it's fictional illness where the patient throws up and coughs flower petals when they suffer from one sided love)

So I've got all these "couples" planned out. The seven pairs of people each have their own stories showing how they deal with the disease. I intend for all the people to link together in some way. For example, a few of them will be students in the same uni. One works at the shop across from another. Small stuff like that to show that they are all in the same universe.

To cut the boring details, I'm having difficulty deciding how to structure the story. I was originally going to do a single chapter per pair, but my writing tends to ramble too much to do something like that.
The few other ways of structuring it that I've thought about are as follows:

• The chapters rotate between the pairs evenly. (A, B, C, A, B, C, etc)
• Finish one pair before moving onto the next one (A, A, A, B, B, B, etc)
• Since it's just going to be on the internet, make separate stories for each one.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on the matter. If you have other suggestions, please feel welcome to share them!

 

[Blemmigan]

It probably depends on how many pairs there are. You could possibly have the alternate option of interweaving stories, dropping off one and picking up another using certain places, dates or events as a common point. With this and the rotation though, you'd need ways to clearly define which story is happening.
I would say that... unless they're done in sequence (or in separate stories), they should probably finish at around the same time, which means either carefully matching the number of chapters/story length, or mixing it up a little (so rather than ABCABC, more like ABCABA etc) depending on which stories have more depth to them in certain places.

Depending on how they link together, you may be able to get away with trying it one way (rotating/in blocks) and then changing it around if you don't like how it's turning out, with minimal editing. Linking the stories together around various common themes and switching that way might be more difficult to move away from if you change your mind.

 

[Hall Kervean]

I'd introduce A B C D E F and G before going into depth about A B and C. Link them up, then make them, at various points, meet up with D E F and G. Intertwine A B and C's introductions to D E F and G, have conflict between, say, B and G when meeting. Something along those lines.
That's how I would do it, anyway. Introduce everyone so you won't have to deal with "a man said to a woman..." more than a few times, and you can introduce everyone as "bob, bobette, john, johnette" etc.

 

[Seldil]

Although I don’t know if it would fit your plot a lot of "out of order" stories, pulp fiction, cloud atlas, ect. will follow a sort of ABCDDCBA type structure.