If Louisa May Alcott is the queen of the slice-of-life longfic, Jane Austen is the absolute pioneer of the enemies-to-lovers slowburn, social satire, and high-society fake dating.

Let’s be real: Austen invented the modern romantic comedy dynamic. She wrote about small, claustrophobic social circles where everyone is constantly up in everyone else's business, financial stability dictates life choices, and miscommunication is a literal lethal weapon. If she were posting on AO3 today, her comment sections would be an absolute war zone of people screaming about her subtext.

Here is how to structure your fic, build your plot, and sharp-en your dialogue like the ultimate Regency master.

1. Structure: The Social Symphony & The Symmetry of Error

Austen's macro-arcs (Pride and Prejudice, Emma) don't rely on external physical threats. Her structures are built entirely on shifting social status and cognitive bias.

The Three-Act Misunderstanding: Austen structures her novels around an initial false impression (Act 1), a series of events that seemingly confirm that false impression while raising the stakes (Act 2), and a cataclysmic revelation that forces the protagonist to look in the mirror and realize they completely misread the entire situation (Act 3).

The Chaperoned Sandbox: Her narratives are structured strictly around social limitations. Characters are rarely left entirely alone; their interactions are constrained by dances, dinners, and family walks. This structural limitation is your best friend—it forces you to build tension through what isn't being said out loud.

2. Plotting: The Catalyst of Outside Intervention

Austen’s plots are masterclasses in Intrusive Dynamics. Her characters start in a state of stagnant equilibrium that is suddenly shattered.

The Disruption Principle: "A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Translation for fanfic writers: Drop a new, high-status character (or a sudden change in circumstances) into a closed setting and watch the existing social ecosystem panic.

Free Indirect Discourse (The Ultimate POV Trick): Austen famously uses third-person narrative but colors the prose with the specific biases, voice, and blindness of the point-of-view character. When you plot an Austen-style fic, the reader should only know as much as the POV character's pride or prejudice allows them to see, making the eventual twist incredibly satisfying.

3. Characterization: The Mask vs. The Vulnerability

How does Austen make characters feel deeply psychological without modern internal monologues? She balances social performance against private reality.

Weaponized Wit and Irony: Austen's characters use humor and politeness as armor. A character who is constantly making sarcastic jokes or playing the perfect host is usually hiding a massive insecurity, a lack of agency, or a broken heart.

The Unreliable Narrator of Hearts: Her characters excel at intellectualizing their emotions to avoid vulnerability. Emma convinces herself she’s just being a good matchmaker because admitting her own feelings is too terrifying. Darcy acts aloof because he is socially awkward and trying to protect his pride.

The Austen Method: An Andromeda Black-Centric Example

Not a weird question at all lovey!! 🫶🏻

So if I understand your question correctly, you want to know how to make an AO3 link for each chapter of a multichapter that takes someone directly TO that chapter, rather than the start of the fic, while maintaining the format? I will show you how I do it, with screenshots (ooo, screenshots).

Let's say I wanted to post the latest chapter (chapter 8) of We Could Stay Like This Forever, and do it with the AO3 share tool. First, I would go to the fic on AO3 (it doesn't matter which chapter) and click the "Share" button, then "Share to Tumblr":

This will pop up the text box with code, from which I click the bottom option for Tumblr:

This pops up the AO3-formatted link on your Tumblr post editor:

If you posted it now, it would take you to chapter 1. But I'm trying to post chapter 8, so what you do is mouse over the top right corner until you see the red (x). Click on this:

Hey presto, it deletes the existing link text, leaving a place for you to input a new one, while retaining the rest of the format:

Now go back to AO3 (it should have automatically stayed in a separate browser tab when you launched the share tool) and copy-paste the link for your chapter from the top URL bar:

Go back to Tumblr and post this in the empty link bar instead. It will now look like this:

But because that's not how you really want it to look, you can now edit the text! Select "Show Chapter | Archive Of Our Own" and delete, whereupon it will prompt you to add a new title:

Whereupon I do that:

I also like to fix formatting/capitalization, bold the categories, indent the fic information, etc. Now my post looks like this:

Now I can add tags and post. Ta-da!

Side note: isn't it wild that there's just tutorials online about how to do stuff like that for free? For funsies?

Is the formatting on my fics okay for you? Could it be improved?

I write and post solely from my phone so I’m not sure how it translates to desktop.

Hey, all you fic writers who love ao3 but hate formatting fic to post on ao3, I have a website for you!

html-cleaner .com is a handy website that converts rich text into html for you, so you don’t have to painstakingly put in all your </p> paragraph breaks yourself!

This is what I’ve used to format my fics for ao3 for the past while. I just copy and paste a chapter into the box on the left, and then copy the html output from the box on the right, and put that whole thing into the html option for posting on ao3.

My working document goes from this:

to all of this formatting done for me:

and it comes out looking like this when it’s published to ao3:

The only thing that gets a little funky sometimes is scene breaks - I like to add a separating line in the html cleaner website and sometimes the spacing of that can go a little funky, but that’s the only thing that I have to go through and extra check before posting, instead of all the breaks or all the italics.

On Desktop:

Open a text post, and you will see this:

Click where it says “Your text here” and you will see this:

The camera icon allows you to add a photo from your computer’s files. The movie icon allows you to add a video file from your computer’s files. The GIF icon allows you to search Tumblr for a gif and add it to your post. The last icon on the right inserts the Keep Reading cut. Click it, and you will see this:

Success! You now have a Keep Reading cut in your post!

On the app:

When you are on your phone, the menu shown above does not appear. To add a Keep Reading cut when you are posting using the app, simply type in “[-[MORE]-]” (without the dashes) on a blank line in your post. (Side note, this will also work on desktop, apparently! If you go back on desktop to edit this, though, it gets pretty screwy, so it’s not recommended.) When you are creating your post, it should look like this:

After you hit Post, it will look like this:

Success! Your post now has a Keep Reading cut!

When should I use a Keep Reading cut? How far down should a Keep Reading cut go?