While this blog does offer some advice on the art of writing, it mostly addresses the challenges of book marketing and promotion for the self-published author. Recent posts have examined the nitty-gritty of promoting fiction on marketplaces such as Amazon.com.
Serialization is apparently in vogue now, though I haven't been following the trends that much, since by the time my own project is ready for release things could be completely different. That being said, this particular trend interests me for more than one reason, to the point where it seems worth commenting on here.
As I've mentioned, the book I'm working on is long and multithreaded, and to try to cram it into a typical 300-page genre format just wouldn't work for the material. You would think I could just break it into 2-3 shorter works, but for story reasons I don't think that would work very well. The primary reason is that the major characters don't come together until relatively late in the story. This is a no-no for formula fiction, but it's necessary for the story, and while there are mitigating elements such as tenuous connections earlier on, I accepted early on that this was simply a condition of the project.
It's also a condition that may make it impossible to get it traditionally published, but I've accepted that all along as well. Of course, there are longer works that make it in the market, and nothing's impossible. One of the reasons long books don't get published often is that paper is expensive and a thousand-page book costs twice as much to produce as a 300-page book. That means it has to cost more, which supposedly limits the buying audience. I assume publishers know their business, so I have no reason to doubt this being true.
Anyway, with ebooks it's obviously not a problem. I mean, on one hand I'm spending three times as long writing something I really can't charge any more for, but on the other hand, I don't mind as long as I like the end result (and ideally someone else does too). It's kind of like grinding through a two-year degree in writing fiction, minus the tuition and guidance. Regardless, here we are.
I've always intended this book to be the first in a series, though if no one likes the first one there'll be no point in continuing the line. But it's a bit of a chunk to digest at once. Cutting it in half or thirds is problematic: for the reasons above, I worry that the shorter books wouldn't be complete stories and would thus leave readers confused and/or pissed off. So I started looking at serialization as a medium for breaking up the page count wherein chunks that weren't complete stories could possibly be acceptable.
In reading some serials myself, I've noticed that most seem to not work that way. That is, each serial installment is a complete story, though later installments will tend to follow the same characters or at least the same setting and premise. The well-known Wool is a good example, without getting into any spoiler detail. I've noticed the same pattern in a number of books sold as novels that really are not, notably the Night Watch series. Each of those books contains three interrelated (or at least related) short story/novella-length stories.
And while I love all the stories mentioned above--Wool included--to be honest, I don't really like the format.
Like a lot of hardcore genre readers, I have the patience for long works. I've mentioned before that I like to stick with a story world and its characters for a long time. So breaking things up into little stories is kind of...well, off-putting for me. On the other hand, for the writer and publisher it's loaded with benefits. The story arcs are clear and well-defined: self-contained. They make it possible to sell a piece at a time, or compile several of them and sell them together. Being on that side of the fence now, I'm faced with a dilemma...or rather, I was at the beginning; it's far too late now. The dilemma: do it the way I want to, and that I think the material calls for? Or design the project as a series of smaller chunks that would make my life easier?
Well, the answer there was obvious. I decided to bite the bullet and go the route of the protracted arc. Taking the short-arc route would mean choosing a completely different project, and I knew what project I wanted to do. If I wasn't writing the book I wanted to be writing, it would just be a job, and since the odds are against me getting paid for it in either case, I decided to heap on the risk. Maybe next time I'll go the other route. It really depends on the material.
I'm hoping, though, that serialization proves to be the solution. Serial installments are different from separate books in a series because they are thought of as a single work in parts. While I haven't come across any myself, I'm told that there really are works out there that are long stories broken into serialized chunks rather than separate shorter stories that get bound into an omnibus at the end of the process.
So the question becomes, how self-contained do the segments need to be, before readers will get to the end of a segment and find themselves feeling unsatisfied?
Well, obviously I don't know the answer. But I've studied enough fiction theory lately to have a theory of my own. As with fractals, stories are built in layers that resemble each other at different scales. Wheels within wheels. To simplify down to the common three-stage model of beginning, middle and end, you can look at a book that "works" and see these stages at the paragraph, scene, chapter, subplot, part, book, and overall series levels. This is just the way it is (though sometimes three is five or more if you prefer to look at the middle in more detail). And it's certainly what works for drama, and what readers expect, mostly without consciously realizing it.
What does this mean for serializing a monolithic work? I'm thinking it means that the serial installments have to capitalize on the natural tendency (or really, author-contrived tendency, through massive work) of a longer work's part-level segments to have a certain amount of self-containment. If the parts of my book take the protagonist through the right amount of change, that could be enough to make not-totally-self-contained parts of a larger story work as serial installments.
There's another dynamic at work, though, which interestingly conflicts almost directly with the idea that it's desirable for smaller segments to be complete. I refer to the cliffhanger device, where the reader feels like things are coming to a head, then finds the tension being built up to a head, e.g. the hero apparently being killed, and then bam! a chapter or part break. Prolonging tension is key to a reader's enjoyment of a novel, and the cliffhanger is a major component of that. And yet, you can't both finish the story in a given segment and carry the tension over the border of that segment.
Let's look at chapters specifically rather than segments of various sizes in general. Obviously within a book, you can have some chapters which end in cliffhangers and others that serve to end a subplot/mini-arc. Generally this is how it's done in most books, and therefore you could say, of course it makes sense to have each serial installment end in resolution. On the other hand, I've found that the page-turningest page-turners seem to never resolve the tension until the very, very end, if even then. Some of the most avant-garde sci-fi seems to build things up to crazy levels and then just end, with a certain amount of tension relief (like popping a balloon rather than letting the air out more moderately) but without really explaining what happened. And I've found that, despite that being something of an annoyance, a lot of my favorite sci-fi has been like that.
So, does a serial installment absolutely have to end with the end of a smaller story, or not? I don't know. But my plan right now is this: I'm going to do my best to shape the elements of my story into discrete parts that will be enjoyable to begin, continue, and finish reading. But there will be cliffhangers after each one, because I believe in and enjoy that, and as a reader, it keeps me coming back for more. And the main threads of the larger story will be ongoing, with tenuous connections at best in the meantime, until they slam into each other in the penultimate or even ultimate installments. And all of that put together will be a book, which hopefully will be the first book in a series.
Because at the end of the book, there's a cliffhanger, too.
Or maybe I'll come to my senses and magically see another answer. Time will tell. Or you can, if you have one. Share your thoughts!
Published author Linda S. Clare blogs a series of writer’s tips tackling specific challenges that often arise during fiction writing. Recent posts address the art of revising text and building tension with dialogue.
I was doing something boringly mundane just now when I realized, Hey, if I have time to do this boringly mundane thing, I have time to write a blog entry for the first time in ages. And so I will.
I haven't slowed down on the blog because I've slowed down on the project. I've slowed down on the blog because I've been on a regular schedule of 4-8 hours a day of writing and it's pretty exhausting. Or that's what I've told myself. Really I've just gotten out of the habit of blogging.
One thing I've noticed is that the work is going much more slowly these days, but I'm pretty sure it's getting that much better. I haven't been very good at following one of the guidelines you're supposedly supposed to follow, namely, just bang out the first draft and clean it up later. Like with all other types of writing that I've done in large amounts, like email, documentation, and nonfiction, I've gotten into a habit of putting it out fairly clean on the first go, like what you'd probably call second-draft level. This is because I'm one of those grammar-fixated people who can't stand an improperly placed apostrophe (let alone a spelling error) and that attitude has crept into other aspects of writing like varying sentence structure through a paragraph and avoiding using the same word twice in a paragraph.
This is part of what slows me down, and there are other things, like life's distractions. I cultivated a habit early on which involved doing the bulk of the writing at Starbucks, and it's gotten me this far. But despite the fact that I keep my earplug headphones in and blasting for most of the time I'm there, distractions creep through. For example, I've been there often enough to know as many regulars there as I do in the rest of my day-to-day life. So they want to talk, and this isn't bad, because it's a social life, or something like it. It is what it is; and it's better to get the work done between distractions than not at all.
It's also better than trying to get it done at home, because with workmen prepping the house for sale at the pace of a pack of snails, a 5.5 lb. cat with no impulse control, and other people making noise and crawling all over me (the cat, not the people), it would be worse. In any case, this is the habit I built, and as I've covered before, habits are key. To change this one would require about a month of effort, and I don't really have another option for where to write in this town. The other coffee house has less roomy armchairs and their coffee actually tastes like coffee, which I hate, instead of chocolate, which I can tolerate in small amounts.
I've said before that I thought the book would take months longer to finish, and that's clearly the case. On the plus side, a few early alpha readers seem to have enjoyed it, and when I go back to read the parts of the draft that they read, I cringe from how badly written some of it was. So that must mean improvement is under way. Or is that under weigh? I think it's the latter.
This is not a typical genre novel, anyway, in several ways, notably in terms of its length. It's over a thousand pages so far, and will get longer before it gets any shorter. It follows the stories of three main characters, essentially different types of anti-hero, as events drive them together and in opposition to one another. I didn't want a two-dimensional or simplistically "evil" villain, so I chose this much more difficult approach instead. There are also a number approaching 100 other characters, maybe thirty of which have significant roles. Let's just say this book isn't designed to be filmed, although I suppose LOTR proves that anything can be.
Due to the length and complexity, I have often bitten my nails (figuratively) over a number of fears, including "is the damn book too long?" and "is this scenario (my term for a multi-scene or multi-chapter arc) too long for its purpose in the story?" and "is anyone going to be interested in this anyway?" I can't do any more than I'm already doing about the last one, but as for the length issues, I have put a great deal of thinking into the others, beyond just worrying, and here are some of my thoughts:
Clearly this book and its internal segments would be too long for traditional publishing, so if I choose to attempt that route, I know I'll end up with major cuts. That idea doesn't bother me philosophically, just practically, for the following reason: as a reader, I like long books if I like the material in the first place. While I don't like excessive detail in description or unnaturally protracted expository segments, I like to follow the characters through a lot of events and changes. And as a video game player (high-end RPG/action-adventure games like Skyrim and Metro: Last Light), I like long games with a lot of side quests and internal lore. So that's what I've been doing here: building a story world with a lot of features, notably many competing world views represented by characters and factions. And I'm setting the stage for a longer series, which means a lot of space that would otherwise be dedicated to story has to go to introduction and setup, plus the story has to be there.
The balance is hell to find, and I haven't, but I'll have to in the third draft. For now, I'm in what Jim Butcher has referred to as the GSW, or Great Swampy Middle, of my own writer's journey on this book: grimly focused on cranking out a second draft that I can be reasonably pleased with.
Another thing I've kept in mind while writing, as a possible solution to the length issue, is serialization. Initially the book had four parts, now five: natural breaks in the story, and (I haven't really analyzed it) but maybe even analagous to a five-act structure, which is more popular in older plays than in anything modern, where everything is either shoehorned into or labeled as three acts no matter what. What I've been thinking, though, is that serialization could work well as a way of breaking up the material into digestible chunks: to release each part, or perhaps two-part combo, as what amounts to as an episode. I've been planning a blog entry on this for a while, so I won't go into detail now, but it's something that's directed my organization of the material for a while now. If I don't end up doing it, it won't hurt anything to have the parts better organized.
Regardless, unlike more practiced authors of fiction, I won't be releasing any of it until the whole thing is complete. Although I will be looking for beta readers in a few months, and I plan to harass readers of this blog hard to volunteer.
Until then, back to the grind. And yes, the cat's still hungry for better food, yada yada. The premise of the blog still holds. But she's a survivor. She'll make it to the end.
Probably I will, too.
This collection of articles from community site Fantasy Faction tackles writing challenges specific to fantasy authors such as creating mythical languages and describing the geography of magical realms.
Utilizing a newspaper style design, this blog focuses on following and analyzing news in the world of self-publishing. Of particular interest may be its articles on maintaining an author presence on Amazon.com.
The science fiction and fantasy publisher reports on the results of their experimental removal of digital rights management protection from its e-books.
