Content warnings & age ratings

Figuring out where to pitch your stories

There’s been a lot of interesting chatter on Fiction Substack in the last week.

Elle Griffin

posed an interesting question:

Do you actually read serial novels online?

It’s a partial response to my own thoughts about writing long-running serials and the challenges of bringing in new readers once you’re past chapter 20. A comment from

Geoffrey Golden

blew the doors off my brain with the obvious-in-hindsight suggestion to remove chapter numbers from the titles.

My most recent chapter was called ‘#69 The Escapists: Part 2’, which is not only a bit messy but also emphasises to a new reader that they have nearly 70 chapters to catch up on. Triverse is being written partly as an anthology - hence Tales from the Triverse. My latest experiment, then, is going to be removing all chapter numbering from the book. That way each storyline stands on its own as a contained chunk of story. Hence the current chapter becomes simply ‘The Escapists: Part 2’, which doesn’t sound nearly as intimidating.

Triverse still has its on-running meta plot, of course, which requires a bit more dedication. But that’s much like a TV show (or, at least, pre-streaming TV shows), in which you’d have standalone eps as well as main arc eps. Some viewers would watch the whole thing, others would dip in and out.

It’s a simple change but I’m pretty excited about it.

---

Right, today I’m musing on the slightly foggy concept of age suitability. I have a 10 year old son, so this is frequently a subject of discussion in the house, especially around movies and games. In the UK was have a pretty decent ratings system that for the most part is useful for parents to make their own judgements, but it doesn’t always work.

U and PG certificates are all good, for example, while 18s are obviously off limits for now. 15 certificates are also off-limits, but we’ve recently discovered that some anime is rated 15 despite not seeming to be any more intense than your typical Marvel movie. Which brings me to the all-encompassing cop-out age rating of 12. The 12 certificate in the UK is a big catch-all shrug from the BBFC and seems to be what almost all TV and film aims for these days. It takes in a huge range of styles, tones and content and watching a 12 can be a real lottery - hence we tend to watch 12s first to assess, before then showing them to the 10 year old.

Weirdly, books don’t really have an equivalent system. There are obvious books for very young kids, and obvious YA-and-older books, but there’s a huge grey area in-between, for both prose and comics. I know there’s a school of thought that age ratings restrict creativity and expression (hence all movies aiming for the 12, regardless of whether that suits the story), but as a parent it’s certainly a useful guide. The introduction of decent age ratings for games has actually helped with creative output, I’d say, neutering the rabid tabloid rantings about dangerous games and allowing a wider range of material in the form.

Which brings me to my own writing, and how to present that. Which is where I’m never entirely sure where to land.