Regarding the monolith

Turn something big into something small

In chapter 3 of How to Write Serialised Fiction I go into the mental shift from writing a novel to writing a chapter, and how serialisation itself can solve productivity issues.

“Unlearn what you have learned.” Yoda

The thing about mountains is that they’re big. Really big. So big that when you stand at the bottom it’s sometimes hard to see the top because clouds get in the way. The only way to climb a mountain is to get started and keep going until you make it up. Each step is small, to the point of being inconsequential. And while that one step was easy, it also barely registers on your journey towards the mountain peak. You may as well not bother, right?

String a lot of those tiny, almost pointless, easy steps together and you’ll be a mountain climber. To climb Mount Everest apparently takes over 26,000 steps, which sounds impossible but people have done it. Fortunately we’re writers and this is only a metaphor, but you hopefully are already sensing my point.

Any major project will seem daunting when regarded as a whole. It might even seem impossible. People will tell you it’s impossible, and that you shouldn’t even try. Many things are impossible, right up until they’re not: landing on the moon, climbing El Capitan without ropes, running the five minute mile, powered flight. NASA didn’t get astronauts to the moon by simply loading a person into a cannon and adding as much explosive as possible. They broke the concept down into smaller, more manageable components, working on each problem one at a time as they crept towards the end goal. Landing a man on the moon was clearly impossible, but designing a spacesuit was doable. Making more powerful rockets was doable. Figuring out how to use parachutes to land a capsule back on Earth was doable. Each solution in isolation didn’t get anyone anywhere near the moon, but combine them together several years down the line and suddenly the impossible is possible.

Writing a novel is the writer’s equivalent of touching down on the lunar surface, or planting a flag on Everest.

I used to break down the creation of a novel into two primary chunks of activity: write the first draft, then redraft as many times as necessary. The difficulty is that this still presents The Novel as a monolithic entity: an enormous slice of impossibility. Acknowledging the need for multiple drafts makes the whole enterprise seem even harder. It’s not really possible for most people to hold an entire novel in their heads, conceptually. The next step is to reduce the book to chapters, given that a single chapter is relatively easy to put together and you can visualise it clearly from start to finish. This is enough for many writers, with each chapter being a manageable chunk on the road towards having a finished novel.

The problem I’ve always had is that this still relies on self-belief and the conviction that the project is worthwhile. It will likely take months, possibly years, to write the book and there are many temptations along the way. Progress is made, and the word count grows, but still nobody has read any of it. By the end of a first draft we’re tired and our creative spirit has been depleted - but now you have to go back and edit the entire book, from the start. All the while being pulled away by the siren call of fresher, shinier projects and ideas.

I’ll just start on the next project, we think. It’ll give me a creative break and refresh my mind, before I come back to do the editing.

You never go back.

Writers traditionally operate in a void. It’s a largely solitary pursuit, until the point at which you deem a project to be complete. Then it will be gradually unlocked, first for agents, editors, designers, and then the general reading public. A consequence of this is that a novel remains solely with the writer for its entire period of creation. It remains on your hard drive, or on your desk, or in a drawer, until you let it out. This suits some people, but for me it creates a creeping sense of dread. What if it’s no good? What if I’m wasting my time? And as long as the manuscript is hidden away in my office, where nobody can see it, it also makes it very easy for me to walk away from - after all, nobody will ever know that I gave up on it.

I stumbled upon a solution to this when I started experimenting with serialisation.

There are different ways of approaching serialisation, but the core idea shifts the definition of a ‘completed project’ from being the entire, finished novel to individual chapters. When a story is being published in serialised form, each released part can be considered ‘complete’. This fundamentally shifts the mental load from I have to finish writing this entire book to the far less intimidating I have to finish this chapter. The moments of achievement and success come far more frequently, creating a feedback loop that keeps the project feeling fresh.

String together enough of these mini successes, chapter-by-chapter, and a book will emerge. The monolithic book is no longer the primary goal, off-putting in its immensity, but an inevitable consequence of committing to serialised writing and publishing.

To take the extreme example of my fantasy novel The Mechanical Crown, which I serialised over the course of about three years: this is a 250,000 word epic story that I would have struggled to write in a more traditional manner. Stuck in the void of the author, I’d have lost courage or concentration. Instead I kept at it, week-by-week, with each chapter being a victory. I was writing it in public, so readers were accumulating around me as I was writing. Some of them were there from the beginning, reading the book over the course of its three year serialisation.

My approach is the most intense form of serialisation, where I write and publish a new chapter every week. It’s very seat-of-your-pants. It’s not for everyone. As such, next I’ll be looking at some of the different variants of serialisation.

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Tales from the Triverse is proving to be enormous fun to write. I hope you’re enjoying reading it as well. If you haven’t checked it out you can jump onto the first chapter here:

Prologue: Two Hundred Years Earlier

Thanks,

SKJ