The temporal aspect of serials
My serial is two and a half years old
In last week’s Tales from the Triverse chapter I revisited a character from the prologue and continued her story. Due to writing my books in serial form, chapter-by-chapter, week-by-week, this takes on a peculiar and slightly magical resonance, at least for some readers.
If it was a normal book which readers were holding in their hands, they might have read that prologue a couple of days prior, or a week-or-two ago, depending on their reading speed. Reading in a serial form is a quite different experience, because that prologue chapter was published in September 2021 and it’s now June 2024.
Any form of serial gains an additional aspect, which is time. These stories play out along two timelines: the fictional timeline of the story, and the real world timeline of the readers (and writer).
Some readers of last week’s chapter won’t remember the prologue. Others may not have read it at all, having jumped on board at a later point in the story’s publication. It’ll still work fine for them, and be a satisfying, self-contained storyline. But for those readers who do remember, it’s not just a reference to something that happened at the start of the book. Instead, the serial is reaching back through time to an earlier version of that reader: September 2021 will trigger memories that have nothing to do with Tales from the Triverse, and everything to do with that reader’s life.
We rarely stay the same for long. The person I am today is slightly different to my 2021 self. That prologue I wrote back then is not the same prologue I would write today, if I were starting over. When you’re writing a serial, the chapters themselves become anchored in time, waypoints along the road for readers and writer.
In mid-2021, when I was working on that chapter, we were still in the thick of Covid-19. Lockdowns were a regular thing, as was wearing a facemask. The reality of that time is punctuated by plague, and it’s a reality that now seems very distant. I was on the cusp of changing jobs, moving from the National Centre for Writing to One Further. My son was 9, which feels like aeons away from the 11 he is now.
Point is, individual chapters of a serial become rooted in people’s real lives and histories, the story stretched out across timelines. A traditional book exists at a point in time, but it’s more of a singular moment. A serial is closer to watching a television show, except that tends to be more fragmented due to the production time of TV seasons — especially in the streaming era, where delivery of new episodes and seasons seems very arbitrary.
This sense of time also builds a slightly different kind of connection between the characters and the reader. When you’ve been spending time with characters and reading about them for months or even years, you’re attached in a very particular way that is slightly different to a book that can be consumed in a matter of days. There will come a time, probably this year, when I complete the Tales from the Triverse project, at which point there will be no new stories or adventures for these characters. The conclusion of any story has an element of mourning and grief to it: the knowledge that you can never go back to the same place, with even a re-read not being the same as the first time.
The final quirk of writing a serial is the endgame experience, after the project is finished and the story is told. Any readers that come along after that point have a fundamentally different experience to the readers who were there for the live serial. Someone buying a paperback collection of Triverse two years from now will read it as they might any other book, over a few days or weeks.
None of this is better or worse than any other form of storytelling; there’s no hierarchy or judgement in what I’m musing on today. But it’s absolutely a point of difference, one that I find endlessly fascinating as both a reader and a writer.
Thanks for reading.
Some fun Triverse stats at this point in time:
Total word count: 257,704
165 chapters across 36 collected stories and 14 bonus tales
Average chapter word count: 1,561
Longest chapter word count: 3,522
Pages if it were a paperback: 737
Time to read: 17 hours (sorry)
This newsletter recently tipped above the 4,000 subscriber mark, which is exciting and also very silly. What are you all doing? Is somebody blackmailing you? Blink twice if you need help. Seriously, though, I’m very grateful for everyone who has chosen to read my ramblings each week.
Some bits and bobs:
Today I listened to an episode of the Triple Takeover podcast, which is an incredibly nerdy show about all things Transformers. Specifically, this episode was a conversation with comics writer-illustrator Daniel Warren Johnson, who is currently writing Starbound’s Transfomers comic. A really interesting chat about comics storytelling and the limitations and opportunities of playing around in someone else’s backyard (ie, Hasbro’s).
Interesting editorial from Substack’s CEO
about the two types of internet content. Inevitably these are essentially long-form advertorials for Substack, but I find it hard to disagree with the central idea.Exciting to see
reveal new details of Citizen Sleeper 2 at the PC Gamer Show yesterday. They’ve been serialising story snippets during the game’s development via their newsletter, and the first game was an incredible bit of interactive storytelling.I got a new personal best at the parkrun on Saturday morning. This has absolutely nothing to do with writing or serial storytelling.
Right, see you all later in the week for more Triverse.
I’m serializing my novel currently. I started in March of this year. Hearing you talk about years of serializing is very inspiring because it is such a commitment to craft!
There is a temporal aspect to traditional books as well, but, yes, it's not the same as with a serial. To state the obvious, it's the difference between trickling out a chapter per week/month vs refining the entire thing for single release.
With a traditional book, of course, author growth during composition is subsumed during rewrites and editing, so the final volume has a unified voice...
But what about series?
Perhaps one of the best examples is JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth. He worked in that world for decades, and, thanks to Christopher Tolkien publishing all his father's notes and rough drafts one can (and I did, back in the day) very clearly trace how Tolkien's style, views, and plots evolved over the decades.
Arthur C. Clarke published the long out-of-print "The Lost Worlds of 2001," which mixes non-fiction essays on how he and Kubrick developed and refined the plot and themes based on the evolving politics and social mores of the mid 1960's, along with incorporating new science. His author's notes for 2001, 2010, 2069, and 3001 all discuss how advances in science and sociology affected the themes of the series to the point where even Clarke didn't consider the later volumes linear sequels to the original. Also, by 3001, Clarke could ALMOST write compelling characters...
What? Clarke was brilliant at science, plot, theme, and "big ideas," but he was weak at character development.
Closer to home for me is Jasper Fforde's "Shades of Grey," and its sequel, "Red Side Story." I attended the Fforde Ffiesta in May, which was largely a celebration of the release of RSS (Jasper stayed at the event hotel after the event ended rather than return home, as the next day he flew out of Heathrow for his US tour, and Swindon is closer to London than his home in Wales). At the Ffiesta Jasper talked about the how the past decade affected writing RSS - both in the evolution of Jasper's views on the themes (Jasper has always preached acceptance and a progressive/inclusive philosophy, but, post-Brexit the themes are much more front and center rather than simmering behind story and jokes), and his writing style. He stated if he revisited SoG today he'd cut 20k words of "needless exposition." As a writer, Jasper's moved away from more overt detail and let things be implied. As an example, in "The Constant Rabbit," on character is in a wheelchair. There's one reference to a car accident at the beginning of the book, one reference a third of the way in to that character's bedroom being on the ground floor, and one reference over halfway through the book about having trouble getting her wheels over the threshold. From these three references the reader can infer there was a car accident which made that character paraplegic. One can also infer the accident killed her mother, since the mother is no longer with us. But there's no paragraph of, "Things hadn't been the same since the accident..." Jasper himself noted a decade ago there would have been an expository scene.
Point being, the temporal aspects of writing do apply to completed works - novels and movies - over serialized works - TV shows and, well, serials - but the effect is less apparent to the audience as the audience gets big chunks, not dribbles.
Hell, look at Dickens or Dumas. All their works were serialized. It's just now one can read all 4000+ pages of the D'artagnin cycle in one huge volume at speed rather than over decades!