Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Priya Iyer's avatar

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!

Expand full comment
Mike Miller's avatar

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!

Expand full comment
12 more comments...

No posts