Serials, Continued

The serial, with its attendant cliff-hanger ending, is as old as Sheherazade. You will recall the story of the sultan's bride, who told him a tale with a cliffhanger every night to keep him from chopping her head off in the morning. In the nineteenth century, and well up into the twentieth, magazines published serial fiction, paying the writers by the column inch (in case you ever wondered why the works of Dickens were so long).

When I was little, serial dramas were acted out on the radio, not only the housewives' soap operas but comic-book style stories for kids, Little Orphan Annie, Sky King, Tennessee Jed, or Jack Armstrong (the All-American Boy). The episodes were fifteen minutes long. Can you imagine? Nowadays it takes fifteen minutes for a TV show to get through the commercials. We would sit transfixed in the big chair in front of the radio, spoiling our supper with handfuls of cookies, waiting to see whether Sky King had rescued Penny and Clipper.

Serials featuring plucky damsels in distress, such as the Perils of Pauline, pulled in many an eager moviegoer in the silent era. Later movie serials appealed to boys. The grim-jawed heroes often served in the armed forces, sometimes flying airplanes, struggling with the customary mad fiend bent on world domination, if not Hitler then Doctor Destruction. Each episode ended with the hero going over the cliff in a car, or falling out of his airplane, or being crushed in a mine explosion. The following episode would begin, "after Captain Bruce Bammer was rescued from the mine, he…"

So the technique is there to be used. Make your audience root for the hero. Involve them deeply in his life. Then do something terrible to him at the end of every episode.

Modern audiences like their serial dramas in bigger chunks than fifteen minutes; an hour or an hour and a half works well on television. And they will wait all summer for the next season of, say, Downton Abbey. But how does this translate into print media? How long should a serial episode be? How many episodes make a story? These questions are still up in the air. Some writers are capable of spinning off an infinite number of episodes of, for example, a sci-fi thriller, and others want to wind it up while the readers are still young. It seems to depend on what the traffic will bear.

How much closure do you need at the end of an episode? That's another question. Some folks are unhappy that the episodes end with cliff-hangers, and to them I say, go read a short story. It's a different form.

It may be that reader input will come to direct the way some of the serial stories will go. There are folks who are horrified by this idea. I'm not one of them. I'll consider suggestions from my friends, so why not from strangers on social media? This is the twenty-first century, after all. How many of us are solitary geniuses cranking out inviolable works of brilliance? As I always say, we'll see how it goes.

Oh, right. I almost forgot to put in a plug for BUCKER DUDLEY.

Kate Gallison

It's New! A Crunchy, Whole-grain Serial

A few years ago I whiled away a great deal of time reading stories about the War of 1812, which, by the way, we are still in the bicentennial of, seeing as how that war didn't end until 1814. The conflict fascinated me because it was the Americans fighting the Canadians. My forebears were Canadians. We weren't told much about the War of 1812 in American public schools, other than vague references to Manifest Destiny, which as near as I can tell is the notion that God wanted the White Americans to have everything.

But I didn't come here to discuss politics. I want to talk about serials.

The result of my studies of the War of 1812 was the meticulously researched BUCKER DUDLEY, a long, rambling historical novel about a young orphan girl who dresses as a boy and goes to sea, a common trope or meme in the age of sail (is it a trope or a meme? What's the difference? Do I care?). Polly is caught up in the war, sees action, has astonishing adventures and at last finds true love and her place in the world. I thought it would be great if it could come out for the bicentennial.

The New York publishing community was profoundly uninterested in this book.

Well, shucks, my friends all liked it, my sister liked it, and I liked it. But, alas, it was commercially dead. I put the manuscript in the bottom desk drawer, along with the sixties mad housewife novel and the high school reminiscence I wrote before I got into crime writing. Then last year about this time the New York publishing community started talking about online serials. Like Charles Dickens, you know, how he published his works in pieces in magazines, how everyone flocked to the newsstand to catch up on the latest installment. Once again the serial is hot. (Stephen King tried that without noticeable success a few years ago, but he was just ahead of his time. Right?) Amazon is doing it now. It must be commercially viable.

BUCKER DUDLEY is a natural, I said to myself.

My agent sent me an email saying that St. Martin's Press wanted to offer serials, and was I interested? I said I was, but somehow he never got back to me. Then Amazon put out a call for proposals. I responded with a description of my project. They replied with a request that I send my submission through my agent. By that time I had no agent. I thought, who needs your silly bureaucratic tinkering with my story, anyway? I can put sections of BUCKER DUDLEY up myself.

So I did. The third of five episodes went up on Kindle this week. But I'm not doing it right, as it turns out. The knowing ones are working out rules for success in this endeavor. As I find out what these are I thought I'd share them with you, along with links to various online articles that I should have read before I set out to do this. Who knows? Maybe you'd like to write serial fiction too. Anyway I'll tell you some more about it next week. Meanwhile here are some links:

A WSJ article by Alexandra Alter, "The Return of the Serial Novel"

The Amazon invitation to submit a proposal for a serial novel

Plympton, a site that publishes serial fiction for reading online

Jane Friedman's post on Experimenting with Serials for Fun and Profit

Sarah Kessler's article for Fast Company Amazon Changed Reading, Now it Could Change Writing, on how analytics may change what you write about (I should live so long. Hardly anybody reads my work)

And, of course, links to the first three episodes of BUCKER DUDLEY:

• POLLY AT SEA, where she ships out on a man'o'war, dressed as a boy,
  and fights in a famous battle,
• POLLY AT SACKETS, where she serves as a lady's maid to a young woman of ill repute, and they encounter what passes for Society on the Northwest frontier, and
• POLLY AMONG THE INDIANS, where she goes to live with the Mohawks and begins to discover the secret of her parentage.

Kate Gallison
image by Mike Licht