On Serial Fiction

[hobgoblinn]

I heard something interesting this morning on the BBC World Service, which broadcasts locally an hour later on Sunday mornings before NPR picks up. I dozed off halfway through, but what caught my attention again was this author saying that he was supposed to send the whole completed novel to the publisher about a month after he finished publishing it in the Observer, but he needed more time. He ended up taking a few more months to revise poor choices he made due to the time constraints, including "bringing back to life characters I'd killed off."

*blinks*. That's a pretty major revision.

But it's gotten me thinking about how we -- how I -- write for this medium of Internet Fan Fiction. I've been reading a lot of Harry Potter serialized stuff on the Pit of Voles, and some of it is wonderful. Some is not. I'm wondering what it would do to the process, if I put something out that isn't "finished" yet. Thus far, I have managed to not create an eternal WIP. But the potential for that is certainly there. Better writers than I have done that.

My 06 nano novel stalled for the longest time, until I got jump started last summer by antennapedia's Antique Roman ficathon as a pinch hitter. The prompt was Exactly where I'd lost focus on that story at the time. I got 2 and a half of 3 parts finished before I lost focus again. Endings are hard. But if I had posted the first good part, would I have persevered? Or was antennapedia right-- I needed to persevere through to the end first, force that bit of discipline on myself?

Come to think of it, I started posting "Lost Boys" before it was "finished", too-- but it was much, much closer to done when I started. And I had the ficathon deadline to force me to maintain focus. "Through a Glass Darkly" was completed in draft when I posted part 1, but changed substantially on rewrite-- it wasn't until I had the finished story in my hand that I realized what it was about. And that it needed to be restructured to be from two parallel Points of View. It also had a ficathon deadline that forced the posting of at least a part by the deadline date, or I might have held on to it a little longer. And one story I'm working on now, which was part of my 07 Nano novel, has already been rewound to the point where I began to make bad choices, something I could never have done if I had been posting it as it was written.

I've got a lot of writers on my f-list, a lot of people whose opinions I respect. So I put it to you-- what are the pros and cons you see of doing something like this? If there's a middle ground, where do you decide when you have "enough" material created to start the process of posting it while writing the later segments? And how does feedback by the general public affect what you write? Or how you feel about it?

Comments

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

I throw my stuff out there. Now one or two pieces have needed revision (only one major revision and that was Learning Curve), but I find my stories in the discussion I have with readers. They tell me what they think, I can see if I've put the right clues down, they have an insight that changes how I see a character. Sometimes I have to put a story to the side for a little bit to let ideas 'stew' and so that I can bang out sections that are not clear in my head yet, but I've never abandoned a WIP yet.

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much free writing time you have-- I suspect your strategy would work for me if I were able to commit to the kind of pace I did for nano-- sit down and write consistently every night for an hour or two. But I think Wee Hob is suffering a bit from my distraction that month, and he needs more sttention just now. Only, being 12, he can't say, "Mommy, I need your attention." He has to do goofy things that guarantee my undivided attention. Which he is sorry he's got now....

Balancing real life and writing is hard. I need less real life. Seriously.

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's definitely different when you don't have kids. I do about an hour every night, so if I throw stuff away, I don't feel too bad because there's just more coming.