This is not a dumb question. So let’s answer it: Why would we write a serial?
The story is too long for other formats.
Yes, a movie or a book or a music album could be any length, but the two to three hour movie, two hundred to four hundred page book, or half-hour to hour length album are conventions for a reason. People expect that, and while different sizes can be good, the audience needs to adapt more to them. A three hour album isn’t something I would ever just put on to listen to, even if I really like it. I’d have to be in the mood, be ready, and have three freaking hours to spare. Can we break convention? Of course. With a good reason.
Yes we need to make our story hard to put down. Yes we need there to be drama and conflicts ripping about page after page. Yes we need to have hooks to pull readers from one piece to the next. And there are plenty of massive tomes that sell fantastically well, and are better because they are massive. But readers also want respite, and reader’s won’t just jump in to a thousand page book from someone they don’t know. Assuming we’re still starting out here, that is important.
More important than that, though:
The story’s development, research, drafting, and editing cannot be finished all at once.
If we make a thousand page book, great, but we also need to have as much polish and care on every single page as a two hundred page book. We don’t get to faff about just because we have more words. Try and get that done in a reasonable time frame.
If the story has grown so large we cannot make reasonable deadlines, we can try breaking it apart. This is part of the reason serialization used to be popular: it funded writers creating long novels by letting them sell it piecemeal in newspapers over a length of time. Of course, this also led to longer novels, as they got paid more if the story was longer. (Unrelated note: Fuck you, Charles Dickens.)
Yes, we are writers, and we have taken on this large work. Writers are responsible for doing it well and completing all the necessary tasks. We can still make it more bearable. Breaking it into pieces, piecemeal publishing it, and building from one to the next is one way to do that. I mean, that’s a series, too, in a way. That certainly isn’t something to look down on.
We need practice.
Probably the best theory I’ve ever been told for writers to learn how to write well is to write short stories, publish them, and then transition to longer works. It’s a great way to learn, fail, improve. Stephen King, almost every classic SF writer you can name, and a great number of other writing luminaries from the last hundred years until recently almost all started this way.
Two problems: It was a good idea in the past because we could actually earn a meager living from publishing short stories. Really talented short story writers could feed a whole family on it. Stephen King’s first sale was enough to pay a couple bills with money left over to go out for a nice dinner with his wife, according to his book On Writing.
Things have changed. More writers, fewer readers, less money available. Many places, at least a few years ago when I still bothered picking up a book on places to publish, will often just offer free copies of the magazine if our work is published. Not nothing, but not great. I’ve stopped caring, though I wouldn’t say it’s a bad idea to do it this way.
But, and we’ll go into detail on this, a properly done story is a series of smaller stories, made up of tiny stories. Serializing, in one sense, can be seen as a string of short stories tied together. If we’re starting out, and working from amateur to pro, the differences between serial and short story are more minor than major. And besides, we’re getting ourselves in the game. How we actually publish this as a serial, well … we’ll get there. Suffice it to say, short stories can be written exactly like serials, even if they don’t meet the definition we set out earlier.
Oh, and the second problem: Some people hate short stories. I do. I can’t fucking stand them. I like reading them: they’re quite interesting and fun. But my brain does not do short. Why would I think of six characters, set them up in some situation, create this whole conflict, and just write eight to ten pages about it? I would rather write fifty. Wait, now I can’t ever use them again, too? No.
There are more reasons, and we’ll cover them as we come across them. Don’t be upset, either, if none of these apply. Perhaps this is the wrong format. I have plenty of stories that I don’t think should be serials, and have no intention of writing them in pieces.
Consider these ideas carefully. Is it going to get us where we want to go? Independent authors are not an outright goldmine, they are a way, with different rocks in the path, rather than more or fewer these days.
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