Story Notes - Episode Endings vs. Chapter Endings (and a change in Ep 5)

Yesterday, Episode 5 of The Case of the Misplaced Baroness got posted with a place holder for the last line.  I corrected it in the morning, but some of you likely only saw the original, so I'll mention it here.

In the orignal, Plink informs Mrs. Lister that she needs to talk to Antonio.

The line now reads that she needs to run off with Antonio.

The line was wrong because Blogger went gazookie last night, and I ended up fighting technology rather than finishing the last go on the story.  I was up until four, my brain was no longer functioning, so I left the place holder.

It was not a big difference, but it was in the last line, and for a serial, that is important.

Pulling a "George Lucas"

They say that in the script of Return of the Jedi, during the fight between Luke and Vader, there was a spot which read: "Vader says something to get Luke really mad." They didn't have an actual line, so they put in a place holder.  They finally came up with what he should say on the set.

I do that sometimes.  Okay, I do that often.  Most of the time, it doesn't matter much.  It's a set up for a joke, or a transition.  A great line in those situations will make the punchline or new direction shine, but it's not something you dwell on.  An approximation will do the job.

And if I come up with a better word or line or phrasing when I'm editing, I'll stick it in later, without mentioning it.  Or just put it in the book version during the editing and formatting stage.

More Important Than a Cliffhanger

With a serial, there is one place where the right detail or line can really matter: the end of an episode.

This is especially true of a short episode serial such as I write here.  With a longer episode, a writer has a whole scene to set things up for the next episode, put in a cliffhanger, and otherwise make promises for the next episode.  With a short episode serial, that last line is what you leave the audience to think about for three or four days.

I don't always come up with that perfect end line.  Sometimes, I am left with the option of just haivng Vader say "Yeah, and you're ugly too!" and getting on with it. 

When that happens, I can make it better in the novel version. But here's the unexpected thing:

That great episode ending is not nearly as important for a novel as for a serial.  With a novel, you actually can end a chapter abruptly, and it doesn't matter, because the audience can flip the page.  And the fact is many/most readers do check the first page of the next chapter before putting a book down.  (I don't remember where I read that, but I know that I do that.)

With a novel, the audience gets to decide where they take their breaks.  They can, and often do, end a session on a note of satisfaction. They can read until they see the next direction of a story, and then stop.

With a serial, the breaks are not optional.  And that is more than an accident of the form; the breaks are what a serial is about.

So it's actually less important with a serial to leave the reader in suspense.  With a novel, if you  leave Jim the Adventurer dangling over a pit of zombie alligators, that will make the audience want to turn the page.  Great!  Because they can have instant gratification with a novel.  With a serial, you need to give them something that lasts for days or weeks; something to actually think about.

I heard a bit of an interview with a reader of serials who had discovered that the serial format forced her to stop and think about the story between episodes.  That turned out to be a real pleasure for her.  The gap between episodes was the best part.

It made me think about how people react to TV shows -- especially on shows which have some sort of overarching story to the whole series.  The thing that gets people to talking about the show between episodes is not exciting peril, but rather that something changes, making the future uncertain, or something is revealed that gives a whole new meaning to what went before. Things, in other words, to think about.

Mastering this for short episodes is tough. I don't know how well I do it, but it makes for a great goal in writing the story.  

In Episode 5, the fact that Plink wants to talk to Antonio doesn't mean much.  The audience doesn't know enough about him to anticipate anything or think about it.  Sure, yeah, he was at the party.  So maybe he knows something.  But...  The fact that she has just spent a couple of episodes trying to convince people to take her story seriously, and that it isn't a prank or joke or accident, makes her suggestion that she carry out a joke that would make people take her even less seriously -- that's more of a question.  It's something to hmmmm about.

Therefore, I think it is a better to put it at the end of one episode than at the beginning of another.

See you in the funny papers.

Thoughts on Writing The Online Novel - What's Next?

Test of Freedom, the winter serial, ended on Monday.  That was a commitment I made before I was laid off and my life got flipped around a couple of times.  I figure this is a good time to stop and think about what I'm doing next and why and all that.

These are more or less random thoughts on web serials in general and my serials in particular.

1.) What am I going to do next?

I'm taking a week off from serializing anything -- next week I'll post a flash fiction story on Monday, and my favorite joke on Thursday.  (The joke, btw, involves Moses and Jesus behaving like ordinary human golfers.  I think it's kinda sweet myself, but if you are offended by that sort of thing, you'll want to skip next Thursday's post.)

Then for the month of March, I will be posting a short serialization of a Mick and Casey novelette: A Fistful of Divas, in which Mick and Casey are looking forward to hearing a concert by some visiting opera singers.... only the concert gets canceled when a local rough-neck takes a pot-shot at the company.

There will be another short break for short fiction and then....

2.) When is the summer serial going to start?

The Case of the Misplaced Baroness will begin on April 8, whether I'm ready or not.  It is a flashback from Misplaced Hero, and I still have not decided if it will overlap with Misplaced Hero, or if it will actually have a full story that will finish up before that one began.

This story, btw, actually begins the main story of the series.  The story of Alex and Thorny is kind of a side story, though I hope to bring them back into it soon.  I call the main series "The Perils of Lady Pauline," and you will see why in the very first paragraph or so of the very first episode.

3.) Test of Freedom and the flavor of my blog. 

I chose to serialize Test of Freedom for two reasons: It was already finished, and because fall and winter were so busy at the day job, I needed a break.  AND the story has an episodic quality that makes me think serialization is the best way to go with it. 

So I did it because it was good for me and good for the story... but I didn't consider whether it was good for the blog.  Furthermore, even though I think serialization is good for the story, I don't think my blog is good for the story.

So one part of me wants to take Test of Freedom and its subsequent stories (of which I know there are two but there could be more, or it could simply be unending like a soap opera) and creating a separate blog for it.  JUST for it.  Longer episodes once a week.  Maybe even twice-a-month.

The problem with this is that it puts my sanity at risk.  That series, since it exists at least in draft form, offers me a break. And if I don't publish it here on this blog during the winter, I have to keep writing other things. Things that aren't my main novels.  Things I don't make any money at. Things that require freaking illustrations!

The good thing about it is... It forces me to keep writing other things twice a week.

But the most important thing, I think, is that the whole Freedom series has a different tone and style than a lot of my writing. Yes, it does actually hit a lot of the same old-fashioned notes that most of my work hits. However, I think that The Perils of Lady Pauline actually match the tone of my mysteries better.

This is especially true since it will always have a certain mystery adventure aspect -- note that even with The Case of the Misplaced Hero, which is largely a simple get-in-and-out-of-trouble adventure, featured a mystery and investigation for all the characters other than Alex and Thorny.

The Freedom stories feature twists and turns, but it's a melodrama. It needs space, and I actually think the short episode format robs it of some gravitas. (It also robs the thing of its humor, as most of the humor takes more time to set up.)

4.) Can a serial be too spread out?  Can twice-a-month work for me?

Hey, it worked for Street and Smith (the publishers of many early pulp magazines, who published everything "twice-a-month").

There are people who publish monthly serials.  I don't know how well they do, but I notice almost all of them I've seen publish LONG episodes. I would not be publishing something all that long.  Part of the point of doing a slower schedule would be to ease the work.  And even if I did the same number of words total as I did with twice-a-week publishing.... that would still mean episodes of about 2500-3000 words.

The other issue everyone mentions with spaced out serialization is that readers forget about it from week to week.  However....  I was reading some mainstream press articles a while ago about the appeal to many readers of serial fiction, and one reader's comment struck me:

She said that one surprise benefit of serialization is that, when she has to wait for the next episode, it forces her to think about the previous episode.  To, as it were, savor it.  Like mindful eating, she focuses on each bite more.

I find that writing a serial novel is a little like that.  With a regular novel, or even novella, you know that the reader has the next chapter right in front of her most of the time, so chapters interlock, and don't stand alone so well.

But I also find that with that particular story -- Test of Freedom -- breaking it up into too small a chunks made it less savorable.  I wonder if a 2500 word chunk might actually give the story more resonance, more stickiness.

So I'm halfway to talking myself into creating that twice-a-month blog with longer episodes. (And fewer illustrations.)

5.) I'm having trouble with follow-through just now.

I think I meantioned this earlier in one of my posts about designing covers; I seem to be stumbling as I get to a certain point in my work lately.  I burn up a certain amount of energy and then I get fuzz headed.  This is different than being tired or indecisive.  It's almost like a silent migraine.  I'm sailing along, but then I get stupid and I need to stop before I break something.

This, I am told, is actually a classic symptom of, um, being a woman of a certain age who is going through certain physical changes. It supposedly lasts for about a year.

So I worry a bit about making too many commitments.  I'm now back at full posting deadlines, and I am about to start writing the twice weekly episodes from scratch, and I'm doing cover art AND illustration and, well, a bunch of stuff.  And I'm thinking of doing a separate blog.

Small steady commitments like these, however are actually a good way to handle loss of focus.  Rather than just spinning off into nowhere, you can keep cranking widgets.  I have found it really seems to work for me in managing the fog of hormonally-induced migraines.

So, in the end, what am I going to do?

I'm going to stay the course for a bit. I'm going to see how the summer serial goes.  And by the end of summer, I'll decide whether I'll do League of Freedom on a separate blog, or whether it will be the winter serial here.

But my brain is getting foggy now. Must wrap up before I forget what I'm doing.....

Tomorrow, I'll be writing about a book I found at Project Gutenberg: a little known novel called Phroso, by Anthony Hope, the author of The Prisoner of Zenda. It's another ripping yarn with noble ladies and dastardly villains and somewhat imperialist theme in that the hero is a right-thinking Englishman.

See you in the funny papers.

Writing the Online Novel - Walking, and Dancing, to the Story

I got off on the wrong foot with Test of Freedom.  I made a couple of small bad decisions with each of the first four episodes, mainly due to distraction.  So I took a week off to get it back in gear.

Walking to the Story

The original draft of this story was written under Nanowrimo-like conditions.  Just sit down and start writing.  One really common problem for the "just sit down and write" process is called walking to the story.  That's where you stall on paper by having your characters walk through all their motions between one scene and another while you think.

It's like when your character gets an urgent phone call that her husband is in the hospital, and you don't just cut from her getting the call to arriving at the hospital: you have her hang up the phone, and then get her coat, and then go down stairs, and then open the door, and then go out, and then close the door, and then walk to the car, and then unlock the car door, and then open it, and then get in, and then....

You get the idea.

But this kind of nothing scene isn't always bad.  It's only bad if it's actually stalling.  It can be a great place for information and character development.  Your character hangs up and races about looking for her keys, which she can't find because she's too worried sick to pay attention to what she's doing.  That could be a powerful scene of it's own.

There are also what I call "bridge scenes" which are usually less powerful -- more summarized -- which you can use for timing and also to set up something to come.  For instance if the character had a frustrating time getting to the hospital and finding where her husband is, that can set up her state of mind for the next scene.  However, you have to be careful about how you use it, how much impact you want.

For instance, full vivid scenes will give you more impact and may actually compete with the next scene.  A summary, on the other hand, will have less impact, but can be more of a quiet set up so that the reader is really ready for the next scene.  You have to decide with any bridge scene how important it is: how visceral, how central to the overall story.

Walking on a Journey

Some stories are about a journey.  Classic road movies and quest fantasies are examples here.  (Or on the literary side, the "picaresque" novel.)  That kind of story is pretty much ALL "walking to the story."  That's what it's about.

It's harder, then, to differentiate between the stalling wasteful bits and the necessary bits.  And that's the trouble I've been having with Test of Freedom -- and why I delayed Episode 5 for a week.  I needed my wits about me to really judge what to keep and what to throw out and how to handle the pacing of the first ten episodes or so of this story.

But there is another thing that complicates this... or perhaps clears it up, because it leaves fewer choices: I'm publishing this as an online novel, and in particular I'm publishing it as a short episode online novel.

If my episode lengths were longer, say 2000 words, I would have space for less important bridge scenes.  The first 600 words of such a chapter could be a whole set up scene that leads into the meat of the chapter. I could also take a couple hundred words for a mini "capper" scene at the end, what Algis Budrys used to call a "validation" scene. (Cappers can also be twists -- a cliffhanger that happens after you resolve the issue of the scene.)

But that that kind of structure presupposes that the reader is reading all those parts as a whole piece. But with a short episode style I'm using, each of those scenes have to stand alone.

So for bridging sequences, I either have to make that bit stand alone with its own importance, or I cut it down to maybe a paragraph or two.  Or... cut it out entirely.  (Or take very short summary paragraphs and turn them into full episodes.)

So the problem is deciding which is which.

Dancing to the Story

In this first section, all the characters are basically walking to their part in the story.

Jackie's journey is easier, because it's pretty much covered in Episode 4. His main story will take off later, but there isn't more to write about him until then.  Mary and Lady Ashton, on the other hand, are on a quest, so they're going to be on the road longer, and for this first part, they have to carry the story alone.

What had me in a dither was this: as with any good journey/buddy story, there's character development and revealations going on in the trivial scenes of the journey.  It's what the story is about, at least in part.  When I look at it one way, whole rafts of story seem unnecessary, and then I look at it another way and I think that's the most important part.

In writing Misplaced Hero, I learned this: every episode is a vignette.  Every episode has a purpose in and of itself, and it's more important for it to work individually and just to move on to the next episode, than it is for it to advance the whole overall arc of the story.  This story is going all winter long.  Hurrying doesn't help.

When I look at things I follow eagerly -- blogs, comic strips, a friend's adventures in parenthood which she relates on a forum I frequent -- I notice one thing about them all.  I get hooked not because they are leading somewhere, but because they're interesting NOW.  Each unit is worth reading, and that makes me look for more units.

And that is the hard part with this story, because I already wrote it, thinking it was a novel.  Some of the interesting bits don't stand alone.  And sometimes the less interesting bits fare better as an episode.

Heres' the irony: I drafted this post before I finally got Episode 5 in the can. At that point, I firmly intended to skip what happens in the episode as useless business, just something the characters do.  And I was going to move straight to a scene with the ladies in their carriage, headed for a port city in Acteron. That traveling scene was a bit of character development, just a little discussion of feelings and moods: Mary's frustrated because while she's sitting in a carriage, she's not DOING anything, and the others try to distract and amuse her and all agree that traveling is all they can do right now.

In other words a scene about the characters not doing anything but talking about how they aren't doing anything.  Still, it was a more fun, more character-filled, more enjoyable scene overall than the scene I posted.

The problem is that the scene failed at its only actual purpose. It missed the one thing that it really needed to do:

In the first book, Mary describes herself as a "Mary-in-the-box."  She has a high capacity for latency.  Sure, she is a coiled spring inside, but when she has no choice but to wait, she can wait like nobody's business.  She doesn't waste time or energy fretting over things she can't help.

But Jackie's arrest, of course, threw her for a loop, and I suppose I wrote that scene -- as a part of a sequence -- to show her getting her equilibrium back.  But like so much about Mary, her equilibrium came back instantly when Lady Ashton offers to fund the expedition.  Heck, she got it back the instant she learned that Lady Ashton knew more about Jackie's transportation.  "What's the name of the ship and when did it sail?" -- that was Mary back to normal.

I realized that one little sentence in the scene about crossing the border actually did a better job of character development than a whole scene: Lady Ashton describes Mary as like a dog who never strains at the leash, but is gone the instant the leash is released.

Showing is better than telling, and a descriptive sentence is not as vivid or visceral as a real scene, but that one did the job better than the scene I had in mind.  So I went with the scene where the characters were actually doing something -- even if it wasn't as clever and entertaining as it could be.

In the end, I'm not sure I danced to the story yet.  I think there are upcoming scenes where that happens, but I don't have to dither over them, because they actually work.  They're intersting and they have a purpose.

If I were writing this story afresh, and not just reworking an existing story, I would make some different choices. When your options are wide open, you can make anything dance.  But when you're editing, you're more about skipping the boring parts.

The next story in this cycle -- League of Freedom -- is much more maleable in this way. It is less goal-driven at least at first. It's the middle of a trilogy and the characters have to adjust to the situation. That's where dancing to the story will really come in handy, and I hope to be more ready for it.

Anyway, I wavered from my original conclusion to this post, but I'll give it to you anyway because I think it's right:

So in the end, it's about skipping the boring parts, but it's also about making the boring parts interesting.  If a story is a journey, the journey matters.  If your actor has to get across the stage, then get him across the stage in an interesting way, whether it's waddling like a duck, or leaping like Najinsky.

The thing that makes it interesting, though, isn't the novelty, but rather that it makes a commentary on the story.  There's a purpose to it.

See you in the funny papers.

---

 A Round of Words in 80 Days Update

Other folks checking in today, and this segment's progress:

Sunday Day 35 - 150 minutes
Monday Day 36 - 105 minutes
Tuesday Day 37 - To heck with it, it's election night.

Writing The Online Novel - intro post

Because I'm throwing myself into the world of serial fiction for the next year or so, I've decided to start a new feature/topic for my non-fiction posts called Writing the Online Novel.

Online writing is a different beast than what fiction writers are used to. For the most part, it's closer to journalism than to books. Books, and most fiction magazines, are immersive reading.  They're designed to be read without distraction, for the reader to submerge his or her consciousness into the story.

Because of this immersion factor, the audience for a book is very conscious about its choices.  They aren't just paying for the book, they're making a major time and attention commitment to it.  They shop for books deliberately, looking for something special, which they will consume later, when they are ready to dive in and lose the world. The book must be worth that time and energy commitment.  This makes them more attuned to genre and category and other boundaries.

The web, on the other hand, is more like a newspaper; lots of different things on any page, meant to be skimmed, full of everything from sports scores, to comics to commentary, along with the news and features, and ads.  People approach newspapers and the web with a more "consume it now" mindset. No commitments involved at all. It's just skimming and browsing and killing time.

Which isn't to say that readers don't dip more deeply into some things, but that's not the point of screwing around on the internet.  The point, more often then not, is to see what's going on.  Right now.  You skim through headlines and feeds and aggregators and social media, to see what catches your interest. You don't know what you're going to find.

And it doesn't always matter if you find much.  You may feel completely satisfied with your experience just skimming the first paragraphs and summaries, and catching a few cartoons or LOLcats, or a video of an otter doing a back flip, or seeing the weather or sport scores.

So readers on the internet aren't looking for the same kind of exact experience they look for in a book.  After all, we've already filtered out the bad stuff by sticking to things we like and trust: we subscribe to feeds, check out certain sites, follow friends and people we find interesting. And because of that, we can leave ourselves open to a wider range of experience than we do when we're shopping for books.  We are less conscious of boundaries.

The experience of the online writer is a little different.

We have to make the same commitment to everything we write, whether the reader is just skimming or engaged in full-out commitment. It's the same time-consuming work, and burns up the same high level of brain energy.

So we writers tend to see online fiction the same way we book fiction.  It's just delivered differently.

I think we need to start looking at online fiction -- particularly online novels -- is a medium unto itself.  It has its own audience, its own requirements, its own modes and problems.  And even though serialized fiction, and newspapers and magazines have been around for centuries, this version of the form is new in a whole lot of different ways.  There is no beaten path to help us figure out how to do it right or gain an audience ... or make a living.

I'd like to explore some of these issues and report what I've learned, so I'll be posting this Writing the Online Novel series irregularly.  The topics will cover everything from genre to cliffhangers to episode length to SEO and making money.  Some of these posts will be useful to writers of regular fiction, and most of them well be helpful to blog or web writers of any kind.

I hope they'll also be interesting to readers in this strange new world.

See you in the funny papers.