Stephen Emms at guardian.co.uk has an interesting article titled: Should serial novels be continued? The premise is: Out of sync with print-based reading habits, this form is nonetheless perfectly in tune with the web.
.As a Charles Dickens fan, I am naturally interested in serial novels. Of course, this is exactly what Stephen King did with The Green Mile.
.Emms writes, "The potted history of the serial novel is well-documented, dating back to The Thousand and One Nights, with its frame of vizier's daughter Scheherazade narrating hook-laden stories to avoid execution by King Shahryar. Its heyday was the 19th century, with the Charles Dickens-founded periodical, All the Year Round, publishing novels of his, including Great Expectations, and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, at the same time as Sherlock Holmes was taking his first cases in The Strand magazine (which had a circulation of 500,000).
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Nowadays newspapers and journals rarely serialise novels, but the format lives on in Japanese manga, as well as the dank online caves of the horror, SF and occult genres, pioneered by Stephen King's "e-novel", The Plant, published in 2000 (which remains unfinished)."
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By the way, I've mentioned this before, but there is a great book about Wilkie Collins, cited above, by Dan Simmons called Drood.
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The thng about the internet as a means of doing serial novels is that it doesn't really let the reader "touch." Wouldn't it be cool if papers still did serial novels?
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Benefits of the serial novel:
.The man inblack fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed.
King himself gives a chatty explanation of the serial novel, Dickens and his own work in the introduction to The Green Mile. Here is my list of benefits for a serial novel:
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1. We're all in it together. The reviewer, the reader, usually the writer are all close to the same place.
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2. Heightened anticipation. You have to wait for the next installment. Thsu the excitement about Little Dorritt.
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3. No jumping to the end. Do we really do that? Well, I happen to know at least one person who will make it to the end of Under The Dome. . . because my evil twin peaked. King shares how he caught his mother peaking at the end of a mystery novel in the introduction to The Green Mile.
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4. More disicipline for the writer doing his first draft. After all, once the story is released, the author is kind of bound to stick to major plot lines and details he already developed. He can't write the end, and then clean it up.
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