STAY TUNED, Part I: Shya Scanlon on the future of web serialization

Shya Scanlon’s article about web serialization, first appeared in the Faster Times. This morning, John Gorman over at Paper Cut published an interview with Mr. Scanlon. You ought to read that, too.

Let me begin with something I call my Le Car theory. When I was growing up, every time my parents bought a “new” car, I’d begin seeing the same model all over the place, as though it had only just then sprung from the oily earth. “Hey, look,” I’d tell my father as he drove me to school, “another Le Car!”

I began my own online serialization in July, and within the past month or so I’ve seen Colson Whitehead continue a story on Twitter he’d begun for a journal called Significant Objects, Eric Rickstad propose posting chapters of his next novel online as he writes them, J.A. Tyler post chapters of his novel The Zoo, A Going every 24 hours, Soft Skull snatch up Matt Stewart’s Twitter-serialized novel The French Revolution, and Necessary Fiction begin accepting novel submissions for serialization.

From my perspective, then, there seems to have been an uptick in online efforts at serialization, but the Le Car theory would suggest that it’s just that: my perspective. Whatever the case, I began to wonder why, if it’s been going on, it hasn’t caught my attention before, and whatever the reason, whether or not the model has a future. Didn’t it used to be common practice? What happened?

The idea of serialization is indeed an old one—it’s been around at least since the first night Scheherazade saved her own neck by uttering some approximation of “stay tuned,” but it didn’t really come into its own until the 19^th Century-notably in England—when it was embraced whole-heartedly as a cheap alternative to book-buying, a medium at the time prohibitively expensive for the working class.

These weekly or monthly serializations were where many of the day’s great authors got their start, perhaps the most famous example being Chuck Dickens. Of course, Dickens went on to serialize most of his fiction, for the simple reason that, as it reached the broadest audience, it continued to be the most profitable way to publish.

Despite his fame and influence on the Western canon, however, Dickens was arguably not the most influential figure in the story of serialization. In September of 1872, Thomas Hardy began to serialize his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes in Tinsley’s Magazine. At the end of one of the published sections, Hardy leaves a central character hanging off the edge of a cliff, and in the process captured and coined what would ultimately become a defining element in this populist story-telling tradition.

Follow the money

But let’s back up a bit, because Hardy was hardly alone in developing/embracing conventions we now take for granted in certain genres. Actually, a trend had been emerging over the previous twenty five years which would, in the next century, ultimately result in what we now see as the most recognizable form of serialized fiction: comic books.

Though “affordable,” publications such as that which featured Dickens’ early work (Bentley’s Miscellany), were still, at a shilling, a splurge for working class adults. And throughout the 19^th Century, literacy rates were climbing steadily, especially among children (universal education started in England in 1871—in the U.S. it wasn’t until 1918, though by that time most states were already diverting taxes toward public school). So the movement toward even cheaper (one penny), youth-oriented serials was inevitable, and the “story paper” was born.

This later part of the century must surely have been the hay day for serialized fiction. Story papers were filled with pulpy content, adventure stories and true-crime, stories set in exotic locations (such as the Lost World genre, founded by Sir Henry Rider Haggard and epitomized by the novel with the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle) and tales of the macabre (Poe’s work turned up in the same journal that published Dickens). This continued throughout the early part of the new century, when the state-side “pulps” sought to out-do one another with the increasing use of visual content-full-color covers, dramatic illustrations and the like—until, in 1934, Famous Funnies became the first publication to use what’s now considered the traditional comic-book format.

While this process was unfolding, two technologies were developed that would each have radical implications for serialized fiction, and for story-telling in general. The first of these was of course the advent and popularity of motion pictures. The second was the streamlining of industrial printing technology. Film was an immediate sensation in Europe until the First World War—when it moved to Hollywood to get even bigger—and the industrialization of printing made unheard of print runs (20k and more) a reality, which gutted the costs and made them available to almost everyone.

There is a narrative here about the rise of the image in popular culture, and any investigation into what happened next with comic books would need to address that, but the point I want to get at, here, is that “serious” serialization fell away, as the reading public could now afford complete books, or, if they wanted a quicker fix, could get their story in the form of film (and, before too long, TV), and what was left was, for better or worse, primarily rooted in genre.

Serial fiction has always been a populist practice. It began as a way to reach a broad audience and, true to the laws of supply and demand, changed to suit the needs and purchasing power of that audience—a process similar to what’s occurring online. So let’s return to my shortlist of Web serialization projects, because I have an admission to make: it’s woefully incomplete.

In fact, there is quite a lot of serialization online, but my Le Car theory only partially explains my ignorance of it. Like comics (until the more recent rise in popularity of literary graphic novels), it’s been perpetuated largely by genre writers. There are indeed several websites devoted to serialized genre fiction, notably fan fiction, and of the personal blogs or author sites on which I’ve found serialized fiction, by far most of them are genre authors such as David Wellington, whose very popular zombie novel Monster Island is now also available in print.

This leaves us with two questions: 1) What is it about serialization that might attract genre fiction authors? and 2) Why the Web?

Read Part II

By Shya Scanlon

Shya Scanlon’s poetry collection, In This Alone Impulse, will be published by Noemi Press in December, 2009. His novel, Forecast, will be published by Flatmancrooked in spring, 2010. Shya received his MFA from Brown University, where he was awarded the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction.