Every series of
events in the papers, from a campaign
for a public swimming pool to a great war is a serial story.” — Frank Luther Mott,
“The News in America” (1952)
Since
I reported and wrote my first serial in 1995, technology and the news
business
have experienced tumultuous changes. Newspaper circulation has declined.
News staffs have been cut. The
space for news has been reduced. The
physical size of the newspaper has shrunk.
The habits of busy readers have changed, too. Items of
information are now dumped on Web sites as soon as they are learned,
delivered electronically to people who
have learned to read telegraphic bits on their tiny cell-phone screens.
In
the face of such change, I’ve been told, the long newspaper story is a
dinosaur, as dead as the anecdotal lead:
I want the news, Mabel. I want it
now. And give it to me straight.
Such reactions to the current sea change are panicky
exaggerations. I’m as impatient as the
next reader, and usually refuse to change my reading habits in order to embrace
an unusually long story. This is why the
serial with short chapters makes so much sense to me. Stories delivered in five-minute chapters do
not turn off or overwhelm the reader.
Well-organized, and supported by the archive of the Web site, they render
something much more powerful than information.
They render experience.
I didn’t invent the serial narrative. But over the next week, I’ll help you understand it. It’s one of the oldest forms of storytelling, yet can be ideal for audiences today.
Story cycles can be traced
back to ancient times and the oral tradition. It is well known that the serial,
as a literary form, goes back to the 19th century and beyond, that the works of
Dickens and other famous authors were serialized in magazines and newspapers. Fiction
and nonfiction serials appeared in newspapers and magazines in the first half
of the 20th century. But the form was adopted and adapted
by electronic media, by radio, motion pictures and now television. I have made
the case that virtually all television shows, including news reports, are
serial narratives.
Witness,
for example, the Elián González drama, the story that was
ubiquitous in 2000 when I first began to gather material for this starter kit. It
might help to inventory the elements that made that story ripe
for serial narration:
- It had a single character, a six-year-old boy, about whom readers would care.
- The story had dramatic high points or potential “cliffhangers”: the
rescue at sea, the arrival of the father, the raid of the house. - The story is energized by a single “engine,” a question we hope the
story will answer: “What will happen to the boy?”
Let
me slow down. Throughout the six chapters of this starter kit, I will go over these and other elements of serial narratives — to describe the genre and to help you test whether your story might lend
itself to serialization.
When I describe these standards, I draw one important
distinction. I am writing about a long story with relatively short chapters.
The chapters for my first three series average about 1,000 words and require about five to seven minutes
of reading time. We’ll address issues of length more fully later, but we’ve all
seen narrative stories — I’m inclined to call them sagas — with chapters that
require as much as 45 minutes of reading.
These two forms, the serial
narrative and the saga, are not at war. In fact, they are first cousins, and many — but
not all — of the principles that apply to one apply to the other. Where I find
differences, I’ll try to describe them.
Over
the next six days, you will learn the secrets of serial narratives, including
their benefits to newspapers and Web sites.
You will learn tests you can apply to your story to see if a serial narrative
is the way to go. You will learn the
critical vocabulary necessary to talk about this kind of writing in creative
and useful ways. Most important, you will
learn…
…Well, I can’t reveal that until tomorrow, because every serial needs a good
cliffhanger.
Tomorrow: Chapter Two —
The Twelve Magic Steps
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