Serial novels: The past and future state of the art
Novelists spend way too much time complaining on social media that our art has been unjustly forgotten, instead of taking REAL action, and complaining about it on Substack.
Well, well, look who’s punch drunk.
But I’m tellin’ ya, we don’t spend enough time on a solution, which begins with thinking about why the novel is needed, was needed, and might be the way we save civilisation from an
Apocalypse of shiny surfaces, everything-overwhelm, bullshit, self-righteousness,
and general piggish hypocritical failure on the part of the general population (including, if not especially, writers) to give a shit about anything that doesn’t tickle our extremely biased fancy, if not our orifi, while expecting everyone else to give a shit about our shit and we NEED more than other people because we feel CHEATED, due to…
Well, some people think the unique contribution of the novel to civilisation is the cultivation of empathy.
While a mere movie shows you what a person says, does, and how cool they look, a novel is the closest thing you can get to reading another person’s mind.
A good novel anyway, but that’s a fight for another day. Or paragraph.
OK OK, so you got a good point, the empathy.
It’s one thing a novel does that no other art form can ever equal—
—unless they make one that’s even more dystopian and telepathic than social media, but if you’ve strapped me to a table with electrodes and whatnot I have trouble calling anything that ensues an “art form,” mais chacun à soi and all…
BUT. I’m more interested in the other precious boon our persons and nations win from fiction. It’s one that need not even exclusively come from a novel; in fact, in its first classical undeniable breakout, this heavenly benefit first came to earth through a theatrical festival, back in ancient Greece.
It’s just that the novel is the only form that’s ghetto enough anymore to bother.
I’m talking about mourning.
A movie can teach you to mourn, insofar as a film can be a fancy piece of theater—but it’s hard to convince people to launch a multimillion-dollar movie about mourning anymore when politics and ass get attention and cash.
They’ve left the theatre too far behind, drunk on cheap CGI and the desire to shock without offending.
Goddamn it, we need art to teach us to mourn!
Grief is a skill you need to learn anew each time, or at least I do—and the only way to learn it is to attack it sideways, through real art, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to come from a bloated movie industry that thinks agility means swapping in goofy slang or swapping out starlets when they turn 25.
If you don’t know how to mourn you’re going to live your life in hysteria. And there’s nothing more annoying than being surrounded by hysterics.
Not to mention depressing. And dangerous. And cetera.
So I’m taking this shit into my own hands,
which is a disgusting mental image. Almost as disgusting as the grotesque spectacle of a world where our idea of learning about how other people tick is a movie-idea:
The silent thoughts and sentiments of characters that you used to experience in a good novel have been replaced by a candy sheen of tits and what looks to me like a bunch of actors staring at each other inscrutably and then getting angry, horny, or devious with a mere scrap of clumsily-written dialogue for explanation—and also—at the risk of repeating the most important matter driving us mad, outside our terror for the future:
How do you mourn your dead?
We don’t, anymore. We scroll. We argue. And corpses pile inside of us like rotten meat.
What’s awry in the writing market?
Well, where to begin?, but since not a lot of people have tried it yet, I’m going to focus on the thing that seems both most obvious and most neglected to me.
I don’t mean the ole mean-stream publishing industry; everyone knows how corrupt and/or/inaccessible it is, but it doesn’t even do its anointed authors much good, so the obvious direction to turn is toward the Internet…
Where we run directly into the algorithms which punish you for not posting fourteen times a day.
I’ve seen YouTube “creators” of “content” (I have much to say about those two words, but let’s focus a tiny bit for ‘oi polloi) that is low-effort garbage to the hilt—the kind of thing that should be poised for success—who are still complaining about the algorithm’s habit of casually crushing them because, as independents, they can’t compete with the corporate persons which pump out similar LCD brain-trash at a much faster rate.
In other words, even would-be sell-outs are punished for not being multiple humans.
Or for having any care for quality or accuracy at all.
And you think you can spend six months to write a decent book—or years to write a good one—then post your proud, one-shot publication thereof on your neglected social media accounts—and actually get somewhere?
I mean, I was clearly dumb enough to think that, and now here I am, realising that was dumb, so no shade, my friends, but no.
So that’s why I’m starting this Substack. And why, maybe, one day
you’ll want to join me.
It’s much easier to believe a single chapter is perfect enough to finally let go and post than to believe a whole book is good to go—that’s only my personal folly, though, because a much bigger better reason to go serial is:
Publishing your great big book ONCE doesn’t work for anybody—not that I’ve seen, anyway.
There’s no choice but to feed the beast, lest it feed on you.
Take Neal Pollack—one of many possible examples—a former colleague from one of my newspaper jobs, back in the before times. I’m pretty sure the best thing he’s written is a novel, J@wball (Jesus H, the text editor won’t even let me type the name of his d@mn book, but I believe you can guess it; he’s J@wish himself so please don’t go stone him over it). But I’ll bet out of all the people who know he exists, for a large majority that book ain’t why. It’s the work he’s currently doing, running a web publication that posts multiple times a day.
And Neal was fortunate enough to get a MASSIVE leg up as a novelist early in life (not gossip but a statement he has made himself). If single-publication literary content events (hm, I need to work that into a better sarcastic acronym, SPLCE doesn’t have any ring to it) aren’t working for him, how d’you think they’re going to work for you, Ms “I wasn’t even BORN before the death of literacy, much less early enough to make a name for myself”?
But what else are you going to do?
(catsploitation aside)
Well, you do like Dickens did back in the day: You serialise.
If it was good enough for Thackeray, it’s good enough for me. Back when Medium was the only game in town, I gave it a shot, but after one of my articles went viral and they didn’t like that, they quit posting my work for new readers, and their platform was a pain in the ass anyway. Substack, for now, promises less censorship; we shall see.
You publish a juicy chapter at regular intervals, so your name keeps circulating. If enough people get to see it, they can judge it. If they like it, keep writing. If they don’t, I don’t know; I haven’t tested it yet myself, so off we go.
What’s awry in the writing market REALLY though? AKA “Nobody reads novels anymore!”—Oh?
Before I lay this essay down and get to work posting chapters, however, let me entertain the devil’s advocate.
From many writers’ point of view, to hell with what happens to civilisation, I want to sell books, and the problem is a market imbalance: There aren’t enough readers, hence not enough demand.
Waaaall, is there necessarily something wrong with the DEMAND? An equation has two sides.
We say nobody reads anymore, but there have always been shiny distractions—before television, there were public executions—and, yes, a lot of people don’t read novels, but is the problem the lack of demand for writing, or the oversupply of writers?
Readers don’t need more books. They need better books. And these days, books need readers. Much more than the other way round.
Maybe the public really is stupid and illiterate, and that’s why you can’t get read.
Orrrr… maybe too many of us are writing books, hm? Or too many people who could be writing good books are writing too many mediocre books, because pant huff algorithm, stay relevant, bleee blah blah.
There are already enough books in existence—even good ones—that no one can live long enough to read them all. How much does the world “needs” any of us to write a book ever again? Those of us thus who hear the call at this point in history are comically unlucky; sure, we need to re-translate all the old themes, and reflect the bizarre new world in which we find ourselves, but there are more people trying to fulfil a smaller need than ever before.
Don’t forget the awful number of people currently on the planet; there are so many of us, but we are still village creatures, and nobody can even keep track of the millions of people who pop up all over the planet bearing literary talent and ambition. Much less give us all what we think we deserve, whatever that means. The public can support maybe 100 writers in the hive-mind, no matter how great the base population. This paragraph is a horror novel if you understand it.
You’re one in a million? Great. That means there are 8071 of you, as of today, and the ticker is climbing. Nobody needs us. So if you’re shitting out a novel into the stream, it had better be worthwhile, because otherwise it’s sludge in our way. Don’t be a dick/cunt.
Graaaaanted, there’s such a thing as being too aware of this fact; recently, after a series of unfortunate events, I’ve gotten stuck in a rut of perfectionism so deep it has prevented me from publishing at all, because, OK, this manuscript LOOKS finished, but is it perfect? I don’t have the right to shit into the stream unless my shit is perfect, so there I sit on the banks of the stream, dying of constipation because you overly-high-self-esteem motherfuckers keep eating all the prunes.
There’s a balance, Mr. Devil.
We do need new, good books, even if we are already floating on an inheritance of the greats;
History rhymes, and any good translator knows that rhymes are the hardest part to change into a new language whilst keeping true.
But the good books we make are buried under this endless sludge.
Everybody wants to be “a creative” now; I suppose I understand, since all the other jobs are either disappearing or a horror movie. But was that your vocation? Or do you want to escape the other jobs? Do you merely want praise and attention? Then I suggest you try Onlyfans, or Tik-Tok. Because here? You’re in the way. Often, if you’re the social type, you’re very good at being in the way.
Do I need to repeat the argument that people who cheat their way into the public eye as “writers,” only to dump a deuce in readers’ eyes and turn them off to modern fiction entirely, hurt us all? It’s tiresome to repeat. It’s tiresome to think about.
Yep—when Joe Trust-Fund takes his inheritance to buy a self-publishing publicity machine, or Jane My-Rich-Dad-Knows-Everyone gets an in with a publisher, or Rachida Already-Upper-Middle-Class-Brat-Diversity-Hire gets scooped to the front of the line, they all write terrible books—and they cement the public impression that modern fiction if not all fiction is stupid, elitist, and lame, before people like us even get an audition.
I can’t think about it any longer, though. It’s November and I don’t know when I’ll see the sun. So I’d rather just figure out how to get around them, which I guess means the Internet…
But if there’s anything less friendly to the form of a novel than the horror-sea of the algorithm, let me know. So I can avoid it.
So I’m going to be trying to cheat the algorithm—I guess that’s the way short-form “creators” are likely to see it.
Well, kiss my ass.
I plan to release 1-2 chapters here every 1-2 days. I have a lot of backed-up chapters in my system that need a final edit and they’re out the door. Along the way I’ll find a weekly schedule into which I may naturally settle, but till then I will be building a nice big stack of sh&t to read day by day. Enjoy!
Meanwhile, since maybe people actually DON’T read, I’ll be over on YouTube and the lesser but less censored video platforms, reading chapters from my work in ASMR form. Yeah, it’s whoring myself. This is the world we live in. At least it isn’t SEXUAL whoring. It will probably take me longer to record chapters there than to write them here, so perhaps listeners who get taken in by the story will come here to read the backlog of chapters. Then again, the point of ASMR is to put you to sleep, so this is strictly experimental. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Yes, I’m still a carbon-based life form, so if you’d like to see me dress better, and possibly buy a steak, I will be setting up paid subscriptions here so you can read stuff early and get access to some bearable slivers of the personal-life details for which everyone seems to be ravenous in the wake of the death of artistic (or any form of) mystique.
In the meantime, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee with a one-time donation here, or maybe I’ll get some nice steak and eggs, or a life raft:
https://paypal.me/AnnSterzinger?country.x=US&locale.x=en_US