twofer

Mar. 13th, 2016 04:26 pm
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (writing: glass cat)
[personal profile] truepenny

When Last We Left Our Heroes
[Storytellers Unplugged, July 07, 2009; retrieved via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]

The thing about writing a post every month (or every couple months--mea culpa) is that you-the-reader tend to get hit with whatever I’ve been thinking about more or less in the background of my day to day life. This time, it’s series novels.

There are two different kinds of series in genre fiction. One, on the Tolkien model, is a single story split up over multiple volumes.* George R. R. Martin is doing fabulously well with that kind of series right now. (Please note: Martin’s success is the exception, not the rule.) The other, which I think of as the mystery model, is a set of stories, all with the same protagonist(s), but with little or no continuity from novel to novel. Ngaio Marsh wrote that kind of series. So did Emma Lathen and Ellery Queen and Edmund Crispin and a whole host of other Golden Age detective story writers. At the far end of that spectrum is someone like John Dickson Carr, whose continuing character, Gideon Fell, is actually almost always a secondary character. Carr wrote standalone mysteries which happened to feature the same detective.

The advantage to the mystery model, from the publishing point of view, is that it caters to the vast yearning for same-but-different that drives a lot of people’s reading habits. You can pick up any book in the series--first, fourth, fourteenth, thirty-seventh--and have roughly the same reading experience. It doesn’t matter if two, five, and nineteen are out of print, because only the completists will care--or even be able to tell. Each book benefits from the sales record and reputation of the other books, but no book is dependent on the other books. This is very much not the case with the Tolkien model, where if you can’t find volume three, reading volume four is an exercise in frustration. And if you’ve read volume four, your incentive to find volume three is sharply diminished, because you already know what’s going to happen. In the mystery model, what happens in volume three has little or no bearing on volume four, and vice versa, so reading one has no impact on your desire for the other--except for feeding the same-but-different demon.

I completely understand why people like the mystery model. I like it myself when I find an author who’s good enough at it. And I equally completely understand why publishing likes the mystery model. It’s as close as you’re going to get to a sure thing in an industry ruled by caprice and intangibles.

My problem is, a mystery model series is the last thing on earth I want to write. They’re popcorn reading, and their indeterminate nature--you have to have enough closure that the story stands on its own but either (a.) leave enough minor threads loose that the next book can tie on or (b.) have frictionless characters who don’t change from book to book--means that even very excellent mystery model series aren’t much more than popcorn reading. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy Emma Lathen and John Dickson Carr and Ngaio Marsh and their ilk, and I respect their craft. But they’re not what I want to write. You have to live with a book you’re writing for a lot longer than a book you’re reading, even if you write fast (which I don’t), and, while I enjoy visiting, I couldn’t live in such a self-limiting form.

I’m ambitious. I aspire to art. I want to write great novels, not just excellently crafted entertainment. This may be a case of “aim for the stars, get to the roof” but it’s still better than aiming for the roof and only getting halfway up the stairs. The four books of the Doctrine of Labyrinths are all deeply dependent on each other, and I have always thought of that as a feature, rather than a bug. (It was in fact my puzzlement over reviews describing it as a bug that led me to understand, finally, that my definition of a series was only one of two possible definitions, and not the preferred definition at that.)

I’m going to be writing standalone novels for a while, I think. Aside from the publishing drawbacks, writing a Tolkien model series is exhausting. But when and if I do write another series, at least I’ll know what I’m getting into.

---
*This is very literally the Tolkien model, since--As You Know Bob--Tolkien conceived of The Lord of the Rings as a single novel. Most post-Tolkien series have at least some closure at the end of each individual volume: each installment is more or less a novel on its own.



This Space Intentionally Left Blank
[Storytellers Unplugged, August 07, 2009; retrieved via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]

Apparently, this month I have nothing to say.

Except for a follow-up to last month’s post, in two parts:

1. I have no idea what I mean by “art.”

2. Despite all my bitching about open series (series in which every book is an entry point and every book can be read separately from the others), closed series (a la The Lord of the Rings) have no inherent virtue or “artistic” value, just as standalone novels don’t. I still think that the form of open series makes it difficult, if not impossible, to do certain things (which, last month, I described as “art”), but those things are not the only way to define art. The perfect counter-example is P. G. Wodehouse, whom I do not have the brass-faced effrontery to deny is an artist.

I hope that next month I will have real content to give you.
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