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twofer
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.
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*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.
no subject
A third way?
Your essay has me thinking about some series I have enjoyed. The Vorkosigan saga partakes off some of each model. And while some volumes are just superbly crafted entertainment, I hope some are more.
I wonder about Earthsea, especially the original three. Not Tolkien, but not fully interchangeable, either.
Readers, are there other genre series you like that are neither fish nor fowl?
no subject
You met the intentions mentioned. That series was very much the case of, 'If you haven't read book one, or book two, book three and book four will confuse you...mind the gaps, young Skywalker.' I will forever love that tale of two broken brothers trying to get a little less broken.
For the section that talks about series type in general:
You have a point. Some authors I read and re-read for just that reason. Some authors who do plenty of stand alone ones do some series like this as well, which I suspect that, for them, it's a lot like play writing; half the work and nearly as fun.
I will present the argument of a third, or perhaps the literary version of type 1 intersect type 2. Which would look complete different in Python IDLE but that's besides the point.
There is a combination of both in which shared elements from both types occur. I will name Andrew Vachss, who writes hard crime noir, and, due to his experience as a lawyer who represents children who are suspected of being abused, his writing has a particularly harsh, real-world perspective.
He has a series he ended some time ago, called the Burke series. In many ways, they are a classic example of type 2; you could, due to the internal messages his writing is meant to convey ("Protect the child, society, or don't be surprised when said child grows up to be douche outlaw"-My words, not his), we could read, say, book five, and not feel driven by any particular force to find books 1 through 4.
However, if you read the series as a collective, in order, you fill in numerous blanks. The author does snippets of memory of the main character, Burke, in his later novels, particularly in his final novel of said character, Another Life, however, it doesn't fill in all the blanks.
For instance, as a character etched into the pages, you can, towards the series, find it perfectly acceptable that he will never be serious about any one woman and is in love with a woman who would never have him. You could read books 5-9, say, and take that one at it's word.
Or, you could read Flood, Strega, Blue Belle, Hard Candy, and Blossom and understand why this is such an internal/external understood fact: Burke is, save of course, his time with his family of choice, going to die alone. You even understand why it seems like such a part of him and why it was a subconsciously made choice that became what I like to call background-running conscious; it's just always present. You also understand some other things; his rage, and his pathology.
You get more pieces with which you can fill in those gaps. If you don't read the whole series, or you read them out of order, you still get value from those books, even if he isn't what I'd call Tolkien level literature. But if you did treat them like the Labyrinth series and read in one order, from the beginning, the rest of the series makes a lot more sense, and gives a better empathetic response, than if you had treated them as any other "mystery model" series that ended with just a few loose ends trailing off for the next installment.
To sum up ridiculously long post (too much caffeine); type 1 intersect type 2 is possible. I will say it doesn't occur as often as the symmetric difference of type 1 and type 2, which you described awesomely, but it may grow. It may be an awesome type 3 model when it grows up :)