This week I’ve started posting chapters of my first novel on
this blog [no longer available here]. The idea was simply that the blog was an easy way to share this work
with others without making a bunch of hard copies. I’ve decided that I’ll do
another revising pass on each chapter before I post it, knowing full well that
the work is far from finished and needs all the help I can give it before I
show it to anyone. That having been said, I’m also working on Novel #2, which
I’m really enjoying writing, so I’m a bit slow on revising and then posting new
chapters of Novel #1.
That reality became very clear when I received a message
from my dear friend Heather saying simply “Chapter 2… Please!”
Somehow that note got me thinking about my process, which
oddly led me to think about my favorite author, Charles Dickens, and how he
published almost all of his works serially. For those non-Dickens fans out
there, most of his works were published in 20 monthly installments of around 32
pages each. This was a fairly common practice in the day, so much so that
publishers would often tout the phrase “Make them laugh, make them cry, make
them wait!” The benefit to the publication (and the authors themselves) was
that it was much more affordable for people to buy the novel on the installment
plan rather than pay a larger sum of money up front for a complete novel.
Simple economics, right?
Not quite. While I’m sure Dickens was appreciative of the
way serial publishing gave him more readers. I tend to think there’s more to
the story of why he continued to publish that way. See, an interesting fact
about Dickens that sets him apart from many of his contemporaries was that he
not only published serially, but he wrote
serially as well.
Think about that for a moment. The way I see it, Dickens
would write the first 32 pages—maybe even the first 64 pages—and then he’d wait
for the reaction of the audience before writing the next installment. If, for
example, the audience hated the main character, Dickens could change things up
so that an originally more secondary character would take the lead in the next
installment. If a character died and the audience took it poorly, SURPRISE! The
character wasn’t really dead at all—it just
seemed that way! The audience was intimately factored into every one of
Dickens’ novels.
I cannot imagine writing that way, being continually
beholden to the variability of readers’ opinions. I’d be afraid the final
product wouldn’t be mine at all but would be a complicated collaboration with
my ideas bending and bowing to others’ input. In practical terms, whose name
would go on the cover?
It’s an interesting idea, though, isn’t it? In some ways, I
think everything I write is a complicated compilation of everyone I know and
everything I’ve heard and experienced. Although I’m not as brave as Dickens, I
appreciate the overt way he used the audience to shape his books.
One of my favorite pieces of Dickens’ work is a seldom-read
unfinished novel called The Mystery of
Edwin Drood. Remember that installment plan? The problem with that modus operandi was that Dickens died
with only 6 of 12 planned installments of his final novel complete. To this
day, although many have ventured guesses, no one really knows who killed Edwin
Drood. Given what I know of Dickens, though, maybe he didn’t even yet know
himself.
