Poynter Online - Writing Tools
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2007
Coming soon: How to write a serial narrative
By Richard Poynter
Dear Readers:
I’ll stretch the definition and say that a blog is a kind of a serial narrative. It’s the story, if you will, of a writer’s ideas, and the reactions of his or her audience. If it’s good, it has a kind of voice, a set of familiar characters, some action moving forward, occasional suspense, a few recurring themes.
In 1996 I wrote a serial narrative that changed my life as a writer. The title is “Three Little Words,” and it ran every day for a month on the pages of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. The 29-day run was long, but the chapters were short, none longer than about 850 words. You could follow the story of a family struggling with the death of a father from AIDS by reading about five minutes per day.
Since then, I’ve seen more than 100 serial narratives written in this, or similar, form. Recent ones have been published in the Rocky Mountain News, The Virginian-Pilot, and The (Fort Myers, Fla.) News-Press. The serial narrative is a special literary form with special advantages and requirements. Not every writer can pull one off. And not every good story lends itself to serial narration. But when everything clicks, when the writer finds a compelling story and a golden source; when cliffhangers abound; when character is revealed through scene and action; when quotes are replaced by dialogue — nothing quite matches the intensity of readership, as Mark Bowden discovered with the serialization of “Black Hawk Down.”
Starting next Monday, Feb. 19, Poynter.org will publish something we’ve never tried before, a series of essays — a serial centerpiece, if you will — on the craft of the serial narrative. You may want to taste some of the serials mentioned above to see if this kind of storytelling interests you. If you have written such serials, or plan to write one, let us know and we’ll share them with all our readers. — RPC
