Should I write one?

Not right now though, of course. I was doing the rounds yes­ter­day and came across the Web Ser­ial Writ­ers sec­tion on Mer­rilee Faber’s weblog (inci­den­tally, I saw that my link has a scroll-over with: “Ryan blogs about not very much these days…” Nice, hehe, though I am cur­rently attempt­ing to cor­rect that lit­tle slip.) It struck me as inter­est­ing because I had con­sid­ered one of my WIPs as some­what of an episodic notion, but never delved into turn­ing it into just that. Then I had just for­got­ten about the idea and begun on ‘Ran Red. Well, in hav­ing it pre­sented before me again, I am find­ing the idea intrigu­ing enough to con­sider it a pos­si­bil­ity after I have fin­ished my book.

I need to look into ‘web seri­als’ a bit more, read a few of them a bit more and gen­er­ally, find out a bit more. Wikipedia explains three dif­fer­ent ver­sions that seem to be most prominent:

1) Self-contained. This kind of web ser­ial tends towards sto­ries that share the same uni­verse, but oth­er­wise dif­fer in arcs. This allows for ease of intro­duc­tion for new read­ers, and the option of character-swapping, but draws away from a larger — con­tin­u­ing — story.

2) Loose Con­ti­nu­ity. The sto­ries may be from dif­fer­ing char­ac­ters, but they ulti­mately tie into a grander story — maybe even con­tain­ing small arcs that con­tain the same char­ac­ters and span a few chap­ters before intro­duc­ing anew. Good for build­ing angles on a greater epic, and intro­duc­ing new read­ers, but may jump onto char­ac­ters you’re not such a fan of and stick with them a while.

3) Tightly Cohe­sive. This seems to be the most com­mon type of text-based web ser­ial; the kind that cen­tres on spe­cific char­ac­ters in a spe­cific uni­verse and doesn’t change. It’s basi­cally a novel bro­ken into chap­ters and served up bit by bit. The upside is a great con­tin­u­ing story with recog­nis­able char­ac­ters and grow­ing appre­ci­a­tion, the down… well, if you’re new, you need to start at the beginning.

Per­son­ally, I like the idea of a tightly cohe­sive nar­ra­tive as that’s what I’m used to with novel-writing, but chang­ing it up could obvi­ously fac­tor into the inter­est and draw. I’ve never really pub­lished any­thing I have worked and worked on for a con­sid­er­able amount of time; pol­ish­ing and nur­tur­ing, and again, of course there is some sac­ri­fice in that when seri­al­is­ing a story, but I do like the thought of some­thing that can grow — in qual­ity and fan base (one would hope).

If I were to ven­ture into try­ing my hand at this kind of thing, I would get some ideas together and shoot for start­ing around the time I am fin­ished with my cur­rent project. It could be an effi­cient way to both show my hand at writ­ing, whilst also keep­ing the cre­ative juices flow­ing… just in time to start edit­ing that novel of mine and begin a brand new manuscript.