Serials, Continued

The serial, with its attendant cliff-hanger ending, is as old as Sheherazade. You will recall the story of the sultan's bride, who told him a tale with a cliffhanger every night to keep him from chopping her head off in the morning. In the nineteenth century, and well up into the twentieth, magazines published serial fiction, paying the writers by the column inch (in case you ever wondered why the works of Dickens were so long).

When I was little, serial dramas were acted out on the radio, not only the housewives' soap operas but comic-book style stories for kids, Little Orphan Annie, Sky King, Tennessee Jed, or Jack Armstrong (the All-American Boy). The episodes were fifteen minutes long. Can you imagine? Nowadays it takes fifteen minutes for a TV show to get through the commercials. We would sit transfixed in the big chair in front of the radio, spoiling our supper with handfuls of cookies, waiting to see whether Sky King had rescued Penny and Clipper.

Serials featuring plucky damsels in distress, such as the Perils of Pauline, pulled in many an eager moviegoer in the silent era. Later movie serials appealed to boys. The grim-jawed heroes often served in the armed forces, sometimes flying airplanes, struggling with the customary mad fiend bent on world domination, if not Hitler then Doctor Destruction. Each episode ended with the hero going over the cliff in a car, or falling out of his airplane, or being crushed in a mine explosion. The following episode would begin, "after Captain Bruce Bammer was rescued from the mine, he…"

So the technique is there to be used. Make your audience root for the hero. Involve them deeply in his life. Then do something terrible to him at the end of every episode.

Modern audiences like their serial dramas in bigger chunks than fifteen minutes; an hour or an hour and a half works well on television. And they will wait all summer for the next season of, say, Downton Abbey. But how does this translate into print media? How long should a serial episode be? How many episodes make a story? These questions are still up in the air. Some writers are capable of spinning off an infinite number of episodes of, for example, a sci-fi thriller, and others want to wind it up while the readers are still young. It seems to depend on what the traffic will bear.

How much closure do you need at the end of an episode? That's another question. Some folks are unhappy that the episodes end with cliff-hangers, and to them I say, go read a short story. It's a different form.

It may be that reader input will come to direct the way some of the serial stories will go. There are folks who are horrified by this idea. I'm not one of them. I'll consider suggestions from my friends, so why not from strangers on social media? This is the twenty-first century, after all. How many of us are solitary geniuses cranking out inviolable works of brilliance? As I always say, we'll see how it goes.

Oh, right. I almost forgot to put in a plug for BUCKER DUDLEY.

Kate Gallison

Once More Into the Breach, Dear Friends

I'm starting another story.

Yes, folks, in the very teeth of a storm of public indifference I'm taking keyboard in hand to create yet another fictional world, yet another collection of somehow complimentary characters, yet another set of astounding circumstances that will throw them all into conflict, keeping the reader in nail-biting suspense right up to the ultimate, satisfying conclusion.

Not useful

Maybe it will be a novel. Maybe it will be a short story, which I can shop around without the help of my agent, who takes so long, so very long to read my work. Maybe it will be another historical. Maybe it will take place in the twenty-first century, an era I have no particular fondness for. (How could I have dared to bring a child into this world? But I digress.)

The point of this fevered screed—quite literally fevered; I'm having trouble shaking a bronchial infection—the point of it is that I have a new system. Beverly Graves Meyers invented it. She described it in a blog post last week for (The Poisoned Pen Press). It's quite a bit more useful, and I think more successful as far as encouraging output goes, than those formulas I used to pass on for torturing your plot into general acceptability, such as Save the Cat. I've broken her system down into bullet points, herewith:

• A three-hole punch
• For each novel, a three-ring binder (an old used one from college will do)
• As many sets of dividers as necessary
• Three-ring punched plastic pockets with zippers

Useful

…And, of course, your computer and printer. Then, everything you find in your research or the bubblings of your imagination goes in the binder, labeled, on the outside, Marvelous New Novel or whatever your working title might be.


Just inside the front cover:

• A calendar for the novel's time line (Google "perpetual calendar" and pillage at will)
• Master list of characters
• Master list of settings, if helpful

After that, the dividers, labeled appropriately:

• Characters (with sub-dividers, one for each character)
• Settings
• Background on main plot points
• Clues (sometimes)

For each character:

• A summary of the character's physical characteristics and life events, worked up last, but put right behind the divider
• A photo or painting approximating the character
• Your notes on this person's history and personality
• Printed articles on the character's profession or hobbies
• Any little squibs and bits you might want to put in one of your plastic pockets

For each setting, your own notes, similarly, plus anything useful you found while doing research. The plastic pockets are good for maps.

Behind the Plot Point divider, whatever you might find helpful. The contents of the pockets include, but are not limited to, those notes you made on the cocktail napkin at Bouchercon.

So there you have it. I'm off to write The Next Big Thing. You may do the same. May the best man keep his desk in order. Oh, yes, and find a publisher.

Kate Gallison

Humor – The Secret Weapon

When I was newly married and struggling to learn how to write publishable fiction (my ambition from the age of ten), I placed some humorous articles in a local magazine called COUNTY TIMES. I only remember one of the topics – how to get rid of a pile of bricks – but I do remember the pieces were odd and silly and I was thoroughly delighted that an editor put them in print.

Unfortunately, one reader most certainly was not. He sent me hate mail telling me so and in the process taught me this: Comedy is without a doubt the most subjective sort of communication, so count on it at your own risk.

Not crazy about the odds of success, I haven’t written a purely humorous anything since. Instead, I write mysteries around a character who has a lighter way of looking at things. If readers think she’s fun – terrific! But if my jokes go over like another pile of bricks, there’s always that dastardly murder to solve.

Old influences were Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, Gregory MacDonald’s Fletch books (not the movies) and the film Charade starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. Another special favorite was Hopscotch starring the late Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. All of them old enough to have whiskers, I know, but they still hold up beautifully.

Which brings me to some of the curiosities I’ve run across regarding humor.

Asked when he planned to do some more serious work, Walter Matthau replied, “Humor is my serious work.” He claimed it was more difficult than “noncomedic or tragic or whatever you want to call it."

Comedian and motivational speaker, David Naster, concurs. “Humor is intellectual… It’s an idea you make funny… [s]ome more complicated than others.”

Street thugs take note: Making someone laugh gives you a certain power over them. Think about it. You’re causing another person to do something they didn’t expect, or perhaps even intend, to do, and usually they’ll thank you for it.

Historians credit the British sense of humor for helping the UK endure two horrific world wars. Our own Bob Hope, and others, did much the same for us. Yet if a funny movie – or book – were to be put up for a prestigious award, most likely it would be laughed off the docket. That subjective problem again.

My first agent may have said it best. “Nobody takes humor seriously.”

Donna Huston Murray