Rewrite

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Finished?One of my sons is in the music industry. Among the things he does is work with bands to record their music. “You work in the studio for hours and hours,” he told me. “Do the same in the mixing room, until it all sounds great. Exhausted but satisfied, you get in your car, slip the disk into the player and as you drive home, you hear all the things that are wrong with it.”

Having just finished the draft of a new novel, I do what many writers do, find a first reader. In my case I sent the book to someone whose judgments I greatly value, and trust. She’s often my first reader. Bless her! But, no sooner does the manuscript get swallowed by the postal service, than I’m accosted by thoughts of all the things wrong with it. 

Why does this happen? Because I’m suddenly thinking of the reader, not the writer.  Because it is now the reader’s book, not the writer’s. Because I’m not controlling it any more.

Except I am the writer. So when I get back from the post office what do I do with that just finished book, the one I’ve just sent off? I start to rewrite it.

Serials in the 21st Century

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Keep Your Eye on AmandaThe first serial I wrote was Keep Your Eye on Amanda. Chapter 1 appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph on October 3, 1996. Readers loved it. Authors found new readers. (I recall riding a NY subway, watching an old man read a chapter of The Secret School in the NY Post.) Other newspapers joined in. Readers clamored for it. Teachers used it in classes, grandparents shared it with distant grandchildren. 

Though I remained the nominal head of the company, Linda Wright took it over, transforming it into a unique publishing venture. The name Breakfast Serials was introduced. Other authors joined in. Katherine Paterson. Linda Sue Park. Joseph Bruchac, among others. Illustrators Brian Floca, Emily Arnold McCully, Timothy Bush. 

Under Ms. Wright, the growth of Breakfast Serials was extraordinary, eventually reaching a circulation figure of thirty-three million! It probably became—in terms of readers—the biggest publisher in the world. All, as it were, beneath the radar. But just as Breakfast Serials expanded around the world, the US press—under the internet onslaught—virtually tanked. What to do?

Instant Serials

Ms. Wright regrouped and has now invented a way to make serialization available online, as Instant Serials. Here, terrific stories and great art are available in serialized form, along with a means of chatting (online, with no smack talk) about the stories. The reader (parent, grandparent, and teacher) sets the release dates of successive chapters. Which means readers will still have to laugh, cry, and wait … a little. Quite amazing.

“Make them cry, make them laugh, make `em wait.”

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St. NicholasOnce Dickens made serialization popular, and profitable, it became a 19th Century publishing norm. There was the work of Dickens of course, but think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, War and Peace, Sherlock Holmes, and many, many more. They were issued in serialized form. Recall that most important 19th (and 20th) century magazine for young people, St. Nicholas, which ran serialized novels. Growing up, I read the serialized novels of Thornton W. Burgess in the daily pages of the New York Herald Tribune. All followed the credo of Wilkie Collins, who, when speaking of the methodology of serialization, said, “Make them cry, make them laugh, make `em wait.”

The longest book I’ve written, Beyond the Western Sea, was my attempt to write a Victorian-like saga. At 675 pages there was nothing of that length in the children’s book world in the pre Harry Potter era, 1995. Indeed I decided to write the book in short chapters, with each chapter having a cliff-hanging ending, so as to propel my readers to read just one more, as if had been written for serialization. [In fact, the publisher was so nervous about the book’s length that they issued it in two volumes, which proved to be a mistake.] When the book was done it came to my mind that I might try to do actual serialization in newspapers. That was the birth of Breakfast Serials.

Breakfast Serials logo

 

Why did serialization become so popular? In the 19th Century, literacy was spreading among masses of people. Buying serial installments was a lot cheaper than buying a book. More than that, a serialized story means, beyond all else, a shared story. Social reading. Think of the book club experience, but multiply it by thousands! Think what a relief it is (say in a classroom) not to have the fast reader spoil the book for the slow reader by announcing what happens next. They can’t, because no one knows. Readers are always on the same page.

To be continued …

Serialized Fiction

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Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick ClubWilliam Hall, of the British publishing company Chapman and Hall, wished to publish a monthly series of cartoons by the illustrator Robert Seymour, about the “Nimrod Club,” the comic misadventures of a group of Cockney sportsmen. The cartoons would be the main thing, (think of Hogarth’s The Good Apprentice, etc.) but there would be some subsidiary text, which would supplied by a young writer, who had recently achieved some success. The writer was Charles Dickens. In 1836, shortly after the first installment was published, having been retitled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Seymour committed suicide. In an effort to salvage the project, Dickens, with his publishers, undertook to enlarge the amount of text for the installments, even while a new illustrator was found. The project—the first time a new novel was being serialized–was an extraordinary success. How successful? Some four hundred copies of the first installment were published. As for the last installment, some forty thousand copies were published. Not only had a new writer—Charles Dickens—achieved fame, a new form of publication was also established—serialization. Why am I writing about this? Because one of my books is currently being serialized.

To be continued . . . .

It’s creepy, and it’s true …

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Wolf Rider: a tale of terror

Sometimes a writer writes a book because its inspiration haunts him. Such was the case with Wolf Rider: a Tale of Terror. Here’s the description for the book, “After receiving an apparent crank call from a man claiming to have committed murder, fifteen-year-old Andy finds his close relationship with his father crumbling as he struggles to make everyone believe him.” 

Strange but true: the opening episode in this book is something that actually happened to me. The telephone call came shortly after I moved into a new apartment and had just received my phone. It was in fact, the first call that came in—on a land line desk phone. The who, the why, and how, I never learned. It was nonetheless, very troubling, very disturbing. I could not get it out of my mind.

The way I worked my way free of the event was by writing about it—something writers sometimes do—inventing a who, a why, and how. Some of my readers tell me Wolf Rider is the scariest book I have ever written. Perhaps it is. It surely is creepy. And . . . it did really happen. At least the beginning.

Disbelief

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Midnight MagicA magician who doesn’t believe in magic? That’s the premise of Murder at Midnight and Midnight Magic, two books about Fabrizio and Mangus the Magician which are also mysteries. Two more good books for holiday reading.

Here’s what I have to say about Midnight Magic on my website: “I know where the setting for this book entered my imagination—Naples, Italy, which I once visited. But the book came about because I wanted to write a scary book that wasn’t really scary, a ghost story, that may or may not have ghosts, and a tale of magic, that might, or might not have magic. But what really makes the book fun is the relationship between Mangus the magician, who does not believe in magic, and his servant boy, Fabrizio, who does believes in magic a great deal. The prequel to this book, which tells how the two came together, is called Murder at Midnight.”

Read something funny

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S.O.R. LosersNow that you’re looking through the bookshelves at Grandpa’s or Aunt Eileen’s for something funny to read, you might try S.O.R. Losers, a tale of a soccer team that does not win. On my website, I often share the “story behind the story.” Here’s what I said about S.O.R. Losers:

“As noted in the entry for Bright Shadow, I am often asked “How long does it take you to write a book?” The answer is, about a year. But it can vary. A lot. S.O.R. Losers took me one day to write. It has never happened before, or since, and I don’t think it’s likely to happen again. How did it happen in this book? When I was in high school I played on our school soccer team. I was goalie. We were terrible. How terrible? We never won a game. My own kids—who had become good soccer players—loved to hear how bad their dad—me—was. So I told them many a story about how we always managed to lose. They thought it very funny.

“One day I decided to write it all up as a novel. Since I had—in a way—practiced telling the tale of our terrible team so often, it just flowed out, game by game—in one day.”

Is losing funny? Read the book and let me know.

Talking it over

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Crispin: The Cross of LeadGiving books for the holidays can lead to lasting memories. Christina, a mom, recently wrote to tell me that she likes using teaching guides on authors’ websites to discuss books with her two boys. “We read the books out loud when we can, on our own when we can’t, but your teaching guide for the three Crispin books provided good clues for talking over what we read. My boys think I’m pretty smart!”

Book as documentary …

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Nothing But the TruthIn today’s Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac, Anita Silvey talks about Nothing But the Truth, a book that looks at truth and lies. A comment on that article, written by Peter Littel, offers an interesting perception of the book:

“When I read Nothing But The Truth, I thought of it as a documentary novel. It reads as though Avi has lots of documentary film footage that he has carefully edited to create a narrative but without any voice over to influence the reader. It could easily have become a one dimensional and didactic view of how many groups—students, faculty, administration, parents, media, community—interact with each other in high school. Instead Avi adds to the complexity of it all by showing the variety of opinions and personalities within each group and thus providing the reader with ambivalence rather a clear linear interpretation. In other words, true to life.”

And now for something funny …

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Beginning, a Muddle, and an EndHere’s another gift suggestion. I wrote a couple of books that take writing seriously by using silliness, puns, and jokes. Appropriate for children and adults, I hope you and the children and teens in your life enjoy reading about Avon the snail and Edward the ant as much I enjoyed writing about them.

Booklist had this to say about A Beginning, a Muddle, and an End: “ … it’s easy to imagine the right child sitting at the dinner table or in the backseat of the car, or traipsing through the grocery store, exhausting the patience of assembled, captive family with a word-for-word account of Avon and Edward’s hilarious exploits.”

There’s a second book about this duo: The End of the Beginning.