The newspaper industry was built on the penny dreadfuls.
There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.
To be honest, I've never been a huge fan of American soap operas. I grew up Spanish, so I grew up watching a lot of novellas.
As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.
By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record.
I very much use Bill Willingham's approach on 'Fables,' which is that rather than having an end point to a series, I have an end point for the various story lines.
That was my relationship to 'Archie' for the most part: just the Sunday strips.
I love Sherlock Holmes, but I love any of these old stories where the writer was paid by the word, so the adventures just continue forever. They are almost like they were meant to be read out loud.
I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement.
The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.
I think there is a real thing going on where writers are feeling more liberated to write with a big canvas because of a demonstrable, continued appetite for long-form storytelling.
It's a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.
There was an enormous revival of pulp fiction that started in the '60s and continued into the '70s, which in large part gave rise to things like 'Star Wars' and 'Indiana Jones,' among others. But I developed an appetite for the original stuff at the time, and that appetite has never really abated.
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
'Gossip Girl' came out in rapid succession over two years, so the endings always had to be suspenseful so that you couldn't wait for the next one.
Most fiction series are written so that the reader can come in at any point and not feel lost, but if you can start at the beginning, why not?
'Rescue Me' is the first book in a three-book series. Although, like all my series, the books are purposely written so that readers do not have to read them in order.
Not all series books are sagas. Some are shaped more like beads on a string, separate episodes held together by a set of characters, who may or may not grow and change as the series continues.
I've discovered I love the vast landscape a series offers. I tend to write long anyway, so, it turns out, series gives me the perfect vehicle for writing 'large' stories.
Some books are serials, not to be mistaken for anything else. 'The Two Towers,' for example, ought never to be read in isolation.
In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.
My view is that comic books are meant to be long-form stories. They're meant to be novels.
As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel.
SERIAL, n. A literary work, usually a story that is not true, creeping through several issues of a newspaper or magazine.
