Interview with Pamela Redmond Satran

Serialized novels come from a long literary tradition that became most popular in the 19^th century, during which writers like Charles Dickens would publish chapters of their stories in periodical magazines. The serial tradition has continued, and most recently has found a forum online, in blogs. Blog novels, or blovels as they are commonly known, are becoming increasingly popular. Authors can update stories daily or weekly, and the blog followers become the readers of the ongoing narrative. The blog provides a way for authors to be motivated to write and finish their work, and it establishes a reader following before authors publish their novels.

     Along the same vein, there have been a handful of attempts at creating something more than blovels - using the potential of the internet and hypertext to create a multimedia serialized novel that can only be read and experienced online. One of the sources of this innovation is writer Pamela Redmond Satran, who is an established novelist and author of the site nameberry.com. She's moved on from blogging to this modern literary form by starting her collaborative multimedia novel called Ho Springs, which she updates daily. We got a chance to ask her a few questions about this new novel type and the potential it offers for the future.

What made you decide to start blogging your novels?

 

I love the immediacy of writing online, of having no one between your (my) writing impulses and the readers.  I think I'm a better writer online - or at the very least, just as good a one - and I wanted to bring the energy and freedom that I think improves my other work to my fiction writing.

 

Also, fiction publishing is really in the doldrums.  Publishers don't quite know what to do with novels and so many good novels fail in the bookstores....or never even find a publisher.  I wanted to sidestep the whole publishing process and put myself in charge of both the creation of my novel and finding an audience for it.

 

Your blovel How Not to Act Old was subsequently published and became a New York Times bestseller. Would you attribute your publishing success to the fact that you started a blovel, and would you recommend blogging as a way for authors to write before they publish?

 

Well, How Not To Act Old was a humor book, not a novel or a blovel, but I would attribute my success with that book to creating it online first as a blog.  I never could have described the concept or the market adequately to a publisher; it took the actual blog, complete with pictures, videos, comments, to truly illuminate what I had in mind and to also prove to publishers that there was an enthusiastic audience for the work.

 

I absolutely recommend this to authors of all kinds.  You'll find out whether you really have enough to say to sustain a book, you'll get a chance to try out material on an audience, and you'll create a showcase for your idea.

 

 

What are the benefits and drawbacks involved in blovels?

 

The biggest benefit is the freedom to create your work exactly how you want, to put it directly before readers.  The biggest drawback is that you need to drum up those readers all by yourself - and it's not easy.  But it's not easy with a conventionally-published novel either.  There just isn't the same kind of publicity hook with a novel as there is with a nonfiction book, so it's much harder to get any attention for a work of fiction, however you publish it.

 

Another benefit of a blovel is that you can create a fictional world in a much more modern way, as I have with Ho Springs, which includes visuals, blog elements by other writers, music, my own blog about creating the piece, a facebook group. 

 

And of course a big drawback of a blovel is that you get no money for it!!

 

Why did you decide to make your current project, Ho Springs, a collaborative effort?

There used to be this mystique that novels were created as completely solo works, one artist, all alone in a room.  Then novelists started including acknowledgment pages in their books, thanking not only agents and publishers but sources, friends, readers etc for support.

 

With Ho Springs, I took this one step further, inviting other writers to create elements of the fictional world.  It's more fun, for one thing.  More experimental.  And it  brings in ways of writing and viewpoints that I couldn't create all alone.  I think of Ho Springs as more like a television show, which is collaborate, than like a conventional novel, and would love to see it become a television/book project.

 

You say that your intention for Ho Springs was to "create it as I went along, publish it immediately, to swing by the crook of my knees with no net below." With this novel continuously and almost spontaneously developing, how far ahead do you plan your plot and is there an eventual end in sight?

 

I am purposefully not planning it more than a week ahead, and even then I diverge from my plan.  I created my characters and settings fully and in detail before I started, which dictates somewhat what they'll do - Juliette is always going to be spontaneous and impulsive, for instance, while George is going to be a caretaker.  So that shapes how they'll respond to the situations I put them in.

 

But I really want to let it develop as much by serendipity as by plan.  When a reader in the real Hot Springs, Arkansas wrote me that the real fortune teller's shop (which I hadn't known existed) burned down, I immediately used that in the plot and it really changed the direction the story was going in.

 

Do you believe that these multimedia-digital-fictions are the new frontier for books?

 

I do.  There's a lot of pent-up writing energy out there, and just as blogs and blog platforms made it easy for people to write about their lives, now that people are inventing digital fiction formats, writers will rush in.  Plus I think readers are hungry for fiction that feels more modern and that includes all these elements that are so easy to incorporate online but impossible to include in books.

 

How do you think devices like the iPad will impact the growth and popularity of this new concept?

 

The technology is paving the way for the art, so it absolutely seems to me that as the iPad becomes (presumably) the predominant way for people to read, so will fictions that incorporate video and music and creators' blogs become the dominant form of the novel.  Why would you go back, as a reader or a writer?  The challenge, for writers and publishers (or writer/publishers) is going to be how to make money online. 

 

But blogs and tumblogs and youtube videos don't for the most part make money, and look at the millions of people who create them, and do it very well.  Ten years from now, this will have exploded.  Right now, blovels and web fictions are in such infancy - virtually all the writers who are doing professional work in this area know each other!  It's a teeny tiny world!  But it's going to be huge.  I just hope people remember that I was one of the first.