During the 19th century, novels commonly emerged piecemeal, their chapters dribbling out in consecutive journal numbers. Some of Dickens’ and Dostoyevsky’s best work was originally written under such presure.
Unfortunately, the primary outlet for serialized stories today is television. Unfortunate because of the limitations of this medium for topics of import, for incisive psychological sketches, and for pure bawdiness. As an audience, we deserve to see a rebirth of the serialized novel. Fortunately, technology may once again prove midwife to literature.
Democratized blogs provide a perfect opportunity for such serialized fiction. The fact that ’til now, we see either endless navel gazing, the newest photos of the Munchkin, or blathering punditry should not obscure an opportunity. An opportunity to tease readers. An opportunity to force the gates of creation open in the writer’s mind. An opportunity to transcend the morass of quotidian existence every day, every hour, and every week, rather than reveling in it.
In addition, a possibility now exists for cooperative publishing efforts by groups of sympathetic authors. Examples of this sort of social organization exist already, but the content is nothing novel — commentaries on commentaries, nothing Athena-sprung from the forehead of the author. By organizing such a collective, the pressure on an individual author to produce is also distributed, which gives room for the inevitable slack that accompanies creative writing.
Finally, such a collective blog could further draw interest by re-serializing works of old. The texts are electronically available in the public domain from Project Gutenberg or related repositories. Of course, since the full texts _are_ already available, there’s the question of why a reader wouldn’t just go straight to the source. First, many readers may be lazy enough to not bother. Second, some may actually enjoy the suspense. In the last, the collective could find some way to spice up these vanilla texts, for example with text-to-speech feeds for iPods, commentary, or illustrations.
An update: Several readers have informed me that plenty of people are publishing serials. For example:
Eggers
Orchard Press
World and I on this topic
Wired on this topic