Scribing a serial story and the shock that brought it to a stop
It was a little unnerving, but also immensely uplifting, having made up a portentous date to find it presented to me in an entirely different but even more significant way. I suppose it is not that unlikely, when you think about it, the chances being one in 365, if it is not a leap year. I hadn’t, however, expected any such proposal to be made to me. Forty years of experience suggested the opposite was far more likely.
The date I chose was 11th October and the fictional outcome would be unhappy. I was informed a third of a year later, that this date would be a cause for celebration. Both instances have their fictional connotations, but the latter will have a real-life implication.
I learned the craft of creative writing in the 1980s, mostly from books borrowed from the Harris Library in Preston, plus one or two that I purchased. There weren’t many such volumes available at the time. One of the fundamental lessons I learned was that ‘re-writing is more important than writing, and cutting is most important of all’. This is true, but also untrue. Creating is most important of all. You cannot cut what you have not created. This fact presents a persistent dilemma. Does the editing cripple the creativity? When we get competent at recrafting and cutting are we closing doors that might lead down the most creative paths?
13A Bohemia Way was an experiment to test this. It is usual to revise a work several times before exposing it to a readership. This often includes a significant adjustment of earlier chapters. This is all well and good, and there is no doubt it makes the work more readable and better structured. This is not an option for writers of serial fiction. Today we might think of television soaps. They cannot re-write episodes that have already been aired and this forces their hand in what can be subsequently crafted. This was also true of those who wrote print serials for magazines and newspapers, not so common now, but the soaps of their day for their readers. Dickens is, perhaps, the most well-known example. Some very fine novels were first assembled in this way.
13A Bohemia Way was to be a fictional (mostly) memoir made in the same manner. I would not write the next chapter until the previous one had gone public on this blog. I confess that I cheated a little. I wrote the first three chapters ahead of initial publication just to make sure there was something there worth putting out, but by the time chapter three was visible (March 2023) I was tightly harnessed, not penning the next instalment, before you could see its predecessor. It was a tense experience but sustained my interest even if it failed to attract yours.
Some years ago, I saw a theatre production containing a scene I have never forgotten. I think the show may have been by Forced Entertainment; a company whose work I don’t especially enjoy. The scene that had a profound effect on me was one in which the performers simply stood on stage and pointed at random members of the audience saying things such as, ‘heart failure’, ‘traffic accident’, ‘cancer’, ‘fatal infection’, and so on. This connected with a concept I had encountered elsewhere in fiction, of ‘death days’; the converse of birthdays. The actors’ ‘predictions’ of causes of death would have had even more impact had they attached a date, excluding the year. It was the latter idea that I incorporated in 13A Bohemia Way. The central character was told he would expire on 11th October. As far as I can remember, I selected that date completely at random. I decided I would issue the instalments on the eleventh of each month, concluding with 11th October – probably in 2024 – if I lived that long.
Imagine my surprise then, when an email told me something would happen to me on that date. That information caused me to end 13A Bohemia Way a year earlier in October 2023. I want to spend some time during the coming year focussing on a different genre.
The serial experience was constricting, but only slightly. It took a little more courage to follow narrative strands that might ultimately prove to be unrewarding, but it was also liberating, and strangely energising, to be forced to make a passable weave from a limited bunch of threads. It may have become trickier if the series had run longer, but I think not. The more information that had been created the more options there were for selecting the strongest cord. The chief frustration, as expected, was in not being able to tweak earlier chapters.
The ’memoir’ label suggests an autobiographical element, and this is true, though I am a tad too young to have experienced those kinds of events at that time. Similar things may have occurred to me. Most of the characters were, as usual, amalgamations of several individuals stored in the labyrinth of recollection, but there are a couple lifted pristinely from my memory. There are characters that I wished I had introduced earlier, and one or two that I wish I still knew.
Is the story over? For now. It may return. It may be reworked, extended and appear elsewhere.
All the above illustrations are from the chapters of 13A Bohemia Way. You can read the monthly instalments starting with Mother Eartha.
The email mentioned above was to inform me that my longest, and as yet unseen, short story Livid, is scheduled to feature in a collection to be published by Fly on the Wall Press.
Publication date is 11th October 2024.
Read more about it at Modern Gothic
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