The Great American Blog Novel

The Smart Set has some interesting ideas for making fiction, and particularly short fiction, work on the internet:

The great American blog novel — yet to be written as far as I know — will not be a novel written on a blog but instead be the blog of a compelling fictional character, or a community of interacting invented literary personas, the online equivalent of the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, who invented poets from various schools with clashing manifestoes. This approach would take fiction back to one its sources in the 17th century, the “jest biography,” such as The Life of Long Meg of Westminster. Somebody wonderful has already done this in comic form with the “blog” of the Incredible Hulk.

Another strategy that publishers could resurrect for digital media is Victorian-style serialization. Episodic structures with very brief chapters for browsing or downloading in bite sized chunks might work well online if they managed to retain the larger shape of a full-blown book. Charging for episodes or individual titles, as Stephen King once tried to do online with “The Plant,” is wrongheaded. An HBO style buffet, or annual subscriptions to an array of publishers, would work much better. In addition, publishers probably ought to consider reviving another old idea — producing preview anthologies with excerpts from their upcoming books as if they were magazines, not just single-publisher PR newsletters like The Borzoi Reader. Made available for free online, these would act like the old Works in Progress and New World Writing to generate pre-publication buzz. The motto of the latter, “Today’s New World Writing Is Tomorrow’s Good Reading for the Millions,” now seems almost unbearably touching, especially when one learns that the 1952 issue peddled works by William Gaddis and Flannery O’Connor: paperback price, fifty cents.

I've long been a fan of the idea that blogs could evolve into serial novels. The trick is to keep each "episode" short and punchy like a blog entry. 200-300 words.