A Brief Tutorial on Serial Storytelling

By no means is this article definitive, it's just what I've observed and learned over the last several years. Feel free to ask questions and leave comments!

Telling a story is something we are all good at. This is why we became writers in the first place. We have good ideas, good plots, and good characters. And we enjoy translating these thing down onto paper. However, sometimes we stay confined in our own little writing comfort zones. There’s more than one way to tell a story and this is often lost, even upon experienced writers. Storytelling is definitely an art, and there are many ways to approach this. Serial storytelling is very different from what we might be used to, but this doesn’t mean we should avoid telling our stories this way. Varying your method of telling a story can be a great way to find a new audience.

Serial storytelling has one big difference from your standard novel: the story is broken up in to several sections and each is published separately. Your story is told over the course of many different publications, and this means you will have to approach it differently. 

You need to approach each segment of your story as if it were a standalone piece. For example, your second installment needs to assume that at least some of your readers are finding your work for the first time—even though it might be the middle of the piece. Assuming that your reader is just beginning the piece is a tough thing to do, but there are a few simple things that you can add to your story in order to accomplish this. Having excitement and action throughout the piece is an easy way out here. Instead of bogging your story down in description and detail, keep the plot progressing.

I have been writing comic books for about 7 years now. These might not be considered the most reputable of literary works in many circles, but they are one of the most obvious places where serial storytelling comes into play. Think about the Spider-Man comics you read when you were younger. It wasn’t necessary for you to read all the back issues to enjoy the story. If you’re like I was, you only read the comics that you bought when you had saved up your allowance long enough to get an issue. This wasn’t exactly the most conducive way to immerse myself in the overall storyline, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the story that I did read. To enjoy serial fiction, you don’t need to read the whole story. It helps, but it shouldn’t be the only way to enjoy the story.

So you want to tell your story, but you want to tell your story so that people will enjoy it and understand it from wherever they begin it. Having story arcs inside other arcs is key here. You want to tell your story, but you need to make sure that there are stories within the story, too. 

The hardest part of serial storytelling is that you need to keep your plot advancing. It’s really easy to write a bunch of short stories and string them together. This is a good thing, but the pitfall is that you need to keep the plot moving forward. For a true serial story, the next issue of your story needs to take the story further. My favorite trick for accomplishing this is to tie up loose ends at a later point.

Here’s an example. My work in progress starts with a full chapter as the first installment. In this chapter, we are introduced to the main character and the main plot line. However, the second installment has no mention of these things at all. Still, this subplot is important down the road because the characters and plot revealed in installment #2 is an important part of the ending of the story. Installment #3 goes back to the main characters and then #4 briefly hints at the connection between the two story lines and the reader starts to understand how they relate. They aren’t yet connected, but there is a thread that makes the reader say “Aha!” 

Each installment on its own is a complete story, but it’s when they are read sequentially—as a piece of serial storytelling—that the reader truly appreciates the story as a whole. 

Of course, that’s my hope anyway. It’s still a work and progress, of course, but this is the formula I am attempting to follow.