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What do science fiction classics like Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, Simak's City, and Sturgeon's More Than Human have in common? Each of them is a "fix-up" - a novel constructed out of short stories that were previously published on their own. "This used to be one standard way to write a science fiction novel—publish a series of stories that all take place in the same world, and then knit them together into a book," says Charlie Jane Anders. "Sometimes a great deal of revision happened, to turn the separate stories into a single narrative and make sure all the threads joined up. Sometimes, the stories remain pretty separate but there are links between them."
The Golden Age science fiction publishing market was heavily geared towards magazines and short stories. And then suddenly, there was this huge demand for tons of novels. According to Andrew Liptak this left many science fiction authors caught in a hard place: Many had come to depend on the large number of magazines on the market that would pay them for their work, and as readership declined, so too did the places in which to publish original fiction. The result was an innovative solution: repackage a number of preexisting short stories by adding to or rewriting portions of them to work together as a single story. There's also something kind of beautiful about a novel in stories says Anders. You get more narrative "payoff" with a collection of stories that also forms a single continuous meta-story than you do with a single over-arching novel—because each story has its own conclusion, and yet the story builds towards a bigger resolution. Fix-ups are a good, representative example of the transition that the publishing industry faced at the time, and how its authors adapted concludes Liptak. "It’s a lesson that’s well-worth looking closely at, as the entire publishing industry faces new technological challenges and disruptions from the likes of self-publishing and micro-press platforms."
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Saturday March 14 2015, @04:57AM
The story is conceived as a coherent whole, and then the parts were written to tight deadlines.
More likely they were just written as they went along. Especially Dickens, he was never too complex.
Mysteries are the only genera where you have to conceive the whole story ahead of time and then back-seed clues into the earlier chapters.
The best way to see fix ups is to find the original stories, and see what they became when stitched together.
But not a lot of the originals survived, because nobody thought the cheap rags they were published in were often not taken seriously, weren't archived, or the archives died when the publication died. Often these stories didn't even all appear in a the same publication, as the authors would sell a story here and another one there, etc.
Then when the novel came out the scattered short stories forgotten.
There were some authors that had novels before they were popular that serialized them - the reverse process of a fix-up. Joe Halderman was known to do this.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday March 14 2015, @07:13PM
The story is conceived as a coherent whole, and then the parts were written to tight deadlines.
More likely they were just written as they went along. Especially Dickens, he was never too complex.
Well, yes. But there's a difference between writing a first chapter of something you intend to become a novel and writing a short story.
When you write a first chapter you are introducing situations that you intend to explore further. You usually have some idea where the further exploration will go. You have no intention of resolving in the first chapter the issues you raise. You deliberately leave loose ends, and sometimes even a cliffhanger.
When you are writing a short story, you intend that story to be the whole, complete thing. You may discover later that the characters and situations you introduced are capable of bearing another story, while writing the first story, that's not your focus.
Mysteries are the only genera where you have to conceive the whole story ahead of time and then back-seed clues into the earlier chapters.
True. It is said that when writing a mystery it does help a lot to know whodunit. Still, there are mystery authors who say that the only way that they can keep focussed on writing day by day is that they want to find out whodunit.
There are two kinds of writers, sometimes called the outliners and the pantsers (this is probably excessively binary -- there are lots of blends).
The outliners prepare a detailed outline for the whole novel before they start, and then proceed to write the text.
The pantsers write by the seat of their pants, so to speak. They set up an initial situation in the first chapter or two, and proceed from there inventing everything as they go along. Pantsers usually discover at the end of the first draft that they have to rewrite the whole thing because it has become an incoherent mess. It's almost as if the first draft of maybe upwards of hundred thousand words is more like a detailed outline for them. Rewrite can be drastic. Entire chapters and plot arcs mowed down and replaced by others.
Outliners often find that their characters misbehave and don't do what they are intended to do. They have to revise the outline as they go along to compensate.
That said, in either mode, it's not unusual for a novel to go through many, many drafts.
My hat is off to those, like Dickens, that can do this in one draft, start to finish, chapter by chapter, without the story becoming gibberish. I suspect such writers do have an outline in mind.
But I do believe that for most writers the two modes of writing in the OP -- all-at-once, and sequence of loosely related short stories -- are different in nature. If nothing else each short story will go through all its drafts before publication separately from the next
-- hendrik.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday March 14 2015, @09:34PM
All good stuff....
Also the Outliners these days tend to use authoring software (not talking about a word processor here) that helps them organize ideas, earl-seed facts that become important later, etc.
Frojack's general rule of novels, is if the name of the AUTHOR is printed way way bigger than the title of the novel on the jacket, chances are they are a formula writer using authoring software. You can sometimes spot these authors because they introduce so many characters that are not germane to the story.
There dozens of the writing tools, see http://creative-writing-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ [toptenreviews.com] for some paid ones, but there are freeware versions as well.
You wonder if manual versions of these existed for writers in past centuries.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday March 29 2015, @12:56AM
Thanks for the link to the writing tools reviews. Not that I'm likely to buy any of them, because they don't run on Linux. Scrivener, the one my friends who have written books recommend, isn't even on the list.
But I am interested in free software for this purpose, to the extent that I've been thinking of writing some myself. There's a nice collection of program features mentioned in the various reviews.
Some of these features could be implemented by clever design and writing code. Others are data bases (such as the data base of names of various nationalities), which are perhaps better crowdsourced or ignored altogether.
Anyway, thanks for the link. It'll be useful.
-- hendrik