Saga, Series, Roman Fleuve

[sartorias]

Katharine Kerr channels my processWhen I was a kid, I couldn't write short stories because I always thought about "What comes after." When I closed a book, often I wondered about how everyone's life would change; in my stories, I could actually live it by writing it down

Comments

[lyonesse]

*laughs* i TOTALLY sympathize. this why the werewolf novel's sequel is a vampire (sorta) novel, about one of the vampires coyote resurrected -- it was "the thing that happened next" that most interested me at the end of the wearable-wolf bit :)

[sartorias]

Heh! Another whose brain whispers "consequences."

[sartorias]

Oh, yes!

[whswhs]

I run into this, in a sense, in gaming. There are people who can run the same campaign year after year, with the player characters getting more powerful but really having just the same adventures, over and over, whether dungeon crawls or super battles. I haven't even tried to do that in many years; I set up a campaign to last a finite time, most often two years, and in that time, likely as not, irreversible changes take place that make continuing the same story impossible.

[sartorias]

Yeah--I guess it depends what kind of story one likes. Is there pleasure in the same sequences? Or does one crave cause, effect, change?

[whswhs]

It's a problem in comics, too. On one hand, every so often, a comic book kills off a character, sometimes even a major character: The death of Phoenix, the death of Robin (Jason Todd, not Dick Grayson), the death of Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), even the death of Superman. On the other hand, the characters are trademarks that can be lost if they stop being published, and more stories about them can always sell more comics. So there is an incentive to bring dead characters back to life. But the effect has been that no one actually believes a comics character has actually permanently died. So the impact of superhero death stories is much diminished. Superhero universes exist in a kind of unchangeable equilibrium where there are really no more permanent consequences than in Warner Brothers cartoons.

[sartorias]

I was thinking about the comic universe the other day while watching ARROW eps in the hospital. Let me try to get my thoughts more coherent.

[negothick]

oh dearest sartorias, live forever. You help us see the world anew.

[sartorias]

Heh--thanks for the kind thought, but it's really Katharine Kerr who explicates it so well!

Short Stories

[princesselwen]

I understand your problem with short stories. I have only one fairly short one, because most of them tend to stretch out towards the upper-word limit. I find that I just can't fit the reunion of old friends or the quarrel of two brothers into five or six pages!

Re: Short Stories

[sartorias]

Ain't that the truth!

Re: Short Stories

[princesselwen]

I find that I can only write short stories when I'm dealing with characters I created from scratch and a world I don't know all that much about. But the more I know about the characters and their world, the more short stories veer towards the novelette and novella range.

One exception are short stories describing a limited event or episode in the lives of characters that still have a part to play in the greater story. However, even those short stories tend to veer towards novelettes on occasion.

Cora

Re: Short Stories

[sartorias]

Or series? (I read Kurierdinest while sitting in the doctor's office, and thought it was cute!)