Dennis franz dead or alive9/12/2023 ![]() In any case, serialization meant that novels used to be more like the present day television series, which have become less episodic and more concerned with seasonal or series-long story “arcs”. And sometimes a change might not be because it’s “better” but simply because someone feels it will sell better. She’s quoted as saying the new ending was the better one, but I wonder if there are good or even great novels that didn’t get published because authors were sure they knew best. When it was picked up by an established publisher, she was forced to change the ending. Lisa Geneva, the author of Still Alice, initially self-published her bestseller about a professor with early onset Alzheimer’s. Do the people pushing a writer for changes always know best? And best for whom? Maybe yes, maybe no. It’s not like the process (these days) where, by the time a novel gets to publication, decisions have been made that may be very different from what the writer originally envisioned. Working with these deadlines, I doubt authors - especially established ones - got too much interference from newspaper editors and publishers, who were probably relieved when an installment was in time, and didn’t get too involved in content. That may be why we find so many cases of “is he or isn’t he dead” in so many old novels. What did this mean for the stories? For one thing it meant that if the author killed off a character, and the audience got angry about it, there wasn’t much that could be done - unless of course the character had perished in a shipwreck or something and the body hadn’t been found. If a series was popular, the author was encouraged to keep it going and stretch it out, which is why some of these classics are very, very, long. Some of the classics were written as complete novels and broken up, but many ( Count of Monte Cristo to name one) were actually written serially, with authors scrambling to get chapters in on time for the next publication. Was it like with network shows where if the ratings weren’t at a certain level pretty damn quick the editor would pull the plug? Did writers beg? Did they suddenly decide to kill someone off or have a heroine get kidnapped to add some spice? ![]() I wonder how many were canceled and never completed because readers lost interest? Besides the classics, there are probably a ton of long forgotten serials. My husband is off on an adventure, so I imagined explaining to him when he gets back, “Since we’re not using those mugs for anything, we might as well just replace broken ones with them!” He would say, “Oh honey!” in that way he does, which basically means, “You’re not a failure to me.” And it’s awesome I have that.īut then I asked myself: What on earth (aside from the MFA from Sarah Lawrence) made me think I could just hall off and publish my novel without a team of editors to tell me to change it? The arrogance!Īnd then I thought about how novels used to be written in olden times, and how it was probably easier to get published on account of not everyone in the world thought he or she could write a novel, and how a lot of the classics were serialized in newspapers. I thought, “We can’t just keep buying more mugs.” I have some mugs I had made to promote Blood Diva, a near-porn, vampire, novel I self-published years ago, which didn’t exactly become the next big thing. ![]() Some bottles fell into the sink, smashing the mug. I had rearranged some spices on a shelf above the sink.
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