Have you ever felt the breathless anticipation of seeing the next chapter from your new favourite story drop?

There’s nothing quite like serial fiction. No other kind of story causes such eagerness and intense expectation, so it’s no wonder the medium has been around so long! Many of today’s beloved classics like Little Women and Great Expectations were originally serialised before being compiled into novel format. And if you’re still not sure what serial fiction is, you’ll probably recognise it in its most popular format: TV shows!

However, written serial fiction is certainly making a comeback in the literary world. As we become busier and busier people, the idea of just reading one chapter seems easier than tackling an entire book. Writers can take advantage of this popularity by using serial fiction to get their name out there before committing to a whole book-writing process. Even if your serial fiction is novel length, many people find it easier to keep up with a weekly chapter posting schedule than a rigorous book writing schedule.

But before you run off to jot down your new serial fiction idea, stick with me to find out what it takes to create a great serialised fiction story.

The Missing Piece of Serial Fiction

Pantsers and plotters alike, hear me out: You have to plan your story in advance. The rise of serial fiction also means the rise of many people doing it badly—including myself, as I’ll share later!

The number one issue with serial fiction is a lack of plotting. Maybe it’s because the writer pantsed a novel before. Maybe they’re so excited to publish a story that they post the first chapter without thinking. Serial fiction is dangerously easy to start, but if you jump in without a plan, your story will likely fall apart. (I didn’t mean for that to rhyme, but there you go, now it’s easier to remember!)

The Right Way to Start a Serialised Fiction Story

In my experience, a serialised fiction story usually starts with writing the first chapter. But before you click “publish,” take at least another day or more (depending on the story’s length) to plan. This obviously looks a lot like planning a novel, but the amount of detail all depends on your goals for the story (where you’re posting it, if you eventually want to publish it, if it’s for a competition of some kind, etc.) and how long it is. The only serial fiction I write is short stories, so the planning doesn’t take nearly as long as it does for a novel.

Just as a baseline, here are some of the first things I consider when planning a short story:

• What’s the logline? 
• How will my main character grow? 
• What will happen at the beginning, middle, and end? 
• What’s the theme? 
• How many chapters will it be?

How to Plan a Serialised Short Story

We all have our own plotting methods, but the questions above are a great place to start. After that, it’s up to you to use whatever method you find helpful. Save the Cat, Story Grid, the Three Act Structure, and Hero’s Journey are some of the most popular ones; if you want to know more about any one of these, make sure to check out my Resources page!

Personally, I find I don’t need nearly as much planning structure for short stories as I do for novels. My main issue with novels is figuring out the middle of the book, but since the middle is so truncated in a short story, my idea is usually pretty fleshed out to begin with. My method is often as simple as writing a brief description of what happens in each chapter, including snippets of dialogue or any other details I think of along the way.

Here’s an example from my current serialised story, The Bend in the Road (caution: spoilers for the next chapter—or a sneak peek, depending on how you look at it):

What Doesn’t Work in Serial Fiction

• Planning as you write 
• Planning one chapter ahead 
• Not planning at all

Not planning ahead is especially bad in serial fiction because you don’t have the chance to edit it later. With novels, even if you’re more of a pantser, you go through an editing phase where you edit the story as a whole. With serialised fiction, though, you’re often only writing one chapter at a time. (You can, of course, write the whole story and then post it one chapter at a time, but then most people just post it as one short story. Usually, people write serialised fiction because you can write and publish a little bit at a time.) This means that if you don’t plan from the start and the story changes at the end or there’s an issue with continuity, too bad!

I learned this the hard way with a serialised story I wrote many years ago. I had a great idea and got really excited about posting it, so I wrote the first chapter and published it just like that. I kept writing and writing and. . . Uh-oh. What was the climax going to be? I realised that I’d written the whole story for the sake of one scene that was an important beat for the theme and characters, but certainly not the plot! After I wrote that one scene, the plot wasn’t going anywhere. I hadn’t set it up enough in the beginning. In the end, I managed to pull something together, but the story certainly wasn’t as good as it could have been. All I would have had to do was spend just a few hours on planning.

Guarantee Your Serialised Story’s Success

Is it possible to create a great serialised fiction story without plotting? Sure it is, but more often than not, choosing to skip the planning stage makes your story fall flat. The best stories are crafted with intention, so spend those few extra hours to give your story a solid foundation.

Not sure how to plot a story? Want to know more about serialised fiction? Drop a comment or schedule a free book coaching consultation! I can help you create your story from the ground up.

Happy writing!
—E.J.

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Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash