Blog of Monica Valentinelli, Writer & Content Consultant

Posted on March 2, 2009 - by Monica Valentinelli

On Writing a Serial Novel

Last Spring, I had announced that I was working on a free urban fantasy website called Violet War. The goal of the website was to promote a series of books I’ve been working on and offer the first draft of the series’ first book (Argentum) for free.

Since starting this project, I’ve found that writing a serial novel comes with its own set of challenges related to the fact that this is a novel of discovery.

In this book, the main character (Sophie Miller) is an exile (think convict) from her magical world. Sophie committed a terrible crime and was later experimented on by the Alchemists then imprisoned by them in a House of Illusion. Those experiments ripped apart her memories, so much so that when the illusion “breaks” she is forced her to deal with the world around her in unusual ways. At first, she doesn’t trust herself but later questions everything she sees.

These questions have turned into information dumps at times, so much so that some chapters rely on discussion rather than action to drive the plot. Fortunately, I’ve been able to catch those moments by sketching out the entire novel from beginning to end. Pacing is really important to me, because as a reader I get very bored when the story doesn’t move, so my chapters are relatively short. They range from one thousand to twenty-five hundred words for that reason.

Another way I’m circumventing those information dumps is by adding chapter breaks which are memories and pieces of info that Sophie knows. Once the “House of Illusion” is broken, she begins to remember bits and pieces of her former life. The things she remembers may seem innocuous at first, but might have a larger impact on the overall story in the end. (*hint*)

Technology has also played a big part in my presentation of this novel. If you look at the physical structure of how Argentum is laid out, you’ll see that there are section breaks in the book. This structure is intentional because of the way this template handles numeric chapters. If I didn’t have a section, then Chapter 10 would have shown up after Chapter 1, which would have made things really confusing for my readers.

I’m pretty excited to have made so much progress on my project this past weekend. This is definitely new territory for me as an author, and I hope you get the chance to read my work.