Narrative Poetics Dances A Tango With Publishing Technology

The narrative poetics of comic books are driven by the stories relationship with the physical page. Everything must be in a particular page-count, with each scene allotted a certain number of panels and pages, and certain narrative beats work better at the bottom right of a two-page spread just before we flip the page.

Prose seems like the writing process exists oustide the demands of the page, but that’s a function of distance and changing technology. Consider the description of writing a ten cent library, 20,000 word “nickel novel” from John Milton Edwards’ The Fiction Factory:

The libraries, as they were written by Edwards, were typed on paper 8-1/2″ by 13″, the marginal stops so placed that a typewritten line approximated the same line when printed. Eighty of these sheets completed a story, and five pages were regularly allowed to each chapter. Thus there were always sixteen chapters in every story.

(Edwards, John Milton. The Fiction Factory)

Edwards is one of the pen names for William Wallace Cook, a pulp writer active around 1910 to the early 1920s, responsible for a prodigious output in the twenty-odd years he worked as a full-time writer. A pulp era where the cost-per-page and printing technology constrained word counts to fit the pages available in the publishing format. 

While I’ve never worked in an environment where the relationship between page and prose was quite that explicit, I got started as a prose writer back in 2007, trying to write short stories of 6,000 words or less (and preferably 4,000 words or less). Novellas and novelettes were harder to get published, because so few markets wanted to devote the page count to them (or risk alienating a screen-reader with long walls of text). The ability to tell an evocative tale in 2,000 to 4,000 words was a valuable skill in that environment, and stories went untold because they didn’t fit into that space.

Less so, these days, when stories are increasingly coming out in every conceivable size and format. In recent years the novella have made de a big-time comeback in both digital publication and print, courtesy of ebooks and print-on-demand technology that make them cost effect. The long tail on digital book sales makes even tricky formats, such as the 10,000 word novelette, a surprisingly useful thing for a writer to have on their backlist.

And so the industry shifts on its axis, and the poetics of SF storytelling adjusts itself in subtle ways.