Series Resources

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED READING

• Robin Laws introduces the idea of the iconic hero in The New Hero anthology introduction, but you can find similar details in the pitch he sent out to prospective contributors that’s been reposted to his blog.
• If the iconic hero model seems like it may be useful, I strongly recommend Laws how-to-plot book, Beating the Story, which is an incredibly underrated book.
• Jason Mittel talks about the three streams of time at work in all stories in Complex TV. While it’s an academic study of the evolving poetics of television narrative, a good deal of it is highly relevant to anyone writing fiction in a digital space.

ARTICLES

• Julie Bosemans article on the rise of Binge Reading and the rapid release of Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X trilogy can be found at the New York Times site.
• There’s a lot of things out there about Serial Box’s background and business model, but the most telling is Constance Grady’s write-up of the company at Vox which starts by detailing her own experience–and dissonance–when encountering books that used a television series structure.
• The folks behind Sterling & Stone have a series of writing guides where they detail their books-as-TV approach to publishing, starting with 2014’s Write. Publish. Repeat.

ESSAYS AND ACADEMIC WRITING

• For a deeper look at how expectations shape our response to fiction, I recommend Kim Wilkins 2005 essay, The Process of Genre: Authors, Readers, Institutions. It may be written for an academic journal, but it’s an incredible crash course on how reader expectations around genre impact our reading of the text.
• Victor Watsons progress, successive, and format approach to series comes from his Series Fiction entry of The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, edited by P. Hunt. You can grab copies in ebook, it comes with a hefty price tag and Watson’s entry is very short. Personally, I’d hit up your local university library and see if they can source a copy for you
• Murray Smith’s excellent breakdown of what really generates empathy can be found in Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and Cinema.