Creative writing can become more fun and exciting when it is published in the form of a serial blog. Each chapter is broken into very small parts, allowing the writer to take a more relaxed pace, while keeping the reader intrigued and coming back for more.
I started writing “Full Time Lara” almost a year ago, a work of fiction about a woman who travels across the country and embarks on one adventure after another. I spent about six months coming up with the plot, the many adventures she gets into, developing the characters, and how many words she would have in each chapter.
So I started writing.
I registered a blog on Blogger and wrote my first chapter. Six months later, I’ve written over 50 chapters, slowly built a small following, and find myself always eager to write more. It’s fun.
Here are some tips I’ve collected…
Adventures seem to make the best series. You have a main character who gets into one situation, gets out, and then gets into another. It just goes on and on. Each situation brings new characters, and each situation brings out a special quality in your main character. If you look at the TV series, the book series, they all have the same format.
Your readers will want a main character who is consistent in their thoughts and actions. Therefore, before you start writing, conceive every fine detail about your main character. It may be helpful to write a dossier on this person, perhaps in MS Word or a text editor. Each chapter you write should stay true to this person’s manners, fears, weaknesses, strengths, and joys. You must create this person’s growth story, what they experienced in their past, and the people who influenced them.
Write twenty to fifty chapters of the series first, before launching your blog. This will help you troubleshoot and illustrate any problems you may experience while typing. In fact, I wrote about thirty chapters in MS Word, and after reading it, it helped me rethink my main character, break chapters into smaller segments, and achieve a comfortable writing pace.
Be absolutely consistent with the frequency of posting. If you are going to post a new chapter every day, absolutely make sure you do it every day. If your readers notice that you post new chapters erratically, they will forget to check your blog.
Post the date of many of your chapters. That is, write several chapters ahead of time and schedule them to be published at a later date. I usually keep ten to twenty chapters written in advance, each scheduled to be released two days apart. That is my posting frequency. That gives me a rolling window of month-long chapters so I can adjust and even rewrite if necessary. It also allows me to take a break from writing without interrupting my readers.
I try to keep each chapter between 500 and 1,000 words. Other serial blogs are less, between 300 to 500 words. But after writing several chapters, I found it comfortable in the 500-1000 word range.
Choose a blog template with a very simple and clean design. You want to choose a template with a larger font, or you should increase the font size if you know how. Avoid templates with bright, distracting colors and graphics. You want to keep readers’ eyes drawn to your story.
Change the tags and headers so your blog doesn’t look like a blog. For example, where my blog listed “Blog Archives,” I changed it to read “Chapters.” Where the blog pagination said “Next Post”, I changed it to say “Next Chapter”. I’ve also removed the date from the post so it doesn’t show and I’ve removed my name from each post.
The title of the blog includes my name “Full Time Lara, by Lara Wellen”, so that it looks like a book.