The Internet: a novel approach

AS a writer, I’ve often wondered what it would have been like to live during the Great Age of the Novel. A century and a half ago, novels were the supreme form of public entertainment, consumed and discussed the way television series are today. Readers in faraway New York clamored at the docks to greet the arrival, by ship, of the latest installment from Charles Dickens to learn the fate of Little Nell.

Today’s novelists often feel like the last manufacturers of buggy whips. Alone in their rooms, facing the blank stare of empty computer screens and the unwelcoming economics of contemporary publishing, they must confront the truth that even quite a successful book will not be read by more than a comparative handful of people. How many times have they been told the novel is dead -- and that television and movies have killed it?

And yet the same technological progress that threatened to finish off the novel may now be restoring it to life. Instead of delivering the final blow, the Internet has provided novelists with a miraculous vehicle to deliver their work to millions of readers around the planet. Not just as books to be downloaded or privately forwarded to friends, the cyber-version of vanity publishing, but written the way Dickens did, in serial form, with new chapters posted weekly to a large and eager audience.

My novel “amanda bright @ home” became the first ever to be serialized by the Wall Street Journal. Chapter 1 was published in the paper’s “Personal Journal” section in May 2001. The remainder was posted on the Journal’s Web site, OpinionJournal.com, a chapter a week over the summer. The editors hoped that by publishing fiction, they might attract the elusive female reader, who is less likely to surf “news and content” Web sites than her male counterpart. From the editors’ point of view, it was a relatively inexpensive experiment; they did not have to commit costly print pages. I could write as long -- or as short -- as I wished, right up to the weekly midnight deadline.

Of course, this new opportunity came with an obligation, the same one Dickens gladly accepted: to be entertaining and interesting, to describe the world as it is, to write for readers and not yourself. In that sense, it was much more like writing for television than for, say, Art.

For me, the opportunity was irresistible; the obligation was exactly what I wanted to tackle. My novel dealt with an unexpected social trend of the booming 1990s: Women of my post-feminist generation who had been raised to pursue careers suddenly were chucking their executive-track positions, having babies and returning to the home. Unfortunately, they had not in any way prepared themselves for at-home motherhood. Having made the big decision to quit work, they often seemed as stranded with their children as a lifelong city dweller who sells his condo to take up organic farming. And so was born my character, Amanda Bright, a formerly ambitious career-woman-turned-housewife, who is slowly and comically going out of her mind trying to adapt to at-home marriage and motherhood. It doesn’t help that her husband, an idealistic young government lawyer, is at the very same moment assigned the case of his career -- an antitrust suit against the biggest software company on the planet -- which makes him briefly famous (in that Washington talking-head sort of way).

I was thrilled when the Journal signed on to the story. (The antitrust angle probably didn’t hurt.) But once the deal was done, I faced a horrible new problem: I actually had to write the thing -- and at a faster pace than I had ever had to write before. I had 16 weeks to tell a story. In Internet time, a week between postings is an eternity. People forget. Despite the success of other modern-day serials (“Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Sex and the City” both began as newspaper serials), I was haunted by the sheer novelty of the experiment: We can’t wait to see what happens next to “The Sopranos.” Yet who today would bother to follow an Internet “book” over the course of many months?

Fortunately, I didn’t have time to worry. Armed with a slender outline, I sat down to write the first chapter, and then the next ... and the next. Between chapters, I had dinner to fix, kids to pick up, groceries to buy. I began with a three-week lead on the serial, but within a month, the margin of safety had shrunk to nothing. I was finishing chapters with minutes to spare. There is nothing like having to produce a new chapter every week to banish any pretensions you might cling to as a Novelist.

There was no time for Angst. No time for Writer’s Block. No time for sighing meaningfully, sipping a cup of tea and staring out the window, wondering if the words I’d just written were Really Me as a Writer. Instead, as deadline approached, I’d start receiving anxious e-mails from the editor (“WHERE IS AMANDA????”) -- and off the chapter would go.

Once I hit my stride -- writing as many as 5,000 to 6,000 words a week -- I began to understand why Dickens and company produced novels this way. The deadline pressure forces you to produce; the need to keep up interest forces you to keep the story moving and lively, and to create characters that are relevant and true.

The response to “Amanda” was both instantaneous and overwhelming. From the moment my pages were posted, first on the Journal’s site, then on that of Canada’s National Post newspaper, I began to hear from a live, worldwide audience. I received e-mails from readers as far away as Australia. Suddenly I was not alone in my study. Tens of thousands of people were reading my novel and their responses assured me that Amanda was becoming a real and vivid person to them. They identified with Amanda and followed her ups and downs the way they would a friend’s. Readers would offer advice: Why doesn’t Amanda do this or that? or When I was at home with my children, I found it helpful to do such-and-such. In turn, I came to rely upon readers -- especially those who posted comments weekly. I remember in particular one Alice Felt, of Walla Walla, Wash., always the first to post her comments (as if she were poised at her computer at 9 p.m. Pacific time, waiting for the new chapter to appear). Their reactions helped me to gauge whether I was getting the pace and characters right, and I began to factor their feelings into the story: Would they like this? Will this upset them? Will they believe this? What will Alice Felt say? Thanks to the immediacy of the Internet, I was not left wondering long.

By the time the serial ended, I’d sold the book in hardcover to Warner Books. I began to rewrite -- and boy, did it need rewriting. Edith Wharton used to wince over her hastily written drafts that had first seen print as magazine serials. When asked what she did to revise them for publication in book form, she said, “I am engaged in the wholesale slaughter of adjectives.” As I revised, I kept in mind the hundreds of comments and criticisms I received over the 16 weeks.

I’m now writing a second novel. This one I think I will do the regular way; a third baby prevents me from taking on the stress of a serial, at least this time. But, my goodness, will I miss the thrill of it -- not to mention the weekly letters of encouragement from Alice Felt, to whom I’ve promised the first signed copy of “Amanda.”