Okay, aside from the obvious. I was talking to a friend of mine today
about Solo Media and what we plan to do. She is a voracious reader,
and she admitted that she would be “bugged” by serials. She has no
problem reading a novel in a couple days, and having to wait a month
between chapters would drive her nuts. She’d have trouble keeping the
story straight in her head before the next issue came out.
“Why would that be?” I asked. “People have no problem doing the same
thing with television.”
She brought up an interesting point. TV is a passive, “alpha state”
medium. It’s like a play, everything laid out in front of you to see.
You don’t have to imagine anything, just sit back and let it all wash
over you. Reading, on the other hand, is more active. You have to
imagine the setting, someone’s hair color. You have to imagine the
action, the special effects. While this is something I’ve long loved
about prose, that a good SF book has an effects budgets Lucas can’t
hope to match, it does mean that there’s more neuron-work involved in
reading than watching.
The question then, is whether that works for or against us in a serial
format. My friend thinks it works against us, because the reader has
to constantly break up and then re-establish that world every month,
like creating a set to film a TV show, only to tear it down at the end
of filming and rebuild it next week. I think it works for us, in that
it gives the audience a stronger connection and sense of ownership to
the work, more incentive to come back next month. It’s easy to set
aside a TV show if you have something else to do, since you didn’t
help create it. Reading is more participatory, and I think that will
help establish loyalty to the story.
Who’s right?
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