Should I write serial fiction?

I’m thinking about writing some form of serial fiction. It’s been a long time since I’ve written fiction, and partly that’s because my available time to write typically comes in short segments here and there rather than the long focus sessions that I would want. So maybe I need to shake that up, and maybe writing even shorter pieces than a typical short story could be at least a way to get something going.

What is serial fiction?

Once upon a time, serial fiction was very popular. It was another reason to get the newspaper every day, and novels were often published at least in part as serials before they became books. At least for the sake of this post, serial fiction is written-word-only.

Serial fiction is also clearly a work of written fiction, not fiction disguised as something real. So making up AITA posts on Reddit do not count. The people reading serial fiction know they are reading serial fiction.

Writers have been posting serial fiction online since the beginning of the internet. I just need to figure out what I want to get from it, and why.

Why serial fiction?

For many reasons, it’s difficult to imagine today reading a novel a little bit every day in the newspaper. But in 2026, there’s something romantic about the idea of being forced to wait for updates. Binging content had its moment, and it turns out I hate when they release an entire season of a show all at once. It’s nice to be able to talk about a story with others and have everyone at the same point. It’s almost like high school, when only one kid in class read ahead of the assigned chapters.

Comics still work very well online just as they did in newspapers. And just like in newspapers, self-contained episodic comics are generally going to be more popular than serial comics just because each release can be a person’s first point of entry into the artist’s work. I remember that as a kid flipping through the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the coveted color pages were reserved for the kinds of comics someone might cut out and hang on the fridge or work cubicle. But on the inside, there were some black-and-white comic strips that were part of an ongoing serial. I never understood them because I didn’t read the paper every day and so had no idea what was happening in the story.

What do I want from writing serial fiction?

I am not looking to write a novel in serial. I’m not even looking to write a short story I don’t think. But perhaps it’s a way to do character work. In the early days of creative writing school, we were learning about the concept that you don’t just sit down to a blank page and start writing a story. Before you can write, you need to put in the work to create your characters and get to know them. We would quiz each other with random questions, and the goal would be to know your character so well than you could answer any question on behalf of that character wihout hesitation. It should just flow out as easy as if you were answering yourself.

There is no “correct” way to do this pre-writing work, or rather all ways of doing this work are correct if they help you better understand your character. So we had this assignment to do some pre-work on a character in an unusual way and bring it to the next class. I remember I filled out a bunch of those teen magazine quizes in character to learn things like which Backstreet Boy he would be. I was writing a character who was a teenager (as I was at the time), and it turned out to be a very helpful exercize. Not only did it force me to make a bunch of snap decisions on random questions, but it also helped me shape what became a scene of his girlfriend forcing him to take this quiz even though he had no interest in it. I never used that scene in a story, either, but the result of it all was that I had fleshed out both him and his strained relationship that was nearing the end, putting him in a vulnerable spot where he was terrified of leaving his first girlfriend but also miserable about pretending he cares about things like teen quizes. He had been identifying himself so strongly in terms of their relationship, so he didn’t know how to carry himself in the world as just himself. All of that work was important to me, but it wasn’t a great read. The next thing I wrote was the first work of fiction I ever wrote that I was really proud of. It featured my character fresh off a break-up traveling alone to the zoo where he experiences a profound connection with a penguin.

So my vision for this serial fiction project is to regularly publish snapshots of a new character’s life. I hope they are entertaining to read on their own, but they are also a chance to watch a character develop over time. If the character never goes beyond some serial posts online, that’s fine. But if I enjoy writing about them, then I’ll let them take me through a proper short story some day. I have no expectations.

I’ll create a different blog to house this project and will link it here when it is ready.