Blog Fiction Typology Discussion

A detailed summary of our most current typology can be found here.

We think it's useful to examine the place of blog-novels in the larger scheme of blog fiction, serialized fiction, and online fiction in general. Not because we want to put any author into a pigeonhole or stifle their creativity, but to set up a framework for further discussion.

Our starting point is folks who have looked into this topic from an academic perspective, starting with a 2005 paper by Angela Thomas.

In a blog entry in May of 2005, Betsy Friedrich commented on the terms defined in Thomas's paper:

• Serialized Fiction: Lots of authors have recognized the wonder of the internet as a free publishing tool. These blogs don't necessarily use the blog as a form. Some aren’t even in first person. I suppose someone could blog in the third person, but I think one criteria of blogs is some perceived connection between the narrator/protagonist and the author. It’s great that authors are using blogs to publish their fiction independently, but I think we need to make a distinction between blogs that have fiction in them and fictional blogs.


• Commercial Blogs: This refers to marketing stratgies that utilize blogs. For example, the Captain’s Blog from Captain Morgan's Rum. This is a fictional blog, a blog written by a fictional character, but somehow I feel like intent makes it something different than fictional blogs. The intent here is to sell a product. The story is a by-product of that marketing strategy, rather than the goal itself.


• Contained Story: This is what I think of as a true fictonal blog and deserving of the term. The author has created characters and a world for them. They use the blog as a form, at least to some extent. The blog exists on it’s own, it doesn't rely on any other person's creation to exist.


• Interactive Role Playing: A great grandchild of D&D, in these blogs authors take on a character and maintain that character while interacting with other characters. A fascinating idea, but again, I think it’s more than a fictional blog and the term doesn't do it justice. Maybe they could be called Blog RPGs? Sort of sterile, but at least it’s descriptive.


• Character Diary: In these blogs the author has used a character from an existing work of fiction or from real life and made a blog for that person. For example, Darth Vader's blog. The author found an existing character and is writing a diary for them (which happens to be hilarious, by the by, if you're a Star Wars fan.) Another blogger did his research and wrote a blog as if he were Julius Caeser- another existing "character" that the author liked enough blog as. There are also lots of character diaries surrounding Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek. Some character diaries can be really great, but like the other forms, I think they are different than fictional blogs and need their own name.

Friedrich developed her views further in a 2006 thesis and other blog posts such as this one from February 2006:

As I may have said at some point in this blog, I'd like to focus on fictional blogs written in the first person, what I've called a contained story. This is different from people who write fan fiction or short stories which they then publish in blogs. I'm most interested in journals by fictional characters that utilize the format of a blog in some way.

That said, I've been thinking of a second distinction in fictional blogs. There is a difference, I think, between what I call character blogs and narrative blogs. A character blog is heavily based on a fictional character and their daily life. Examples would be God's Blog http://bigoldgod.blogspot.com/, and American Short-Timer americanshort-timer@blogspot.com.

A narrative blog tells a story. It has a beginning and end; there are plot points. It is probably not about the minutia of someone's daily life because that does not make a very interesting story. Examples are Transplanted Life http://transplantedlife.blogspot.com, and Simon of Space http://simonofspace.blogspot.com- the blog I've been reading the most of lately.

I hadn't previously made this distinction, though it seems obvious now- especially since so much between the two is different. The motivations for writing, the process, the readership, all of these are going to depend on whether it is a character blog or narrative blog.

This is our best understanding of Friedrich's circa-2006 typology of blog fiction:



This is a great framework to build on, and future blog-fickers will be indebted to this pioneering analysis. As for our own initial ideas on the subject, we humbly offer a few small revisions.

• First, we're expanding the chart upward to show it in a greater context of online storytelling. Blog fiction is online storytelling that uses a blogging platform, possibly including multimedia elements, hyperlinks, and a commenting system. Other ways to tell a story online include podcasting, webcomics, and forums.


• Second, we're trying to find a better home on the chart for the commercial fiction category, if it even needs to be culled out at all. We disagree with the principle of mixing story content or author intent into the discussion of story format. It would be like saying a movie isn't really a movie if it includes product placements, which many of them do. Or that a book like The Devil Wears Prada isn't really a book because there's a product name in the title. And if we start by excluding commercial fiction, we might also exclude stories that support a political viewpoint, or ones that have a moral lesson, or ones that make us think about philosophical issues, and pretty soon all that's left is bland and mindless. We're keeping the "Commercial Fiction" box on the chart for now, but we're not happy about it.


• Third, we're making a distinction between narrative blogs that unfold in real time and those that don't. We think there's a major difference between how readers interact with these stories and we're also a little biased because our story is one of those real-time types.

So this is where we were in July of 2008:



Additional discussion since then has revolved around where blog-novels, as we like to call them, fit into the chart.

The original consensus of our group was that the real-time element was required, putting them into that bottom left box. Subsequently we've come across some asynchronous blog-novels that work very well in their time frame (and we've taken to calling them "asynchronous" instead of "non-real time" because it's less contrived and more cool sounding that way).

Blog-novels are now synonymous with narrative blogs.

We've added fraud blogs onto the chart, to indicate blogs that present themselves as factual but are really works of fiction. There have been a number of these that have become popular and celebrated, only to have readers throw a fit when they discover that the author is not actually dying of cancer, working as a call-girl, or whatever. It's the same problem we've seen with memoirs that turn out to be fictional or highly embellished--people don't like it when their fact and fiction mix without adequate warning.

Interactive Role Playing is now known as Role Playing Blogs, or RPBs, on our chart--a slight improvement though I'm sure the people who do them probably have a name that's cooler and more descriptive.

Also gone are Character Diaries from Fictional and Non-Fictional Sources. If they're fictional, we're calling them Derived Blogs. If they're non-fictional, we're calling them Fake Blogs--like the Fake Blog of Steve Jobs or the Fake Blog of Dick Cheney.



We'll continue to add to the discussion draft until we come up with more ideas, which we probably will.

Who's in the Giant Girl Creative Team?

"Giant Girl Rampages" is conceived and written by a team of four published authors with a combined total of 27 years experience writing for children and young adults. Together we have fifteen novels and non-fiction books to our credit.

We've come together to create an innovative story using web technology, instant-publishing, and real-time storytelling techniques. We call our project a blog-novel and, as far as we can tell, ours is the first ever to be written for specifically middle-graders or teens. We estimate an equal chance of this project either failing spectacularly or succeeding beyond our wildest dreams.

Our publishing houses and literary agents are not involved in this project and, at the moment, have no idea what we're up to. Therefore, we are required to be stealthy and anonymous for at least a while longer.

What is Melly's Posting Schedule?

The goal we've set this story is for new blog entries to be posted on most weekdays, sometimes twice. So far the Giant Girl Creative Team has been able to drop a post or two on every weekday since the story started, so hooray for us! If we space on a weekday or two in the future, don't be surprised--those are days when Melly is just too busy to blog.

We're experimenting now with a main daily post that drops at 11AM Central Time, which makes it possible to drop a bonus post a few hours before or afterward. We're not expecting to do more than two posts in any given day.

Also, Melly takes the weekends off and so should you!

What is a Blog-Novel?

There are lots of blog/novel hybrids out there that could legitimately be called blog-novels. Some are paper-printed novels that imitate the journal-entry format of a blog. Some are traditionally-written novels serialized to the web using blogging software. And some are blog posts collected into print volumes.

Our definition is... A blog-novel is a traditionally-structured work of fiction published online in real time as a standalone blog. This requires all six of the following elements:

1. A blog-novel is traditionally-structured with a clearly-intended beginning, a clearly-intended middle, and (if the story is not still being written or on a clearly-intended hiatus) a clearly-intended ending. Structure is what distinguishes a blog-novel from unstructured blog-fiction and blogs of genuinely unstructured life.
   
   
2. A blog-novel is a work of fiction and would be unmistakably fictional to a casual reader. Disclaimers are provided that the story is fictional, or enough fantastical elements are included to make it totally obvious. This requirement excludes works that are presented as factual, just as memoirs are distinguished from works of fiction, and for the same reason: Readers feel deceived when they take a work as fact and later discover it's not real, and pissing off your readers is just bad form.
   
   
3. A blog-novel is published online. This requirement excludes works in print or other media that merely co-opt the formatting and sensibilities of a blog.
   
   
4. A blog-novel is published in real time with a one-to-one time scale so that time passes between posts at the same rate for the characters as it does for the reader. The story might not necessarily take place in the same year, century, or universe the readers are in, but if a week passes between posts for the reader it should be a week later for the characters as well. And if there's ever a six-month gap between posts, there had better be a darn good in-story explanation!!!
   
   
5. A blog-novel stands alone so that the blog or blogs that make up the narrative contain all the information required for a reader to understand the story. This requirement excludes blog-fiction in which required plot points are given in another medium, such as blogs by fictional TV characters who merely comment on events taking place in their shows. A blog-novel may adapt stories from television shows, movies, manga, comics, and print novels, or may incorporate characters from other sources, as long as the resulting story can be read and enjoyed by an audience unfamiliar with the source material. A blog-novel can also be adapted into another medium without losing its blog-novel status. This definition also excludes blog-fiction used as just one element of an immersive story environment in which vital plot points may be provided by forums, social media, traditional websites, email, or instant message.
   
   
6. A blog-novel is published as a blog: i.e., as a first person narrative from a character or characters who intend to be writing journal entries and who mean for those journal entries to be viewed by the general public. Blogs are linear, serialized, epistolary, and interactive, with the possibility for including multimedia elements.

Blog-novels have their roots in eighteenth century pamphleteering and the serialized publication of fictional works from the eighteenth century to the present day, such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67), many of Charles Dickens' novels, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series, and Henry James' The Ambassadors (1903, with each of its twelve parts appearing in The North American Review before being published as a whole that same year).

Is Melly For Real?

"Giant Girl Rampages" is the story of Melly Mills, a fifteen-year-old with a problem fitting in--mainly because she's approaching eighteen feet tall! This story is a work of fiction. It takes place in a world that defies the laws of physics and biology as we understand them. If the story were printed on paper sheets and glued into a cardboard cover we'd know how to react to it, because we're all used to visiting the world of books and returning to our own world without blurring the line between the two.

But instead of being fixed in a static book, Melly's story is unfolding in real time, in first person narrative, in an interactive medium most people use to convey facts or honestly-held opinions--the blog. And a funny thing happens when a story is told through a blog. Readers experience the blog-novel at the same pace as their lives, they gain the ability to communicate with at least one of the characters, and the line between reality and fiction fades away.

In the blog format, Melly's voice seems more immediate, personal, and trustworthy. Is she reliable enough to make the outrageous events of "Giant Girl Rampages" seem like they're really happening? We wouldn't have thought so, but readers have surprised us by treating Melly like a real person despite her impossible height. They give her unsolicited advice in their blog comments, ask questions about her life, and explain how their own experiences relate to hers.

The blog-novel exists in an electronic environment where readers and characters interact, and in that environment Melly Mills is as real as anybody else. She believes in her existence as strongly as anybody else. And if you accuse her of being fictional, be prepared to prove that you're not just a figment of her imagination.