As promised, we’re going to take a quick look at the blognovel plan b today and analyze some of Diego Doval’s narrative choices that I think were ingredients in his success with this experiment.
One quick caveat: When I think of blognovels, I’m specifically referring to narratives that clearly represent themselves as stories rather than fictional blogs, where the blog itself, the supposed writer and the daily situations are treated as though they’re “real”, but are actually fictional creations from top to bottom. Nothing wrong with that, of course, just not what I’m particularly interested in.
Okay, so what is plan b exactly? The Guardian describes it thusly: “An episodic office comedy that took readers into the mind of a stressed cubicle jockey.” I personally would call it a dark comedy, but we won’t quibble.
In plan b, Doval was kind enough to give us some insight into purpose:
Stories usually have a strong element of time built into them, just like a weblog. A weblog, however, is a story where the beginning changes every day: what we see is the last element that was posted. The question that Plan B is trying to answer is: is it possible to create a story that makes sense, keeps the reader engaged, and yet can be “consumed” in bits and pieces, maybe even in any order?
Serialization is not a unique concept. A great deal of Charles Dickens’ success was due to serialization of his novels in magazines. (In fact, if you read Dickens carefully, it’s pretty obvious that he’s writing for serialization rather than just chunking his text to fit an inch allotment.)
Plan b‘s serial format is unique in that the author expects to attract readers over time, and due to the nature of blog design, understands that most of those readers will be introduced to the text in midstream. He can almost count on the fact that the reader isn’t going to have enough investment initially to dial all the way back to the beginning just to catch up to the current day’s post. So every new installment has to be treated as an in medias res introduction. Where the story is self-referential, it needs to by hyperlinked to the appropriate passage.
I think this is very clever, personally, but is also the same sort of funny-one-time cleverness that illuminates something like Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller. I’m not sure that it means anything for blognovels in general. Once we’ve seen a narrative trick often enough, the storytelling becomes about the trick itself rather than the story…which isn’t really the point of writing the story down in the first place.
(Editorial aside: I’ve had this really “clever” idea for awhile to build an interactive website that seems to tell one type of story, but which actually tells a completely different and vaguely dystopian story in the programmer comments in the code [viewable via right click > "View Source"]. While I think that would be fun, it’s also somewhat gimmicky and I’d have to be much more organized than I normally am to carry it off well. Bottom line is that I appreciate a well-executed gimmick as well as the next guy, but I wouldn’t want to have to View Source on every literary web page I visit in the future just to feel like I’m not missing part of an inside joke. That would just piss me off after awhile.)
Asides aside, there are a few things I want to pick out of Doval’s narrative. Note that none of these things have anything to do with plot or with how compelling the story and/or the characters are. It’s all about technique.
- Minimal Daily Investment – The entries are brief. Most of these clock in at well under 500 words. Regular readers can consume a new episode in five minutes per day.
- Intimate Style – Doval is writing in first person, present tense narrative, almost as though the action is unfolding as the story is told/typed. In a medium where we’re used to people revealing intimate details about their lives to an anonymous audience (i.e., the blog), plan b presents itself almost as stream of consciousness voyeurism.
(I’m not going to argue this point, so we’ll just stipulate it: blogs are a semi-sexualized form of digital exhibitionist/voyeuristic symbiosis. Argue if you want, but I’m right on this one.)
- Humor – It’s a comedy. Comedy works better on the internet because (ideally) it doesn’t require as much thought from the user to be appreciated. This shouldn’t be construed as a slam against comedians or comedy writers. Well executed funny is hard.
- Immediacy – Something new happens every day. No dry exposition, no backstory. Each episode stands alone and describes a particular event. It may be part of a daisy chain of events, yes, but each event in and of itself is discrete (which gets back to the whole in medias res discussion above).
Those are all good reasons for plan b to work. In essence, what Doval is giving us is a story that follows the conventions of blogging (i.e., a glimpse into the daily personal life of a complete stranger with [supposedly] their normal socially appropriate filters turned off). Blogs are, in essence, conversations that begin with “Let me tell you about my day…” or “This is what I’m thinking right now…”. Plan b mimics that dynamic and, I think, does a pretty good job of it.
The problem, of course, is that what works for plan b doesn’t necessarily work for anything else.
(NB: And maybe I’m missing the point entirely. After spending more time with the blogged Dracula link from yesterday, I’m forced to ask: What if blogfiction isn’t really anything new at all, but rather just an updated technological distribution of the old epistolary novel form? Grr.)
Filed under: Blooks and Blognovel Analysis
