What 'The Italian Lesson' and True Crime Podcasts Can Teach Us About Serializing
What 'The Italian Lesson' and True Crime Podcasts Can Teach Us About Serializing
on Substack!
I’m beyond excited about The Italian Lesson, the romance novel currently serializing on Substack. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s by E. Jean Carroll (of the brilliant Substack advice column Ask E. Jean) and Mary Trump (yes, Donald’s niece and the author of the excellent Too Much and Never Enough) and edited by Jennifer Taub (the esteemed law professor and author of Big Dirty Money).
The best summary I’ve seen comes from the authors/editor themselves, who describe it as a “politics-free zone”—
“a strange and luscious, mysterious and very romantic story. And YES, there is knitting, Italian wine, house cows named Bella, lots of fashion, chickens, a very bad man, and a cinnamon roll hero.”
They’ve gotten great press coverage in The New York Times and on NPR and are doing fantastically well with Substack readers.
So to say that people aren’t interested in serialized novels simply isn’t the case; they are—obviously. It’s just that no one has serialized as well as these three authors have.
Why are they so successful?
Because they’re writing it for Substack, for their Substack readers, and making it an experience, complete with cocktail recipes (!). They’re also having a lot of fun, which is a delightful change from the absent or tragically persecuted writer persona.
I have no doubt The Italian Lesson will come out in book form (if publishers are smart, the book deal has already been signed), but for now, they’re writing a Substack novel.
As I’ve said before, we can’t just serialize a novel or memoir. It doesn’t work to write a manuscript based on craft techniques and approaches used to write a book, upload chapters on every platform, and expect readers to love it.
We have to invent a new genre: the Substack novel/memoir.
This kind of reinvention has happened before. Take Jennifer Eagan’s Twitter “novel” (it was called a novel but was really a short story). She didn’t write fiction and put it on Twitter; she invented Twitter fiction.
It also (more famously) happened with a genre you might know well: true crime podcasts. NPR’s 2014 podcast “Serial” essentially created the genre that still thrives (that’s an understatement) today. It reinvented true crime for a new medium. True crime existed before then as books and other media—see the great Ann Rule—but not as podcasts and not with the level of success “Serial” had.
“Serial” was beyond a phenom. It was downloaded 175 million times (that’s 175 million, the equivalent of over half of all American adults, folks), won unprecedented journalism awards like the Peabody, and spawned an HBO limited series. It ran for thirteen episodes (plus three mini-updates) and held listeners rapt. Reddit threads were abuzz with speculation about whether the young man convicted of murder really did it.
When I listened to “Serial” a few months after its release, it was already such a sensation as to be annoying. I wanted not to like it. But I ended up like everyone else: absorbed, practically jonesing for the next episode.
The plot is simple: podcaster Sarah Koenig investigates the conviction of a young man, Adnan Syed, who was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, based on a single supposed eyewitness and no physical evidence. When the podcast aired, Syed had been in prison for fourteen years since he was seventeen. Syed is beyond a sympathetic character, a nice guy who’s practically the stereotype of someone wrongfully accused. The podcast unfolds much as you’d think. Koenig pokes holes in the state’s case, explores inconsistencies, finds new evidence, questions the supposed timeline of the murder, finds new suspects, spotlights overlooked suspects, and delves into inconsistencies in witness testimonies.
Though it was a podcast, “Serial” has a lot to teach us in terms of what works in a serialization. It didn’t appear in subscribers’ email inboxes the way a Substack novel or memoir does, but it created a podcast experience similar but different to the way The Italian Lesson is doing.
What can we learn from “Serial”? I’m interested in the way it used
the first-person narrator as the protagonist,
voice,
summary.
These are just possibilities, not rules.
The First-Person Narrator (or Author) as Protagonist
“Serial” made Sarah Koenig “the first celebrity podcaster,” as late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert put it. There’s a reason. She’s as much the protagonist of the story as Syed, which is a little weird.
Documentary filmmaking, which is documentary podcasting’s predecessor, traditionally doesn’t focus on the filmmaker, yet Koenig is featured in every interview. Documentary filmmaking typically entails, well, documenting others. There is a participatory mode of filmmaking (not to be confused with participatory journalism), but “Serial” takes it to the extreme.
When Syed finally receives a hearing that could lead to a release, much time is spent on the fact that Koenig is recording in the closet of her hotel room “flanked by bathrobes” to get the best sound. I mean, who cares? Well, we do because by then, we’ve been on her journey more than Syed’s. We’re rooting for her too.
Most memoirs already benefit from being in the first person. When an installment/chapter appears in a subscriber’s inbox, it has the feel of an email—less memoir than missive from a friend. Serial novels may need to be in the first person, so it pulls your email subscriber in. How often do we get emails thick with setting descriptions and written in the third person? That’s right, pretty much never.
» Lesson: If you’re a novelist, write in the first person. The Italian Lesson is in the first person so far.
Voice
Voice in writing has three registers—formal, informal, and conversational. The formal voice avoids contractions and relies on long, complex sentences. (Think: wearing a tuxedo.) The informal voice is casual, full of contractions but not slang or profanity. (Think: jeans and a t-shirt but nice.) The conversational voice is slangy and down to earth, perhaps descending into profanity. (Think: joggers and a hoodie or zip-up.)
Koenig is beyond conversational. We’re as interested in Koenig as we are in Syed because she’s never (obviously) being writerly. We get her constant commentary, statements like, “Bummer” and “We got nothing.”
» Lesson: Use the informal or conversational voice. The Italian Lesson is in the informal voice.
Summary
Several aspects of the podcast’s use of summary and catching readers up may be worth experimenting with:
In the middle and at the end of the series (episodes 6 and 12), Koenig reviews the case—kind of a what we know so far.
The “summaries” are clips from previous episodes.
Koenig works summaries into each episode, contextualizing characters, settings, and clues and saying, “Remember last time how I said….”
» Lesson: Consider all of the above. The Italian Lesson isn’t using summaries and is doing what “Serial” (and Charles Dickens and other serializers) did by contextualizing what readers need to know.
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This understanding of why The Italian Lesson and “Serial” are so popular should be a siren call to serialists: This is how we do it.
» To see how I’m serializing my new memoir Cured on Substack, see below. It’s the sequel to my debut memoir Pathological (HarperCollins). I have a whole upcoming post about how I’m using Substack. For one thing, I wrote it as a book for my agent and editor at HarperCollins and when we decided to serialize it, I rewrote it specifically for Substack.
