Concord: An Update
Three weeks, three chapters
I am learning a great deal about Concord by serializing it. The posted chapters are attracting fewer readers than my more discursive posts, which isn’t so very surprising. The medium is the message; Substack seems like a neutral platform, on which you can publish anything: video, podcasts, poems. But most people treat it like a newsletter, and most subscribers to Substacks probably read them because they’re looking for news (or commentary on the news). William Carlos Williams said it was difficult to get the news from poems; it’s even harder to get it from a novel, especially one being published in chunks. But I’m publishing Concord this way because I’m convinced it does have news of a sort to offer about the way we live now. Also, this is the first novel I’ve written that’s plot and scene-driven, a novel-novel rather than the poet’s novels I’ve published previously. (I stand behind those novels, especially Beautiful Soul; I think they’re some of the best work I’ve done. Buy one! Buy two!) Concord is crammed with incident: AI, adultery, apocalypse, a little murder, and a prison break! It was incredibly fun to write; I’ve never felt so free.
One thing I’m persuaded of is that the original chapters as I drafted them are far too long for this medium; Chapter 3, as I published it, came in at 5,300 words, which the Substack app tells me takes 25 minutes to read. That’s just too long for an email. Going forward, I’m going to go for briefer pieces of narrative, more like episodes, though I’ll keep calling them chapters. Most of the original draft’s chapters consist of at least three episodes, 1,500-2,000 words long. It’s tempting to go back and break Chapter 3 into three pieces, but to do so I’d have to spam you with material you may have already read. We will just have to stumble on.
