From Idea to Series — The 5 Ingredients for a Successful Web Novel

From theory to practice: how to sift through your notebook of ideas to find the right one for an episodic story.

Partly by chance, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of recklessness, I started following a webinar by Rotte Narrative on Web Novels. It’s a writing format I’m not familiar with at all, but it has some potentially very interesting features. Needless to say, it’s already piquing my curiosity.

So, armed with this new perspective, I’m sifting through my notebook of ideas to see which of the dozens of concepts I’ve collected might be suitable for this format. Summarizing my notes, I’ve distilled five fundamental characteristics that a good idea for a web novel should have (or at least, this is what I’ve understood so far).

1. An Obvious “Serial Engine”

The story needs a clear, intrinsic mechanism that can generate chapter after chapter without losing momentum. This could be a power progression in the style of progression fantasy, a sprawling investigation, a series of obstacles to overcome to reach a distant goal, or a constantly evolving relational conflict. As I wrote in my article, “The Story’s Compass”, you need a defined objective to guide the…