Pros and Cons of a Soap Opera In Book Form?

[TheGreatMagician]

What are the pros and cons of re-creating a soap opera in book form?

Romance novels are the closes thing in book form i can get to soap opera but they not exactly "SOAP OPERA". They are more soap opera-ish.

Reason being, most romance novels have a main character and only follow that main character and they relationship which is the "MAIN" story thread. Any sub-plots or other POV characters all connect back to the main character' story thread.

Whereas in a Soap Opera, the story follow many couples and characters day-to-day lives, activities and personal relationships. Which means their will be many story threads and no 'MAIN" story thread that connects the others. The story threads run concurrent with one another. But the concurrent story threads may at times interconnect and affect one another or may run entirely independent of each other.

My story follows a group of people day-to-day lives in this small community. Its a soap opera but in book form. Their is no main character. Which mean there is no main story thread that would connect all the other story threads.

what would be the pros and cons of creating this soap opera story in book form?

My story is equivalent to TV Soap opera "Dark Shadows".

P.S: I know soap opera narratives don't have a 'ending" (No beginning, Middle, Ending) and can go on for years which typically doesn't happen in books (well in some). But in my book I have a ending but its not your typical story conventional ending. EX: In Harry Potter, we know Harry and Voldermont will have a final face off at the end of each book.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Didn't you already ask this?
https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/552644/

There are a lot of long series in SF/F - have you ever looked at any of these, to see how they handle themselves?

What you're talking about may be a hard sell - what you are saying is that you want to write a TV medium in a novel format, but with no overall plot arc of any kind that would help push your story along.

Also, dedicated soap operas are hugely dependent on personal conflict - and without the benefit of the visual medium, this is going to be very hard to write in novel format for any writer. You are going to have to be an absolute master in use of conflict and characterisation to even begin to make this work - two of the most difficult writing skills, IMO.

 

[HareBrain]

The great thing about most books is that you can read the whole thing in one go, if you're sufficiently grabbed by it, or in bite-size chunks. But soap operas are meant to be consumed half an hour at a time. When I used to watch them, I could just about put up with the weekly omnibus editions, but any more and it would have been just too much of the same. Only die-hard fans would watch for hours. I'm not sure how successful a book would be that needed its readers to put it down after every few chapters. Though if you already had a fanbase, and were serialising it, that could work.

 

[TheGreatMagician]

Creating conflict is going to be difficult?

There are many conflicts in the story... "Who is the father?" 'Is that my real mother?" " who killed my brother?" "Who shot roger?" "is the baby really his/hers?" Its alot of conflict in the story. Its what connects the characters to one another. All the characters are connected in ways or will be connected and some may only be connected to some. There are daytime soap operas with book adaptions but they usually use them to develop one character's relationship, backstory or just to add more depth to a character that the soap opera couldn't dive into.

If i had to market this kind of story to someone i would market it to the Romance reader's. Reader's who love melodrama reads. If i had to think of a Romance story like this, i would say "Twilight" is a good start. "Twilight" can honestly go on for years if the author really wanted to. 'Twilight" really don't have a "END" sort to say. Well it dont have no end like a Harry Potter story do. Once Voldermont was defeated that ended Harry Potter story. In "Twilight" (something that is melodrama) it can always continue to pump out more stories due to the conflict amongst the characters is what drives the story.

The conflict amongst the characters in my story is what drives the story. I have a endgame for my series and know where everyone is going to end up when its all said and done.

 

[TheGreatMagician]

Soap Operas are 1-Hour long due to it being on TV. Soap Operas could be movies but movies are only 2-Hours and sometimes 2 1/2 Hours. Soap Opera requires alot more time to fully develop characters and storylines which is why they work best on TV format considering the stories could be spread out. If a soap opera was a movie it will cause for a pretty long movie. And i don't think ANYBODY would want to sit and watch a 4-5-6 Hour movie rather it be Soap Opera or X-men or Harry Potter.

So you not saying the story wont work because of the narrative I explained.

You basically saying i cant write the story because I'm unknown and don't have a fan-base.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I don't think the fanbase has anything to do with it initially - or none of us would be writing anything - but you'd need to build one if it was to succeed in the longer term.

I'm actually a bit unclear as to how this is different from other series - Ender's Game prequels ended up with lots of stories featuring different character's take on the same events.

My advice would be to start writing it, get some crits and see if it works then. Like anything else, execution is key...

 

[Hex]

An existing fan-base always helps.

Like Jo said, the theory is one thing, but we can't actually tell if it's going to work until you write it. Some writers can make anything work.

 

[TheGreatMagician]

I've written alot of the story and I just got midway through and thought to myself "This is really like a soap opera" and by me not coming across a story like mines where the story fits a soap opera narrative with many plot threads and character POV's, i was thinking that i couldnt write this story. Because not all my plot threads end at the same time. Some end early and some begin while others end. (Very Soap Opera)

Might just be over-thinking it and creating problems that aren't even there.

lol i wasnt saying that i didnt need a fanbase i was just saying, the guy made it seem like I coudnt write my story the way i wanted to because im unknown and dont have a fanbase.

but thanks everyone for feedback

 

[TheGreatMagician]

I have one question... This may be off topic but here it goes

Say I have this girl and her dog. The girl leaves home and leaves her dog at home and she gets caught up in this little adventure...Meanwhile, her dog is at home getting caught up in a little adventure of his own. Neither of they adventures connect so when the girl returns home from her little adventure and dog makes is home from his little adventure, she picks her dog up and lays on the couch and says

"how was your day? Bet it was pretty boring"...

Would someone look at that as TWO stories or ONE story?

 

[Brian G Turner]

Creating conflict is going to be difficult?

Certainly in fiction writing. Posing questions isn't enough - character depth, struggle, and developmental are all required, and are very hard to do adequately with a single character, let alone with multiple POVs.

Remember, posting questions isn't enough - you have to make the reader care about the individual characters in the first place.

Simply 2c.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

One of the potential problems with a book that has too many different characters and subplots is that readers might decide about halfway through the book that they are interested in some characters and not in others, and may skip over the scenes or chapters of the ones they don't, in order to get to the chapters of the ones that they do.

It can be done in such a way that readers are eager to find out what is happening to everybody, but it is going to be a challenge, particularly if you don't have a lot of experience. Although, since we are not acquainted, for all I know you might have been writing for a long time and do have a lot of experience. There are a number of (as yet) unpublished writers here who are nevertheless very experienced. If you are one of them, then you may be up to this challenge. After all, this sort of thing has been done before, and done successfully.

But if you haven't done a lot of writing up to this point, it would probably be better not to start out with a difficult concept like "I am going to write a story that is like a soap opera" and just start writing about the characters who interest you the most and see where their story leads and how the structure of the book evolves. Sometimes newer writers fall in love with an idea they think is clever or original and decide to focus on developing that, and as a result (unintentionally) pay less attention to character development.

 

[tinkerdan]

I don't see anything wrong with this, it's been done for years in the comic books; but maybe you should take this over to the comic book area. All joking aside there have been several authors now who are doing comic book type heroes in a novel style and some of those are working and you might want to look into those as a means of tapping into what works and how it's accomplished.

I think that if you have a main arc to each story and you craft it carefully you would be surprised how much you could get away with in those unfinished threads. But as soon as a bunch of readers start getting annoyed at the the frayed like ends of uncooked plot-lines you'd have to admit defeat. or at least have a goulash finale every so often to kick those threads goodbye.