On Mosaic Stories

An Attempt to Promote a Name, and Thereby an Ontology

It is an impoverishment for our collective conversation that the most popular form of narrative in the world today has no widely agreed-upon name. This is only in part because it is an amorphous thing, with many different variations; indeed, to some degree it is because it is unnamed that it is amorphous. So I think it should be dignified with a name. Various names have been proposed. I myself think that the best term—one which is not my invention, but which is hardly in common use—is mosaic stories, or mosaic narratives, which we might shorten, at least in situations where it will not cause confusion, to mosaics.

Philosopher J. L. Austin (1911-1960) famously described a particular type of sentence as a speech act: a sentence which, instead of saying something or describing something, does something; one common example he used is the act of marriage—"I now pronounce you man and wife" doesn't describe something happening, it makes it happen. Other examples include "I promise", "I apologize", "I welcome you,", and so on. But Austin makes clear that speech acts can't just be done willy-nilly: they have to be done in the right way, or else they don't work. (A drunken student stands up at a party, points to two friends, and says "I now pronounce you man and wife": they are not now married.) And naming is, of course, a quintessential speech act: the speech does something. Austin likes to use the naming of a ship, with all its attendant ceremony (breaking a bottle over its bow, etc), as his example. But again, it has to be done in the right way or it doesn't work.

In many cases, however, there is no single speech act that could work. Even more interestingly, some only work retrospectively: we say that Kimberly Crenshaw named the phenomenon "intersectionality", or for that matter that J. L. Austin did likewise for "speech acts", but these were only acts of naming once they caught on: a great deal of new terminology lies unnoticed and unmissed in dusty, undisturbed library stacks, published in journals where they will be forever safe from prying human eyes.

I am not, then, performing the speech act which terms the most popular form of narrative in the world today "mosaics": I do not have the power to do it (just as our drunken student has no power to marry two people, and at any rate that has already been done, in potential, some time ago. But I am trying to promote it—to help make what was done, by someone, at some point, retroactively into a speech act, one which, rather than defining an idiosyncratic use, named a literary form.

Who has used it before? I am not sure—in particular, I am not sure if anyone has used it precisely as I am promoting, although that use has been, so to speak, surrounded on all sides.

The more common term is a mosaic novel—which doesn't quite fit what I trying to get across, although it's close. The earliest usage for this term listed in Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (2007) is Wild Cards, the shared-world anthology series edited by George R. R. Martin.¹ Martin, of course, was editing stories by different authors into a single narrative, but the more common usage (more common, but not common tout court) these days is for what is also termed a "fix-up" (unquestionably a nettlesome term that has long outlived its welcome), namely, a story made up of previously written short stories (or, sometimes, a novel in which parts were spun off as short stories although it was written as a novel). This is the sense in which Jo Walton called Maureen F. McHugh's superb novel China Mountain Zhang a mosaic novel, and the sense in which Angela Slatter gathered that up with four others as a group recommendation at tor.com. So, as I said: close, but not quite right, for my purposes.

As for the specific phrase "mosaic story", it is mostly used in different senses, which googling brings up in delightfully strange juxtaposition. There is the story of Moses, using the adjectival form of his name, as in the 1897 book by one A. D. T. Whitney (1824-1906) entitled The Open Mystery: a Reading of the Mosaic Story—a delightful accident since the Mosaic story is in some sense a mosaic story, albeit one edited together well enough that it took generations of scholarships to get the seems to show. There is also a recent game called Mosaic: A Story of Civilization (2022), a real estate venture called Mosaic Story Homes in Fort Collins, Colorado, and a "pdf pattern" called the "Mosaic Story Block". But now we are drifting away from our quarry, and must refocus.

So if it is not Moses's tale, a game, a set of houses, or a pdf, what is a mosaic story? —Or, more precisely, what do I mean here by a mosaic story? Put simply: a mosaic story is a serialized story, itself made up of separate stories, which combine to a story of larger scope. Which is to say, a story made up of stories, as a mosaic is a picture made up of pictures (albeit usually simply tiles).

The most common form in which people encounter these are in modern television shows. Not all of them, God knows—some of the shows try to be, essentially, a movie broken up into parts. (TV critic Alan Sepinwall has argued that this is a mistake (see also here)). And certainly there are also TV shows still on the air which run episodes with no continuity to speak of, which are a series of similar entertainments. Nevertheless, the era of peak TV has been the golden age of the mosaic narrative—to the extent that when people want to speak of these things they often say "structured like a TV show". This is understandable, but unfortunate: as I said, they deserve to be dignified with a name.

After all, a mosaic really is its own form. It is not quite right to simply call such a serial: what I am referring to is not, precisely, a single story, the way that (say) the serialized novels of the nineteenth century, the works of Dickens and Eliot and so many others, are single stories. Or rather mosaics are, in some sense, single stories, but the fact that each installment in them is also a separate story is important enough to deserve a distinct name. Nor are mosaics collections of stories in the familiar forms of the anthology and the single-author collection; we would not even want to put most collections putatively held together with frame stories (the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales and their many descendants) into this category, for the stories in those works do not entangle in the way that the stories of mosaics do.

There is, of course, a continuum of such things: in some the standing-on-its-own aspect is attenuated to the point where it is almost nothing more than a single serialized work; at the other extreme some have only a minimal overarching story, just enough to lure the listener in with a promise of large things. Various other aspects—how goal-oriented the overall plot is, for instance—vary along a spectrum too.

Yet we do not hesitate to have a category called "the novel", despite that form's including works of such diversity of form as Don Quixote, Ulysses, This is Not a Novel, Cloud Atlas, and Pale Fire. Similarly, short stories can be essays, incidents, lengthy structured narratives, lists, and many other things. Why should we deny such internal variety to the mosaic narrative? Why, if we grant it variety, should we therefore refuse to grant it the unified ontology which the novel and short story posses?

Where did mosaics come from? I am not proposing a quest for the ultimate origin or sole invention, let alone planning to declare some particular work The First. But how did they get so popular?

Well, to repeat, the most common experience of this form that most people have is the current format of dramatic television. It is therefore unsurprising that, given television's central importance to our culture, it is in fact out of television that this form emerged. Importantly, however, it was a development, not an instant process.

In the old days, television shows were variations upon a theme: a show would have some standard set-up (a murder needs to be solved, the fugitive or the Lone Ranger comes to town, three couples would board the Love Boat, etc), and the story of this particular murder, town or set of couples would unfold over the next hour, interweaved with chirpy, helpful information about new soaps, tasty cerals or automobile sales. By the end of the hour the story of the guests—the murdered corpse and its relatives (and killer), the townspeople, the couples—would be completed. There were characters who appeared once, guest stars, and those who formed the skeleton of the show—the detectives, the travelers, the ship's crew. The narrative power, such as it was, came in the arc of the individual stories; the recurring characters tended to be unchanged, any experiences they had in the intervening hour would be wrapped up and assimilated by the end of the hour, never to be mentioned again. The great benefit of this format was that the shows could be watched in any order: since there was no past and no future to the recurring characters, you need worry about having missed nothing. (And yes, plenty of shows still use this format.)

But over time this form, which for all its occasional delights was reasonably stultifying, evolved. The secondary characters began to have lives of their own, and stories about them would continue from episode to episode, in the background as it were, while the main stories, the guest-character stories, would continue to take center stage. Sometimes the front and back stories would interact—a recurring character would learn some important lesson (even, God help us, a Very Special Lesson) from participating in the front story.

It is worth noting at this point that none of this was confined to television. The endless series of variations upon a theme began in radio-dramas, after which the original television shows were patterned (and sometimes directly adapted, e.g. The Lone Ranger). Then, very roughly at the same time, superhero comics, mystery novels, and various other narrative forms followed the same pattern of development that television did. In superhero comics, the all-but identical stories of a superhero foiling a villain's plot were gradually increasingly paired with ongoing stories about Peter Parker's struggles to pay the rent, or the endless soap-opera interactions of the infinitely recombining X-Men. The mysteries of Sherlock Holmes showed little development for the two central recurring characters (Watson got married, Holmes seemed dead for a while and eventually retired, but none of it affected the stories a great deal), but later mysteries began to develop overarching narratives in which the detective grew and changed as a character in their own right.

Note also that these two stages are not sharply delineated; there is a spectrum between them. You might get a little continuity in a series of largely stand-alone episodes; you might get a one-off with a focus on a guest star without much driving of the overall plot on what is generally a serialized narrative.

Yet we have not arrived, yet, at the mosaic narrative proper—at least, not to my mind. For the mosaic proper to appear there is one further aspect which needed to develop, namely, the ending. Stories end. A conclusion is as essential a part of a narrative as a beginning or a climax, as characters and event and setting.² Soap operas, whether on radio or television or in comics, coexisted with the episodic narratives, yet they were not mosaics, for they simply continued, with no structure or endpoint or finality.

This is not to say that an ending in and of itself is sufficient to make something a mosaic. Non-mosaic serials—not of the Dickensian, novel-split-up variety but of the endless-variations-on-a-theme variety—occasionally have endings too. The most famous case here is the popular 1960s television show The Fugitive (1963-1967), which centered around an innocent escaped prisoner who was endlessly searching for the real killer of his wife, a man with one arm. When the shows was canceled, the producers said they wanted to finish the story, to have the fugitive find the one-armed man in the last episode. The television studio, short-sightedly, said no one would be interested. The producers, however, went directly to their advertisers, convinced them to make it, and ended the series with a two-parter; the second half was the most watched television episode up until that point.

People like endings, you see. People like stories—and stories have endings.

But it's, at least within corporate capitalism, to give successful stories endings. Even if individual creators may wish to bring their tales to a close, they may not have the clout to do so. Sometimes the corporate owners of the stories—and it is an important if lamentable fact that the corporations do tend to be the owners—will push the story to delay its way to an ending, thereby weakening the story considerably from where it would naturally conclude.³ Other times creators are simply pressured by their fans (as Doyle famously was), or tempted by the money, or both. So endings get delayed, or undone. In the realms of self-contained stories (novels, films, etc) this manifests as the pressure to produce a sequel: even to stories which end with such conclusivity that it is hard to imagine such a thing. (Sometimes a prequel, or sidequel, will be settled for if it is sufficiently patently obvious that there is no way to go forward.) In the serialized story, it manifests as a failure to end, stalling for time in some fashion, refusing to get to where it is clearly going.⁴

But some stories do end—perhaps they were not quite popular enough to be pressured to continue, or perhaps the creator had control over the timing, or perhaps (it does happen) corporate bean-counters can see the wisdom (financial if not aesthetic) in leaving before the whole thing goes stale. And once you add a conclusion to the serialized story with a focus on its main characters—while, however, still presenting each episode as an (at least somewhat) self-contained tale—then you have the mosaic narrative proper.

Like the transition from pure story-of-the-week⁵ serials to more connected serials, the transition of more connected serials to mosaic narratives did not come over night. The ending, as I have indicated, is a big part of it. This is not to say it is sufficient; just that it is (for the most part) necessary. But there are endings to serialized stories that do not make them full-on mosaic narratives.

There is no one thing that distinguishes the ending of a mosaic from the end of a simple serial. It's not that it's planned—lots of great shows (and comics, and prose series) have had endings improvised as it loomed. Nor is it that the ending of the work is creator-driven: although it is always a good sign if a creator decides to end their work, some shows have managed to throw together good closings upon their abrupt cancellation. Rather, what makes a mosaic different is how it is structured all along. it's just that endings are an important part.

I am not trying to draw hard-and-fast boundaries here: sufficiently episodic stories bleed into mosaics which in turn bleed into a succession of stand-alones about the same characters. Rather, what I am claiming is that, however much one may argue over the edge effects, there is a notable center at which this is a thing, a thing that needs a name.

As I said, this was a slow process. In the world of comics, two of the three major graphic novels in the graphic novel's annus mirabilis of 1986-1987 Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, played a big role.⁶ The Dark Knight Returns, which came first, was not a mosaic narrative: but it was the end of an endlessly serialized story, and its quality and its popularity showed the power of endings, aesthetically and commercially. Watchmen, coming later, was a complete mosaic narrative (most of the twelve issues are very much their own story while still building to a larger tale), and it was even more popular, even more influential, and even better than its predecessor. At that point endings began to be incorporated into comics—with all sorts of other trends feeding into the change as well, such as the increasing importance of creators (rather than characters) in selling work,⁷ the rise of the trade paperback as an important format to rival the individual issue, the increasingly common gimmick of starting a series over at #1 due to increased sales (which required an ending for the previous series, although not a good, meaningful, or significant one), and other things. I'm sure similar tales could be told in the realm of TV, serialized novels, and other narrative forms. And, of course, the different trends in these forms influenced each other: tv and film creators read comics, and Alan Moore's influence stretches far beyond superhero comics.

Nor do I want to claim that this is all there is to it. As this is an essay not a dissertation I can hardly even sketch all of the factors, but there are broad trends in the narrative arts that play a key role here, too: there is an increasing sophistication of both creators and consumers; there is an increasing realization that keeping back-stock available is a whole revenue stream that a focus on current episodes misses; there is the role of the internet in promoting both of those; and on and on.

One way or another, the idea that these originally purely serialized forms—television, radio drama, comic, novel and story series, and so forth—could be vehicles for overarching stories while still maintaining the integrity of the individual entry was spread, and a new form was born.⁸

We just don't talk about it, because we don't have a name for it.

Why is a name important?

It's not only that with a name one can talk about this phenomenon in the sense of saying "it's a mosaic story" in recommending it to others. It means we can think about them. There are lots of differences within the form, after all—different amounts of continuity versus isolated tales, different ways that the individual segments can relate to each other or can add up to a whole. We can't begin to think about the many variations within the form without knowing what to call it. And it is, as I said, the single most popular narrative form today.⁹

Yet there is a little more to it than that. You see, I am not entirely disinterested in my attemptinh to promote, and clarify, this term.

For some time now I have been writing... well, a mosaic story. The installments are prose fiction (as opposed to comics or tv episodes). And I am going to start publishing it soon. As in, next week.

So yes: this week's essay, while (I hope) an essay in the grand tradition thereof, is also set up for next week's more casual fare—save that it will not be at all casual for me, for all that it will not be an essay—nor a bricolage. Rather, it will be the publication announcement for the first installment of my new mosaic narrative, Retcon.

But to do that, I needed to be able to say what it is.

So now that you know what a mosaic narrative is, please return in seven days to hear about the one which I have been writing, and will be publishing, and hope to convince you all to read.

That is the end of the essay, but I should note that I went on the next week and introduced the new series properly here. Or, the off chance that you want to just go ahead and purchase the first story, you can now do so on my web site, or Amazon, or Smashwords, or Barnes & Noble, or Kobo, or Apple. It’s $0.99 (as it will be for the the whole series)

I have also set up a one-time subscription purchase on my web site, so if you want to pre-purchase the entire series, you can go here and do that. To be clear, you’ll still get them monthly; this is just meant as a convenience—rather than remember to order them, I’ll send them to you; consider it a subscription service (and you save $1.98, which, I suppose, is not literarly nothing…).

If anyone wants to support this newsletter, buying (and recommending, and reviewing) the story series is far & away the best way to go about it. Thanks in advance!

1. Wikipedia lists some older examples, such as Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930), but these are quite clearly retcons—the books were not called that—and anyway they are bad examples, quite far from any current usage I’ve seen; I think the editor who added those simply misunderstood the term.

2. Let us, however, remember Nietzsche's insight: "Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable." (Human, All-Too-Human (Volume 2, Part 2, section 204, trans. R. J. Hollingdale).¶

¶ Here I feel compelled to digress. In tracking down the precise Nietzsche quote, I stumbled across a blog post by Dwight Goodyear in which he points out that a similar remark in John Dewey's Experience and Nature illuminates Nietzsche's point: “A musical phrase has a certain close, but the earlier portion does not therefore exist for the sake of the close as if it were something which is done away with when the close is reached.” I think Goodyear is correct about the ways in which Dewey illuminates Nietzsche. Nevertheless, looking at the context from Dewey, he is actually talking about something else:

...in a legitimate account of ends as endings, all directional order resides in the sequential order. This no more occurs for the sake of the end than a mountain exists for the sake of the peak which is its end. A musical phrase has a certain close, but the earlier portion does not therefore exist for the sake of the close as if it were something which is done away with when the close is reached. And so a man is not an adult until after he has been a boy, but childhood does not exist for the sake of maturity.

End of digression.§

§ It was in this digression that I discovered that Substack won’t let you put a footnote in a footnote. This fact reminds me of the moment in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America when Roy Cohn, in the hospital, complains about his telephone:

And get me a real phone, with a hold button, I mean look at this, it’s just one little line, now how am I supposed to perform basic bodily functions on this?

No footnotes on footnotes?! How am I supposed to perform basic bodily functions like that?

3. Of course the opposite happens too: the ending of the TV version of A Game of Thrones, but one underlying problem is that the creators seemed to have decided they had better things to do and to rush through a conclusion (in a story whose tendency to take its time was one of its strong suits). The corporation, in that case, would gladly have let it go longer, since it was a hit; but the creators decided to cut and run, rather like resigning with a lead in the 8th inning because you can't wait to get to the after-game party (not that I’m bitter or anything).

4. This creates the rather sad phenomenon of the failed mosaic: a work that clearly wants to have an overall arc, to head in a direction, is as it were waylaid and forced to keep going in some other direction. Such stories become, often enough, types of "endless variations", in which the repeated chunk is not the episode but the larger story arc: having failed to end at the tying up of one story, it is all done in some sense again.

5. Such is the influence of television that I feel compelled to say "week": of course in comics it was month (or bimonthly), and in series of novels it could easily be year.

6. The third one, of course, was the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus, which played a very important role in the history of the graphic novel—but not, I think, in the history of the mosaic narrative.

7. A trend which has, ironically, reversed itself under the influence of the comics-based Marvel Cinematic Universe and its many imitators.

8. Sometimes, as Alan Sepinwall complaints in the two links above, they go beyond this and simply tell one long story, broken up simply for commercial purposes, the way that the Victorians did with novels. Whether or not you agree with Sepinwall's dislike of this trend (and I myself think he has a point), that is something different than a mosaic narrative, although as always the lines here are blurry, with lost of edge cases which could be put in either category more or less at whim.

9. I will leave to others the question of earlier precedents: was Homer a mosaic story, with each book a single entry? How about the three plays in the trilogy of Athenian dramatists, or the various subdivided stories of the Thousand and One Nights? As with the novel, there will be no single starting point, and earlier examples will have both similarities and differences with the form as it evolved in modern times. But the creation of ancestors is an intellectually fruitful endeavor, and it, too, requires a name.