Melvin Burgess sees his characters come to life on the internet

The bestselling teen author explains how he adapted his new book, Sara's Face, for the internet. Watch the first video blog to accompany the book here.

"There’s been huge interest in the internet for years now, but it’s been unclear how authors can best use it to tell a story. One answer is vlogs – fictional video blogs, like Lonely Girl 15 and Kate Modern.

My new book Sara’s Face lends itself to vlogs, since my main character, Sara Carter, uses a video blog in the book to push her experiences to the front of the reader’s experience. The book is extremely topical, dealing with Sara’s dreams of celebrity and her willingness to go to any length to get there. The idea was to adapt the blogs to vlogs, telling the first part of Sara’s story, and then launch a competition in which users can add their own vlog rants on how far they would go to look beautiful.

Adapting the blogs was not easy. After the first draft, I had something like twenty minutes running time — an average of five minutes each. No good. Users, I’m told, jump around online so quickly that two minutes is the maximum possible length, preferably one.

I’m not sure about this. Surely the aim should be to get people to linger? An on-going story is a good way of doing that. And how accurate is this stat? If it’s an average, does it tell us much about the people we want to reach? But that’s for another time.

I had to re-write the draft so that no single vlog was longer than two minutes. It was bloody hard. I had to establish Sara’s character, life and ambitions in the first minute. Each vlog had to provide a recognisable piece of story, be crystal clear and at the same time be compelling. It was rather like writing an advert – except all done on a shoe string and, hardest of all, with no imagery. A picture tells a thousand words, but a vlog is just a talking head. That makes it cheap and ideal for online users with nothing but a cheap camera, but it makes very particular demands on the writing.

It’s been a fascinating project, though, and I’m very happy with the results. I see fictional vlogs as a fantastic way for people to create new characters, develop acts and tell stories. I’ll be interested to see how well they catch on the future."