Comment by sundarurfriend 3 days ago
> Can you imagine a world without HGTTG?
Yes. Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but the book form of HGTTG is a mess. You can tell that it was converted from an episodic weekly-gag-based radio show into written form with very little effort to make it into a coherent whole. It's popular because it has brilliant one-liners, but as a book it's not nearly as good as its popularity would suggest.
You actually see something similar today with web serials.
An author starts a story, writes a few chapters, and then presents it to the Internet. They acquire a following, and keep putting up chapters.
But even if they start with a solid outline and a world building bible and a binder full of character secrets, the story rarely follows a smooth plot arc -- they have new ideas as they write, and some things don't work the way they'd hoped, and maybe they are not sure how to move from point A to B and spend a few weeks putting up chapters where both they and their characters go in circles for a bit.
And then it's finished, the next logical step is to republish it as a book. They could treat the web serial as a first draft, and rewrite it now that they have the whole thing figured out. Throw away some of the meandering, save a few disjointed chapters for short story anthologies, fix some of the character drift that isn't development, drop the plot lines you never finished, and add a bit more foreshadowing to the early chapters for things they didn't figure out until later.
But well, the book's already been published, right? And people liked it well enough? So why write the same book twice, and not just clean up the spelling and grammatical mistakes and publish it as is?
Adaptations of loosely-connected episodic material to book form is tough even with editing. I did it once and it didn't really work very well. Look at most compilations of newspaper columns too.