Katherine asked: Could you please share your thoughts on shaping a good story / balancing the form, particularly across a series?
If you are setting out to commit a series on purpose, with malice aforethought, the first few things you need to think about are: 1) Do you really want to do this? 2) Do you actually have enough material for multiple books? And 3) Do you have the personal commitment and stamina to write multiple books about the same place/characters/plot/theme/idea without getting bored or losing focus? I talked about those questions a while back, and I was almost tempted to just repost that essay, but it isn’t really what you asked about. So here’s a bit about what you did ask, instead.
When it comes to structure or “shape”, there are two major considerations if you’re setting out to write a series, and a bunch of pitfalls to avoid.
The first major consideration is: What kind of series are you writing?
Series structure runs on a continuum from a bunch of novels that share a setting but that are otherwise independent of each other and can be read in any order, to a multi-volume novel with a single story arc that takes up the entire series (whether that’s the traditional three-volume novel or twelve or more ginormous fat books). Somewhere in the middle are the series that’s made up of several independent story arcs.
The second major consideration is: What is the common thread that holds the series together – the thing that makes it a series, rather than a bunch of books by the same author?
This is often closely related to the kind of series, but I think it is worth considering independently. The most frequent thread is usually the central character, followed closely by plot, but in some stories the thing that makes it a series is the location, or a pattern that the books follow.
There’s a lot of overlap between these two things. Classic detective novel series were usually a string of independent, unrelated cases, which were a series because the same detective solved them all … but since the detective often works in a particular area, like Chicago or London, the books share a common setting as well. On the other hand, you have characters like James Bond, whose adventures take place in a different location every volume. When the series is a multi-volume novel with a unifying plot arc, like The Lord of the Rings, the volumes generally share both characters and setting. Alternatively, you have a series like the Harry Potter books, which have an overall plot arc (Harry’s coming-of-age and defeat of Voldemort), but in which each volume has its own plot arc that comes to a conclusion. A series with several mostly-independent story arcs can be a biography of the central character (with occasional side-stories that revolve around secondary characters, as with Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan series), or it can become something like Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books, a series of multi-book plot arcs, each of which follows a different central character. Dorothy Sayers wrote a series of independent detective novels which developed a four-book-and-change romantic plot arc at the end. There are several Romance series that are held together by a pattern – one follows the members of a football team as they find romantic partners, one at a time.
Obviously, there is a lot of flexibility in the series format. The key thing, in my opinion, is to know what you are setting out to write and why, so that you don’t get bored and go haring off track, leaving your readers hanging one way or another. As a reader, it is intensely frustrating when a series with an obvious overarching plot suddenly veers off into side-stories just when it looked as if it was getting somewhere; it is equally frustrating to be picking up the latest book in a series I thought were all independent, read-in-any-order novels and suddenly discover myself in the middle of a multi-volume plot because I missed the last two publications.
In other words, as with a lot of things in writing, you can get away with nearly any structure you want if you are doing it deliberately and you set it up effectively. Some things don’t even require that much setting up. In today’s market, it has become fairly common for a writer of a long series centered on a particular character to write the occasional side-story about the adventures of one of the secondary characters, even if the main series is a multi-volume novel with a single central plot arc. The trick is to keep it occasional, and/or find ways in which the “side-story” turns out to advance the central plot, so that your readers don’t get too frustrated. On the other hand, if your series of stand-alone detective novels isn’t doing it for you, and you want to introduce a cool new multi-volume plot arc you’ve just thought up, you may need to do at least a little setup to ease the transition for your loyal fans – introduce one of the future-plot’s key characters as a minor appearance in the current book, or drop a few background hints about the central plot problem. The idea is to start connecting the stand-alone stories together in a non-obvious way that will lead up to the major arc. Or you can do as Sayers and Rowling did: give each book a stand-alone plot while simultaneously advancing the major plot arc you’re working on.
The main thing, though, is to have a clear idea of what you intend to do (structure-wise) and then stick to it unless you have an extremely good reason for changing your mind. “I am sick of this whole series and I am going to stop in the middle and leave all my fans hanging forever if I can’t do something a little different” is a good reason (though see “Do you have the stamina for this?” above…). “I keep getting letters from fans wanting the sidekick to have his own book” is not a good reason, unless in combination with “I’m also bored and ready to quit” or “…and that’s just the twist I need for that thing I’ve been planning on since Book 1.”
The other major pitfall of the series, especially the sort composed of supposedly stand-alone stories, is the check-in. As interesting new characters get introduced, both writer and readers want to know what’s happened to them since the last book, so the first chapter or two gets devoted to checking in on them. As the series gets longer and characters proliferate, the check-in expands to four or five chapters, then six or seven, until the story doesn’t even start until the middle of the book. In a multi-volume novel, this tends to manifest either as a proliferation of viewpoints and subplots, or as ever more extended attempts to summarize the previous books for readers coming in in the middle.
A link embedded (or somewhere) to the related essay you mention in the first paragraph would be helpful, for us mental completists.
There is a link – click on the words “talked about those questions”.
Eyeballing my latest work, and comparing it to the outline, which usually gives me a rough idea of how long the final thing will be. . . .
Hmm, this one may be LARGE. Should I break it into a trilogy? I start to ponder — entirely too much. Considerations of covers and titles come second to seeing its actual size.
Well, you remember how _The Lord of the Rings_ turned into a “trilogy.” It was published in the early 1950s, when Britain was still recovering from WWII, and paper was rationed.
What it is, is that old Victorian staple, the three-volume novel.
Yep – As often as it’s been done over the decades, LOTR being called a trilogy still sets me off. In many cases, it isn’t even published in three volumes any more.
The same is true of Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series, which is universally referred to as a trilogy, though it isn’t. Grrr!
Er, yes it is. You just have an omnibus edition as well.
This will be a three-volume novel, too, if I decide it would benefit from being sold separately.
Or maybe a two-volume novel
That’s mine. I created a world in one novel and then found myself inspired to explore it. So I have stories from its Bronze Age, from its far north, from its Steam Age, from the capital city of its largest empire, and so on.
The novel set in its Bronze Age looks to be the start of a character-centered series (within the setting-based series).
There’s also another series-within-the-series that explores the events around a magical artifact as it passes down through history.
Readers don’t need to know all of these connections. For the most part, the books are stand-alones. But I find it challenging to market the series as a series, because of the multiplicity of the connections.
This is not the question you answered, but I will add in a related note that I really wish publishers would give series #s in a multi-book series. Some of them don’t if it’s not a series with an overarching plot (LOTR, Harry Potter, etc.), but I still want to know if there’s some sort of order. I have an author I’m fond of who writes series that are several stand-alone adventures with characters that know each other and are connected, but since it’s not one plot they don’t mark them on the outside of the book as being in a specific order. So book one involves character A who learns about her heritage and in the course of things makes a dramatic discovery about the Family Secret of B and C (siblings). Book two is about B going off and taking action based on the big reveal of book one, while in book three C is inspired by sibling’s example to go do the same, which is also spurred on by Exciting Event at the conclusion of two. Book four is about D, whom C met in her Adventure and who is connected to a minor character in book two. And so on. It’s true that each book is its own concrete and ending story line, so it’s much more possible to read independently than, say, LOTR, but if you go in the wrong order it’s going to spoil the events of earlier books if you go back to them. (For example, the dramatic reveal in one is referred to throughout the rest of the series, so it would completely spoil the drama of you were to read it last). Also, the series is a fantasy/romance cross-over and each book involves romantic tension between the lead and her beloved, which is of course happily resolved by the end, and then the rest of the books involve that character happily living in her stable partnership that she formed during her novel. Which is a total spoiler!
So I probably can’t convince the publishing world to change this, but I find it very frustrating. Even series books that are much less interconnected tend to have new characters appear and disappear over the course of several books, and unlocked achievements tend to get mentioned casually over the next several books, so if you don’t read them in order you spring from one set of characters and hero ability to another and back and forth all over the place. It’s nice to have them clearly marked as having a publishing order even if you aren’t required to read them that way for it to make sense.
When I discover a “new” author I enjoy, I then try to collect and read their books in chronological order – partly to avoid this problem and partly to see how they developed as a writer.
Tracking down old books can be challenging, but that’s why we have used book stores, isn’t it. 🙂
Aha – you’ve been reading Sharon Shinn’s Elemental Blessings series! I love her books.
This is a major complaint of mine, too. I really really like to have numbers clearly telling me where in the line-up the book lands, especially in series that don’t seem to be heavily interlinked, usually they’re more interlinked than the author would admit, just like the series you used as an example.
I think “setting” is sometimes not just “location” but “people”; certainly some of the joy of reading a long detective series – or Vorkosigan – is the minor recurring characters. Of course you can use the same place hundreds of years later when all the old characters are dead (as J.M. Ney-Grimm suggests above), but that’s not a very usual approach to a series.
Pat, you don’t mention the opposite of the check-in: someone who finds volume 7 in a bookstore may well be intimidated by all the backstory they’re expected to pick up in order to work out what’s going on. That used to be used as an argument for short series, and even for removing series information from the book cover to try to fool the reader into thinking it was a stand-alone; in this days of Kindle and Abebooks, can one assume that a reader who sees book 7 will just search for the series and dig out book 1? (Which is what I usually do.) Jackalope, my usual recourses are Wikipedia and Goodreads.
Wolf Lahti – agreed, I’ve been doing chronological (re-)reads of several authors recently. Apart from anything else it makes the transition of styles between books less jarring.