The comments on the last post started getting into endings and the escalation of threat, particularly as related to series books, and I discovered I had quite a lot to say on the subject even though I haven’t written a long-running series myself.
The first thing is that not all trilogies or series are the same. Some are accidental — the writer wrote a book that was supposed to be a stand-alone, and then everyone wanted more, more, more. Some are episodic — monster/murder/McGuffin-of-the-week (like the one Michelle is working on). Some are closed (or potentially closed) — there is one central story, and when that’s finished, the series is theoretically over (like “The Fugitive,” if anyone besides me still remembers that show). Some are completely open-ended.
Escalation is a problem for nearly any series that goes on long enough — the characters save the world (or whatever) and get stronger and better during the process, so saving the world again would be not only repetitive but too easy to be interesting. The writer has to come up with a new and bigger challenge — saving the universe, maybe. And that can get ridiculous pretty fast.
The escalation problem occurs most often and most obviously when a writer does an accidental series. If the problem the characters faced in the original “standalone” book or trilogy was too large, it can be hard to find a new threat that doesn’t seem anticlimactic. If you know you’re doing a series, you can plan your challenges so that the characters aren’t saving the kingdom in Book 1 and saving the universe by Book 4.
The closed-ended series is subject to a slightly different kind of escalation problem. If you know that your characters are supposed to end the series by saving the world, you have to make sure that when they finally get to the climax of the series, it doesn’t turn out to be anti-climax. You have to either make sure that the characters don’t get too powerful over the course of their previous adventures, or else make sure that every time the characters get more powerful, the difficulty of saving the world (or whatever) increases, too. (Of course, in the series, one makes it look as if it was really going to be this difficult all along, only the characters didn’t know it yet.) And there’s always the danger of getting off-track and never actually completing whatever the original master-plot-arc was supposed to be, because one or more of the sub-arcs turns out to be more interesting (to the writer, at least).
Even the McGuffin-of-the-week type of series is vulnerable to the escalation problem. This is most obvious with TV series, because for just one full year of shows, the writers have to come up with about 30 plots, each with its own McGuffin…and beating the monster, catching the murderer, or finding the McGuffin can’t be too easy, or people get bored. So you start with the heroes beating random strange monsters, and by the end of a season or two, they’re fighting in the war between Darkness and Light, with the fate of the universe on the line, or they’re stopping Ragnarok at least once a season.
The open-ended series probably has the least trouble with escalation, because the author can and does switch to a new batch of characters if and when the first set gets too powerful. Worlds and universes are very large places; it isn’t that hard to find new characters who are far enough away that the overpowered folks from the first story aren’t going to find out about their problem in time to deal with it. And there’s always the next generation.
Avoiding escalation completely is really hard, if not impossible. The author is caught between a rock and a hard place: if the characters have become stronger as a result of their adventures, the threats and obstacles they face must also become stronger, or the stories get boring pretty quickly. But if the characters have adventures and do not change, do not become stronger and wiser (or do so only at the proverbial snail’s pace)…readers also get frustrated after a while. About all you can do is pay attention and think ahead, and try to hit a pace of development for both your characters and your threats that is neither too fast nor too slow. (What? Who said writing was going to be easy?)
Perhaps one of the most amusing series of escalations in the literature is in Doc Smith’s Lensman series. In original publication order (so ignore Triplanetary and First Lensman), three books in a row end with the protagonists FINALLY having cleaned up the Boskone mess — and three next books in a row begin with the protagonists discovering that they did not clean up the problem at all (and at least the first time, they made it harder).
Er, I suppose some people might consider that to be a spoiler.
David – Oh, yeah, I should have thought of that! I use the Lensmen books as examples all the time, because the thing he does to make the series work as “complete books” is to cut the story *right* at the point where they have “solved the problem,” and *right* before the point where they realize they haven’t. The three Kimball Kinneson books are really all one story, cleverly broken up at just the right points to make them look like standalones with a resolution at the end. Only, as you point out, it always turns out not to be.
Multi-book sets seem to be my natural form, I’ve got half a dozen in the works, each structured in a different way, and none of them even vaguely resemble “we save the world, we save the galaxy, we fight the gods… oops what do we do now?”
I just can’t imagine that one ever happening to me.
I may possibly have the opposite problem though. I don’t know. I wouldn’t know how I could tell until I actually had readers and they started getting bored.
What do Xanth and (Angela Thirkell’s) Barsetshire have in common? Within each series, the books are very similar, but separated by time. The protagonists who came of age and got married in one book, in a later book are minor characters, too old or too busy for the new adventure.
Tess – Yup, they both fall into the category I’d call open-ended series. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books would be another example.
Diskworld is awesome! But even there, you have individual series within the world. I’m especially thinking of my favorite- the books about the Night Watch. There Pratchett escalates by upping the struggle Sam Vimes has to stay a strait cop in a dishonest world. He starts the series as a lonely drunk not-quite-crooked cop, and by the last book (so far, at least) he’s respected and has a family- and it’s that much more he could loose. It’s really great, the emotional escalation, as well as physical.
I’d love to hear how you felt about the stand alone getting a sequel with the Kate and Cecelia books. I think you did an amazing job with escalation with these books, but did you have a hard time creating the right level of escalation?
Hi Patricia! Somehow I managed to stumble upon your blog and I found this entry rather inspiring, and a bit along the lines of things I’ve been debating in my head for a long, long time.
I myself have been thinking a lot to myself, for years, as to what are the main factors that pulls people to fantasy. I agree with you, that fantasy is all about making up your own rules, and not restricting you to the limits of everyday life rules. It allows you to create a world, or even worlds, of your own. And I find that the idea is beautiful.
And yes, I think its a thrill reading your books, discovering the rules of that particular world along the way.
I’ve been trying to tell this again and again to my non-fantasy lovers friends, but I could never seem to convince them about the wonders of the fantasy world.
Even though I love my friends, our thoughts and opinion DO rather vary. I’m afraid I’m the sort who’s too stubborn to believe that there are people out there who doesn’t LIKE reading fantasy.
Then I noticed this later part in your entry:
“a lot of adults find fantasy confusing, or even disapprove of it”
That kinda stirred a faint memory in me. Perhaps, someone might have told me once, that they find fantasy confusing. Or rather, hard to understand.
I don’t quite understand why myself. As you said, “adults have to figure out the rules of the fantasy world as they go along, just the same way that kids do”.
I’ve entered my twenties, and I’ve never found it that hard to discover the rules of the different worlds as I go along the stories.
Do you think its perhaps because that these people who doesn’t read fantasy has closed off their minds to such ‘fantastical unrealistic nonsense’ at a younger age? That they preferred limiting themselves to ‘real life stuff’? Or is it because of something else? That they just couldn’t be bothered to try?
…Okay. I absolutely ranted. How uncommon, seeing me as the lazy brat I am. 🙂
Erfa – I think it’s a matter of taste, mainly. There are books out there that I happen not to like, but which are bestsellers – which means a whole lot of people DO like them. There are whole genres that I don’t particularly like…or that I don’t like well enough to wade through tons of what I consider mediocre books in search of the occasional diamond. But enough people DO like those genres that those genres exist. They scratch an itch for all those readers, and the fact that my itches are in different places doesn’t make them more valid itches.
I do, though, think that at least part of the problem with fantasy in particular is that adults have gotten used to understanding the world and how it works. Kids are still figuring it out; they’re USED to not understanding the real world, and they’re accustomed to not understanding all of the books they read. Adults aren’t … and most of them don’t like feeling out of their depth. Also, our culture still has a lot of the Victorian attitude that “fairy tales are for children” hanging on, which makes a lot of people in their late teens and early twenties unconsciously reluctant to continue reading the “kid’s stuff.”
Whoops wrong entry!
It was supposed to be for this entry: http://pcwrede.com/blog/letting-the-dragons-in-part-iii/#comments
I had a few windows of your blog entries open…