This one comes from Lyn South, who submitted her question to Victoria’s Advice Column, which I like to think of as Miss Lonelyhearts for the Word-Worn.
DO
- Identify your protagonist(s) and their nemesis(es) clearly right up front in each book. Your reader wants to know who this series is about. And they’re not going to go hunt down earlier books to learn.
- Identify your protagonist(s)’s dilemma for each book clearly. Each book gets a major dilemma, and all of these dilemmas can be traced back to the one overall dilemma of the entire series. Simultaneously identify your protagonist(s)’s overall dilemma clearly. Handle both of these right off the bat, i.e. in your first one or two chapters.
Although you give your protagonist(s) a new dilemma for each book, always keep the overall dilemma pointed like a diamond at your protagonist(s)’s greatest nightmare (which of course you will address in the final book). This overall dilemma is going on at all times, no matter what else also happens to be going on. - Fill in backstory—what happened in earlier books—as briefly as possible, each time with a slightly new slant, and without repeating yourself. That way your most loyal readers will not be your most ANNOYED readers. They will get something special for their loyalty: multiple layers of the same story told with some tiny fresh illumination every single time. (This is harder than it sounds.)
- Think of your series holographically, that is: each book has a hook, development of conflicts, faux resolution, and climax. And the series itself has a hook book, development of conflicts in separate books, a faux resolution (at the beginning of the final book), and climax (the bulk of the final book).
DON’T
- Lose track of your protagonist(s)’s basic, driving agenda. They need something. They have always needed it, and they will always need it. And their ultimate failure to get that something is the climax of your series.
Although characters should grow and change throughout your series—fiction is, after all, the record of a human change—this basic agenda is your Pole Star. Don’t wind up with a final book starring a main protagonist who couldn’t possibly be the same character as the main protagonist of your first book. If you do make a serious change in character, make sure you’ve accounted for it properly in a significant place. - Muddy your subplots. Make sure you’ve got these mapped out. Writing a novel is complicated. Writing a series—which is really an uber-novel—is that much more complicated. It’s all too easy to find yourself solving the wrong problem for a given book. This is, um, bad.
- Guess what? You knew I was going to say this, especially after that last point. Don’t pants. You’ll wind up with your climax in some book other than your final book, and later books won’t be able to compare. And the loyal readers who read all the way to the end will COMPLAIN LOUDLY.
- Forget your supporting characters’ personalities. No kidding. It happens all the time with enormously long works—you change your mind about characters in mid-stream. This is completely acceptable in early drafts, so long as you go back later and re-create either character arcs or at least character unity. It is death, however, to published fiction.
P.S. Hi, Spork people! I don’t know who you are, and I can’t get onto your website to say hello, but you guys are cool. And there are a lot of you!
Excellent advice! I’m currently working on book one of an intended three book series and have run into many of these issues myself. My big hang up at this point is how far to plot out the remaining books in the series in order to set them up in the first book. J.K. Rowling did a bang up job of this in Harry Potter (across 7 books, good gosh that woman was enterprising), and I want to make sure I do the same. Any recommendations on that?
I wrote a seven book series for fun (and to learn; for any of it to be publishable, I’d need to completely rewrite three, but boy did I learn!). While I did ‘pants’ a lot of it, most of the time going back a book or two and making a small change or adding something makes things seem planned, so it CAN be done. Probably not as easily, though.
JEM, thanks for the question. Do you want me to throw it in the queue for Victoria’s Advice Column?
Eika, Flannery O’Connor said, “You can do anything in fiction you can get away with. Unfortunately, nobody’s ever gotten away with much.”
Keep in mind that what you did was not for publication. Publishing’s a very different world from just doing it for fun & your own edification.
#3 in the “do” list is always problematical. How much to reveal, how to reveal it. I’ve picked up books mid-series and there’s been so much back story I have no need to go back and read the first ones. Which is why I try to avoid reading out of order.
And if you’re still trying to sell book 1, it’s tough to know how to handle writing book 2 if book 1 might not get picked up. Or if it’s picked up, but as a single book.
Series’ fiction is really serious fiction.
Yes, Terry. That’s the thing about each book being able to stand alone. Maybe book 1 really is just backstory before things get exciting.
You know who I was reading last week who did it well? Dorothy Gilman with her Mrs. Pollifax series. Granted, I don’t think she plotted out Mrs. Pollifax from start to finish. But I don’t care, because I think Mrs. Pollifax herself rocks.
That’s a joke, by the way, folks. Mrs. Pollifax does rock, but it’s not quite that simplistic. Dorothy Gilman has traveled around the world, and where she doesn’t travel she researches extensively, so each book is actually a realistic trip to someplace you’ve probably never been before. You know why people read? To learn something they don’t already know.
And Mrs. Pollifax does go through change throughout the series. For one thing, the woman gets married.
Thank you! This is particularly useful to me at this time. Most of the series fiction I’ve written so far has been regular mystery, with slow long arcs – open ended, no final book. (Although there are arcs within the series.)
But right now I’m about to start an “old-fashioned serial” series, which will need very planned larger plots around the smaller ones. The reminders in the DON’Ts part in particular are critical to this kind of writing, which can get really complicated.
I’d love to see more YA series authors follow these guidelines – a lot of them tend to fizzle out as they go on. It definitely takes skill to keep the story arc going through a whole series, very different than a single novel or just a novel and sequel! Thanks for the great advice! =)
These are good reminders to keep on the straight and narrow of fiction.
This is some really sound advice. I’ll be bookmarking this for future reference as my own series continues.