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Entries categorized as ‘Writing Series Novels’

Writing the Series Novel: Shattering the Happy Ending

Monday, June 23, 2008 · 4 Comments

How do you start the next story in the series?

That’s probably one of the biggest questions when it comes to writing a series (the other is about backstory, which we’ll get into tomorrow).

Last week, we discussed ending a series novel. The gist is, no matter which kind of series it is, each novel must give a satisfying ending. If the series is a spinoff series, which picks up with different POV characters, starting the next novel shouldn’t be too hard, as you have two new characters with brand new conflicts to explore. You can throw them into immediate conflict with no problems whatsoever. If your characters from the first book appear at all, they can still be living in the afterglow of their happy ending (if it’s a romance or other “happy ending” story). If it’s a family saga and you’re continuing the story with the kids of the characters in the first book, again, you have totally new characters and new conflicts to explore.

However, if you’re writing a serial or sequel series, you’re faced with shattering the “happy” (i.e., satisfying) ending from the first book and throwing your beloved POV characters into new turmoil and conflicts . . . when you just spent 80,000–100,000 or more words getting them OUT of turmoil and conflicts. This is where your mettle as a writer will be tested—as you’re forced to once again embroil your characters in enough conflict to drive the plot of the next novel, as well as get them closer to the ultimate plot’s climax and resolution.

If you’re writing a serial series, in which you have the same character throughout getting into one fix after another, starting the next story is a matter of finding the right conflict that not only will bring out new aspects of your character but will also allow your character to pick up at the level of development she attained in the previous book(s). Even though each book in a serial series could be read as a stand-alone, for you as the author, it isn’t. You can’t have your character making mistakes that she was making in the first book if you’re in the third, fourth, or ninth book in the series. Even though each book has its own self-contained story/plot, your character must continue to grow and develop throughout the series so that she’s a different person by the end of the series than she was at the beginning—just like she’s different at the end of the novel than she is at the beginning. You, the author, must keep up with her growth, her strengths, her weaknesses. Exploit them for the plot, but never forget what you’ve already put her through, nor the lessons she’s already learned. Don’t have her learning the same lessons over and over and over throughout the series. Revisit if necessary, but don’t just rehash. In other words, don’t start the next book with a crisis that is precipitated by the character doing something she should have learned not to do in the first book.

If you’re writing a sequel series, you’re faced with not only continuing the over-arcing storyline, but with coming up with a plot that will drive the narrative of each of the books in the series. Even if it’s most definitively a “to be continued” story—such as The Empire Strikes Back in the original Star Wars trilogy—each volume of the series must have its own beginning, middle, and end. It must have turning points. It must have a climax and a denoument—even if the denoument doesn’t wrap up all of the loose ends of the story. Most importantly, just like any stand-alone novel, a sequel must begin with a hook and an inciting incident that gets the plot rolling. Remember, you cannot be certain that a reader will have read the previous book(s) in the series. Even if the first line of the first chapter picks up right where the previous book left off, you still need to hook the reader with the first line, the first paragraph, the first page.

This is one area where knowing your story ahead of time can really help out—because you’ll know where to break it into volumes so that each ends with a bang and each starts with a bang.

In a sequel series, you also want to make sure that each volume in the story continues to ratchet up the tension for the characters. Don’t look at a sequel series as individual books; look at a sequel series as one REALLY LONG story. Remember in the Plot or Plod series when I gave the example of a plot looking more like an EKG than a steadily rising line on a graph? Well, I did a quick-and-dirty example for Fellowship of the Ring that shows the rising and falling tension levels in the plot of the story (taken from the movie, not the novel). That’s what you want the storyline of your SERIES to look like as well—ending each volume after one of those tension spikes where the level then drops—but then seeing the tension level rise swiftly (and higher) almost immediately in the next volume.

For Discussion:
Consider the characters of your current WIP. Even if you’re not planning on writing a SEQUEL to the story (as in, continuing the story), what’s something you could do to them that would shatter their “happy ending” and begin a new volume of their story? If you were to write a SERIAL with them, what’s the next conflict you could throw them into? And if you were to write a SPINOFF of your WIP, how would the original characters come into play in the next book? What would you want your readers to know about those characters after the close of their story?

Categories: Fiction Writing Series · Writing Process · Writing Series Novels · craft of fiction writing

Writing the Series Novel: Know Your World

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 · 3 Comments

One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard about setting out to write a series, whether it’s a trilogy or a forty-book saga, is that before you start writing the first book, you have to know the “world” of the story intimately.

Yes, I heard this in a seminar geared mainly for speculative-fiction writers (sci-fi, fantasy, allegory, etc.). However, the same holds true for ALL fiction, and it was never brought more clearly to light than when I did my final revisions on Stand-In Groom. You see, in the two years since I last worked on the novel, I’ve written two different openings for the second book in the series, Menu for Romance (a spinoff). Though I didn’t realize I was doing it, I made a few decisions on different aspects of my setting, and some of my characters, that had been different in Stand-In Groom, or that could be added to it to tie the series even more closely together. When I finished edits, I posted an image of all of the notes I made:

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Most of these are what we editors call “continuity” details. Such as:
–Forbes’s eyes are gray-green
–Major’s birthday is March 3
–Meredith drives a white Volvo SUV

Since finishing Stand-In Groom two years ago, not only have I gotten deeply involved in Meredith and Major’s story in Menu for Romance, but I’ve written a somewhat detailed synopsis for the third book in the series, A Case for Romance. Forbes, who is the cousin of Anne in SIG, and the older brother of Meredith in MFR, is the hero of the third book. But I was never quite sure who the heroine was. I’d come up with a story idea when I originally pitched the series to Barbour, but even then I wasn’t crazy about the heroine I’d created for him. In the process of writing MFR, a woman walked in and demanded a supporting role and all of a sudden, I had a perfect match for Forbes. Fortunately, I “met” her and came up with the story idea for book three before I went into final revisions on SIG, so I was able to actually drop her name, and the name of her parents’ business (which is important in book three) into Stand-In Groom, tying the books together.

Knowing your “world” is more than just knowing the setting where your story is taking place. It’s knowing as much about your characters as you can. If you’re writing a series in which the main characters from your first book either continue on as the main characters of your second book, or have a supporting role, you need to know them well enough by the end of the first book that you aren’t going to get into the middle of the third book and realize that there’s something fundamentally wrong with one of them that you need to change, which is going to require a complete rewrite of the series . . . especially if you’ve already sold that first book.

Whether you’re using a real or fictional, contemporary or historical setting, one POV character or six, keeping a continuity sheet is important—and that goes for people who aren’t writing series as well! If you have the sign out in front of Delacroix Nursery and Florists being green in chapter three and blue in chapter nineteen, that’s something a copy editor might not catch, but a reader probably will. If Forbes has gray-green eyes in Stand-In Groom (where he’s a secondary character) and hazel-brown eyes in A Case for Love (where he’s a POV character), while that might not necessarily be as noticeable as if it happened in the same book, if someone goes through and reads both books back to back, they are going to notice—and probably lose a little bit of confidence in me as an author. Same goes with my setting. Because Bonneterre is fictional, my readers are depending on me to know the setting intimately. If I “misplace” something from one book to the next—as in, it’s near Town Square in book one and on the north side of downtown in book three—again, the reader loses confidence in my authority as the creator of this setting.

Now, does this mean that you have to map all of this out before you start writing? Not exactly. But it does mean that you have to do some work with your characters and settings before you start writing. That’s why I like to use Real World Templates for my characters, so I don’t have to try to constantly conjure a mental image of my own making for them. That’s why I also make a character spreadsheet as well as a collection of images of the characters as I write. That way, as I write more of the series, I have these files to refer back to so that I’m not having to comb through the first book to find the information or just try to remember it on my own.

For Discussion:
How much time do you spend on developing your characters and setting before you start writing? How do you keep track of the details you’ve written into your story for continuity?

Categories: Fiction Writing Series · Writing Process · Writing Series Novels · craft of fiction writing · writing business
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Writing the Series Novel: How Do You Know It’s a Series?

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 · 2 Comments

When I first started writing my historical romance, I thought it was going to be very much like my contemporaries: a stand-alone story with, perhaps, the possibility for a spinoff with a secondary character. However, the more I got into the story and the characters, the more I came to realize that I had way too much story to fit it all into one 100,000-word novel. When I sat down and wrote a (very generalized) synopsis including all of the ideas and conflicts I already knew I wanted to include, I realized I had enough for two novels. Then, as I got into the middle of writing the first book and I suddenly had POV characters I hadn’t planned on being POV/important, I realized that there was no way the story would fit into two books . . . but it would make a great trilogy. There were natural breaks in the story—natural cliffhangers as well as places to give satisfactory conclusions—to be able to not only keep the reader hanging and wanting to buy the next book to find out what happens, but enough big subplots to wrap up each book satisfactorily.

When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings story, he envisioned it as one massive volume. But because it was being published after WWII, when money and paper were scarce, the publishers decided it needed to be broken into three volumes. Because Tolkien had written the story in six “books,” the natural place to break them was after books 2 and 4, so that each volume of the trilogy was about the same length.

How do you know if what you’re writing is a series?
Remember yesterday, we discussed the three different kinds of series: spinoffs, sequels, and serials. If you’re writing a stand-alone novel, you can ask yourself if there’s the possibility of a sequel—of continuing the story beyond the ending. Is there enough conflict? Is there an overarching storyline that could tie more than one book together as a whole story? If not, ask yourself if you can take your main characters and put them in a new set of circumstances and have a new story in a serial series. If the main conflict for your characters ends at the end of the novel, are there any minor characters you could take to spinoff a new novel from?

Don’t forget about using themes rather than characters as a way to develop series. What about a series of novels based on telling the “romances” of each of the first ladies of the U.S.? Debra White Smith did a contemporary-set retelling of each of Jane Austen’s novels. What about doing the same with your favorite classic author like Dickens or the Bronte sisters (come on, you know Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are just begging to be set in modern times). What about a series of historical novels based on the lives of the royal family of Liechtenstein or Luxembourg?

But what if you just have a really long story that has no natural place to break it? We’ve all been told that publishers won’t look at anything over about 120,000 words. What if yours is 180,000 or more—and it just doesn’t seem like you’ll be able to break it into two novels? Well, then you may be in a quandary . . . you’re either going to have to convince a publisher to publish a five- or six-hundred-page novel—which is a hard sell unless you’re an established author like Steven King or J.K. Rowling or Philippa Gregory—or you are going to have to find a way of breaking it into a series.

The way to do this is with subplots and secondary characters. If you haven’t already, write a detailed synopsis of your novel. If you have a story of 150,000 words or more, you’re going to have several major events happening. (If you don’t, you should probably consider either adding some conflict or cutting a lot of stuff out, as you’ll need several major conflicts to sustain a reader’s interest in something that long.) Is there a major event that you could use as a climax of your first novel? Do two of your main characters get married? Is there a major battle? Does someone important die?

Look at how Peter Jackson broke the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Rather than following the way it breaks in the printed books, he broke it more naturally with how the story flows. He broke Fellowship of the Ring after the death of Boromir (which is the opening sequence of the second book). That gave him a battle for a climactic scene, as well as the goodbyes to Boromir as the denoument. Even though in the long-term scheme of the story, it’s not a conclusion, just the breaking of the Fellowship, it made a natural place to end the first “volume.” In a similar manner, he chose to end the second film with the Battle for Helm’s Deep, with the aftermath of the battle as a denoument.

Look in your story for episodes like that—times of great conflict for your character which have a satisfactory conclusion (remember, “satisfactory” doesn’t have to mean “happy”), but which still leave the main story arc conflict hanging.

For Discussion:
Have you ever written or are you currently writing a series? Which kind is it (spinoff, sequel, serial)? Did you know when you first started writing it that it would be a series (two, three, or more books)?

Categories: Fiction Writing Series · Writing Series Novels · craft of fiction writing

Upcoming Series: Writing Series Novels

Tuesday, June 10, 2008 · 6 Comments

Beginning next week, I’ll be starting a new series, so I want to collect as many questions as I can ahead of time to make sure I research all of the areas of interest.

Writing Series Novels: As a follow-up to the series I did on Endings, this series will go more deeply into how much to review in a sequel or a follow-up—is it backstory, flashback, or even necessary? How many threads can you leave hanging at the end vs. how much should be wrapped up? Can you introduce the POV of the main character of a second/spinoff novel if they’re not a POV character in the original? Etc.

Now, what haven’t I mentioned that y’all would like to see covered in this series?

Categories: Fiction Writing Series · Writing Series Novels · craft of fiction writing