In my first two series, I built the plots fairly normally, that is, I had some idea of what each entry was going to cover, and how the characters got the way they are, and how the plot was going to work structurally in each book. Maybe it wasn’t in detail, but the broad strokes were there, and while changes came to mind as I was constructing each entry, and I modified that entry accordingly, still each book was published before I got to serious work on the next entry, so what had already happened in the story was committed.
These were only 4-book series, and I had the basic concept of the series progression as a whole adequately conceived and structured before each entry, but the whole-series story was dependent on just that specific length. In other words, if I had wanted to extend it, it would have required some retroactive shoehorning, or at least some limitations, to stay in the direct line of the overall series. That runs the risk of feeling anticlimactic, a tack-on to the original series entries.
Well, now I’m generating an indefinite-length series, and I have concepts and a good bit of detail for quite a lot of it (the first two books completed, and much of numbers 3-5). It is intended to be a lot longer, a substantial chunk of the hero’s life if not indeed other generations, assuming I live long enough. I’ve been delayed in getting the detailed writing finished (health, etc.) but the upside of that is that I get to fabulate elements that cover a much larger scope of entries before I have to commit some of the entries to publication. Before, that is, the world building in that entry becomes committed for the series.
And that provides some wonderful luxuries to consider future worldbuilding options and provide for them ahead of time. Let me present one random example.
The hero’s eventual wife originates as a small foundling child, lost on the streets of the city. She has no information about her lost parents, just a vague memory of a mother who has vanished. (Hey, I don’t know who they were, either. Yet.) Maybe she (and I) will never find out, and it’s just part of what forms her character. On the other hand… I was just ruminating about when the married couple’s first children will appear, and toying with the idea of making them twins. And then perhaps later, another set of twins. And then… much later… there’s a clue about her parentage that also mentions twins, and the similarity prompts speculation about identities and relationships.
I don’t have to make those ultimate decisions until the plot requires I find out more about her parents, if it ever does. But I can give her twins twice, say, just in case (if I want to). And that hazy forecast gives me an incentive to keep my options open. Fabulating the potential worldbuilding requirements of a distant series entry lets me slip a useful detail into an earlier entry, increasing the odds that each published (committed) entry in a long series like this continues to spin out options to help keep the series as a whole from dead-ending like a shorter length series, which is often structured as a narrative whole ahead of time (more or less).
Because I have this unusual delay in instantiating my sequential entries, it feels like I can work backward with some of worldbuilding, which can only be to the benefit of the series as a whole, eventually. Of course, I do have to finish the entries sequentially and commit them (publishing earlier entries will happen before the series is completed). But it does make the whole more organic and fruitful. Each individual book has the appropriate plot structure as a story and feels complete, but the whole could stretch for generations if I were so moved.
It’s a bit like constructing a large building without too much in the way of detailed architecture involved ahead of time.
How have you handled the structural tensions between series entries and whole-series story progression, if you’ve dealt with that?
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “Working backwards with your worldbuilding”
WP hates me…
My worldbuilding efforts have been more, working within an existing world. So of course, I started thinking about twins. As in, in a family line where twins are common, is a singleton regarded as a bad omen? Would that be enough to cause the family to, ahem, “distance,” themselves from the child? This is, of course, assuming she is a singleton, which is part of your ongoing process.
For my most recent series, I thought of each book as a single complete story but I knew the progression (in broad strokes) of the whole series.
Before the streaming services started bringing us shows where the story spanned the season, TV had a much stronger sense of serving up single episodes as a whole story. There might be a season arc, but you could watch a show mid-season and get a whole story. You might miss out on greater depth and understanding, but you could get resolution of a plot. I wanted each of my books to be like that, but with the series as a whole telling a much bigger story.
All that being said, at one point I had to retrofit published works. I didn’t work out my full theory of terraforming until Book 3 or 4, and went and changed the Wrong Plants in the first two books to the Right Plants.
Also, it think it was Neil Gaiman who once said he puts lots and lots of things into his books and then happily makes use of them later. Because he has so much to choose from, he looks like he cleverly planned it, but claims he does not.
I very much believe that of Neil Gaiman. “How to make character and plot froth useful.”
Setting tends to be something I’m constantly noodling around with, while I fall in and out of love with specific character archetypes at varying intervals. Story happens when the basics of a setting converges with a character or characters I want to write about, and a lot of the finer details of the setting are emergent, existing to account for the characters. Like, I knew going into Wolf’s Trail that the hero was going to grudgingly become king of his own people by the end of the first or second book (late in the first, as it turned out), and even more grudgingly Emperor by the end of the trilogy (this is not a huge spoiler, book two should be out by the end of the year or early next year, with some heavy-handed hints in that direction). But what that entails has been something I’ve figured out on an as needed basis.
Oh, it can happen on a much smaller scale. Take, oh, The Book of Bone. You’d think the title book was devised because the story is filled with necromancy working with bones. Actually, the title book came first and dragged the magic after it.
I found important events, things that were key to the life of the model for the MC, and broke up the life-story based on those. One per book, so that gave me a chronology to weave the tale around. Thus far it’s only happened once [leans over, touches wood]. Everything else has been build-as-you-go, or “Dig into world idea, find character to go with it.”