Just the other day, I had one of those moments of satori that solves a series structural problem I had been ruminating on, and I wanted to share how that worked.
I’m happier writing series, rather than just novels, and that imposes certain requirements (as I see it). Some of those “rules” that make me happy include:
- Each series novel is a complete novel, with everything that implies regarding structure, flow, etc. They are not stand-alone books (they’re part of a longer and continuous story) but they are complete entries in themselves, with satisfying beginnings and conclusions, without cliff-hangers.
- The series world is not envisioned as unlimited in scope, but as the telling of a single (large but) limited, progressive, and connected story, not as an anthology of “in the same world as” entries.
In my current in-process series (The Affinities of Magic) (which won’t be released until at least the first 4 books are ready), I have a core set of characters (of course) that are followed throughout the series, and who accrete new members (as slowly as possible to avoid overwhelming reader memories), as well as guest characters within each novel, some of whom have a continuing occasional presence later on.
So, why the article? Well, here’s what’s going on, at the series level.
Book 1 – The characters spring into life, surmount their first existential crisis, and set the stage. [A dying (inheritable) wizard guild house is salvaged by a young family member from another branch of the family who discovers an important principle of magic and founds an academy for other unserved students.]
Book 2 – The primary characters begin a major growth path, building businesses based on wizard principles being discovered and coming to terms with opposition from other wizard guilds. Tragedy strikes the primary character, and he has to weather it, isolated as he is in the main city away from his original home.
Book 3 – The primary character solidifies his career goals and continues his growth as a business builder and founder of an industrial revolution of magic. He encounters the woman he wants to spend his life with, in the midst of all of his other responsibilities.
Which brings us to…
Book 4 – The primary character brings his family of choice and his proposed wife on a visit to meet his original family clan upriver, where his parents were tragically killed years ago.
…And there we crash to a halt. While I have no difficulty with telling that story, and it belongs in the series at this point, I don’t like the isolation of it from the original setting, from a series point of view. It would leave behind one of the central “characters” of this series — the Wizard Guild Hall setting itself. Many of the primary and secondary characters are associated with it, as primaries, servants, teachers, transient students, etc. The city that surrounds it is also prominent.
I’ve been puzzling over this issue off and on for a while. And my reliable back-brain came up with an appropriate solution.
You see, the defunct Wizard Guild house that was saved in Book 1 has a long history in the city. Prominent in that is a clock tower, no longer working, that used to be a feature of the neighborhood. Well, Book 4 is just the place to deal with that. The novel needs a frame within a frame. The outer frame is solving the clocktower issue (meetings with the neighbors, work in progress, local experts and other secondary characters, setbacks, improvements, delegated responsibilities, etc.), while the inner frame is the local family story of the primary character and his relationships there (business as well as family) while worrying about what’s happening at home (home now being his guild, not where he grew up).
So, the primary characters will start the ball rolling over the clock tower restoration before progressing to the family story upstream, and the characters left behind (and new ones) will work on the clock tower, with scenes moving back and forth between the two groups, allowing for story delays and suspense as we switch back and forth.
The series entry story will logically conclude with the primary character and his new wife back in the guild hall, admiring the sound of the chimes.
(And, incidentally, I now know what should be featured in the cover illustration — the clock tower — so much easier to portray than emotional family issues.)
I find this frame-within-frame structure very helpful for thinking about keeping novel and series goals in sync with each-other. I’ve sort of always had it in the back of my mind, but only now have I focused on it so consciously in my toolkit.
How do you keep both novel and series structural requirements in balance with each other, if that’s your particular output?
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Nested Frames”
Well, I rely on my back brain.
On a more serious note, in Martha’s Sons I have a series arc/goal/ultimate destination, and I knew what it was from the start. I meant each book to be a stand-alone. I’m not sure I succeeded in that with the first two books, so I’ve put them (and a wee novelette) together in a boxset.
For that series, each book plays out a step along the way and that step is what the story’s about. Usually the step is related to the overarching goal, but the fifth book has a bit of a detour that allows for more gathering of the team from a faraway place and the recruiting of allies. It still has a complete story in and of itself, but by that point we know that the one brother’s goal is the ultimate destination.
I seem to keep writing Exodus. The first four books show why one might want to leave the valley settled by the humans stuck on their lost colony world. Book three sees the start of attempts to make that happen, as well as continuing to show why the governance of the place is less than ideal.
You would think that with this experience, I’d have an overarching vision and a good plan for my next series. Instead, I’ve got a draft with beta readers, know the plot for the next book, but don’t know the ultimate series destination.
For this YA academy WIP, the hook is “The road to Mars has to start somewhere. It might as well be central Virginia.” (Like I said, Exodus. We’re like this, me and Exodus: *crossed fingers emoji*.) So, if I were planning a six-book series, Mars would be the destination. Or graduation? I know the villains will be a slow reveal. I don’t know much more, and am merely grateful I have a plot for the second book.
The back brain will let me know when it’s ready.
I just love Laura’s tagline about starting for Mars from Virginia!
Back brain, and putting a little “note to self” at the end of the plot sketch for the WIP. The plot sketch fills in what should happen in the course of the current book. The note reminds me things like “hint at Big Bad, MC needs to gain confidence; other series MC needs to find things that tie to secondary plot of WIP, more hints about Big Bad”. My series notes (separate document) are where I list who or what the Big Bad is, and anything that needs to be tied up before the end of the series arc or sub-arc.
Oh, very cool. I’d sort of had to do that in one of the fanfic shorts, but didn’t have a way to articulate that.
The standalone, but interconnected stories was something I was trying to go for there too. What I ended up doing was each story was also one of the story beats in the larger story arc. But early on, I realized one of the characters was basically going to betray one of the other characters. I had to foreshadow that, and set up why. Problem was, it depended on a dynamic between the two characters that existed, but was not explained why in cannon.
So I had to figure out a headcannon reason that matches what had been shown, set up the conditions that provokes the betrayal, and show it without ever actually explaining what I think was going on (because it’s never explained in cannon, but the original author could, in theory, lay down the word of god whenever he feels like it, so this has to be compatible with other possible explanations.) You just can’t write a satisfying story like that. Doesn’t work. At least not for me.
So it had to have a second plot, one that did have all the visible stuff, when through the emotional beats at the same time, and was something the reader could actually follow while the train wreck was happening in the background. And was also why that one was twice as long as all the other shorts: it was two different shorts happening in the same story.
That was such a brain twister. But a lot of fun, and I think it worked out ok?
Ok, that sounds hard.
It was a lot of fun, which makes it easier.
That hard part is when it stops being fun, or when you just lose the story.
See, seeing the phrase ‘nested frames’ reminds me of when that was all the rage in web page design and soooo many browsers would render them differently, making it all a mess…
For me, series plotting is…an ongoing process. My first series was three sorta-gothic, sorta-romances connected by a setting and some characters who were related (two brothers and a female cousin). My second series was a prequel to the first, with a similar conceit but dynastic (related characters are descended from one another) and a tendency to be about whatever interested me just then: gladiator fights, balloon travel, spies, Indiana-Jones-ish hijinks in a warzone. My Obligatory Star Wars rewrite was supposed to be a trilogy but severely hampered by the fact that I didn’t have enough plot for three books, so it ended up as a duology. Current series has basically two structural things imposed on it: a stop-and-start romance between the two POV characters, and an arc of the male POV character having more power and authority than he really wants thrust onto him. There’s some other minor quirks going on, like, the steampunk motif, the horse motif, and certain recurring things going on with the baddies.