Oh, god… it’s endless. But I can’t stop. (Sound familiar?)
I’ve just finished reading the entire 21 entries in the Inspector Lynley series by Elizabeth George. They are literate, well written, lengthy, varied, etc. — everything you could want in a British Police Procedural.
While this was going on, my to-be-reads kept piling up, but I refused (almost successfully) to let anything else interrupt the marathon. With a great sigh I closed the 21st book and leaned back to contemplate my next book, the endless choices in my newly wider horizon of purchased or borrowed or ready-to-be-either works on hand or immediately available.
And then, Amazon pointed out something it had hidden until now… the recently published 22nd book in George’s series. I fantasized that she had written it while I was reading the others, but, no, it had somehow escaped the proper numbering/labeling that would mark it as the next organic book in the series, and it was a few months old at that.
My trance having been interrupted, however briefly, by my belief of completeness, I find I have the will to postpone this final (for now) book in the series while I let a few other books slip in for perusal first.
But the whole thing puts me in mind of what it is that most reliably makes a long series work for me (and it’s not the same for all of them). YMMV
(1) I want to see the same core group of characters (allowing for organic story growth or disaster) as much as possible. I don’t care as much about their eventually introduced siblings or their children, though a certain amount of that as a why of extending their presence is fine. If they develop, say, a multi-generational clan, there’s a danger of my losing sight of what I loved in the initial group. While there may be good characters among the descendants, this becomes a problem for….
(2) The more new characters that are introduced, the less remains of the original group that attracted me in the first place. I mourn the loss of the originals, who I’d’ve liked to get deeper into a relationship with. It doesn’t make a difference to me that the story qua story has perhaps deepened, and can carry on for generations. [It’s not that I haven’t read plenty of these multi-generational sagas, it’s that I have to read those for historical story rather than direct character hooks.]
So, what do I do when writing my own fantasy series? I wrestled with this question of my own preferences, naturally, and settled on a plan that I wrote to. To begin with, I envisioned just a few books per series (in my case, 4 seemed like a good number). That allowed me to create an overall story plot/primary problem to solve that could be divided into reasonably chunky per-entry plots. That in turn let me grow the core team relatively gradually, to keep them in focus for the reader along the whole plot. Sub-plots allowed me to visit sub-groups as a whole, which helped remind the readers about the relationships between all the players, as well as providing variation between isolated heroes and small groups, and the differences in what they were doing, before the multiple foci could group together for a full ensemble ending.
This is not an uncommon arrangement for long fantasy series, if they can restrain their deplorable tendencies to rattle on forever. On the one hand, story can be extended indefinitely, if you’re willing to expand the goals and the characters, or extend the lifetime of a primary team and the accumulated walk-ons. I could add more books of story to my series — that’s not a problem, I left a few plausible hooks — but I didn’t want to blow out the set of characters that I had. They had solved the primary crises and reached a satisfying victory, more to be honored in the “I wonder what happened to them afterwards” of the reader than in the dilution of their victory in arbitrary extensions into new crises with their families and friends.
Now, it’s not in the nature of all story genres for this to work. Romance, for an obvious example, has a hard time creating long series… an infinite range of siblings for each entry just isn’t the same thing. On the other hand, what I think of as “Career” series work well this way, each entry featuring a problem that must be solved, resulting in both short term goals and long term growth (or setbacks). Just like a fantasy series, however, a career series must be cautious about how it handles the ever-growing list of characters.
What does any of this have to do with the Elizabeth George police procedural series I started with, today? Well, those typically take the form of a career series. As a reader, I am made comfortable by my deepening acquaintance with a core group of continuing characters (not too many!), and able to watch the puzzle being solved while admiring the perhaps more compelling effect that the puzzle has on the characters I care so much about. It’s not that they solve the clever crime, it’s the effect that has on their own lives and growth in the process that I most treasure.
It has always seemed to me that the Sherlock Holmes corpus began as much more focused on the clever crime story, and that the reader engagement with Sherlock and Watson was something of a surprise to the original intent. The windup Sherlock/Watson became more interesting than the windup puzzle, at least to modern readers. The puzzle was just the excuse for the engagement. That said, I’m not the sort of person who reads Agatha Christie in order to see if they can catch all the clues and figure it out before all is revealed. I read for the characters in a long series, not the story — I don’t care how many enemies threaten the world-as-we-know-it in a goat-choking long fantasy production, if the protagonists aren’t engaging.
What are your musings on long series and how they work, in various genres? What are your preferences, in reading them or writing them? And why?
Mad Genius Club 
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