I have a special fondness for some particular authors who have their story-telling chops under control, so that I can not only enjoy the ride, but also soak up the methods that they’re using as I go along, for my own eventual use (theft being the most sincere form of flattery).

In fiction, I have a particular favorite genre convention, namely what I call the career story — how the protagonist rises from ignorance and nothing and figures out how things (people, jobs, money, education, character, family, etc.) work so that he and his can prosper through cleverness, courage, strength of character, and the occasional bit of luck.

Many authors do this well, but I’ll call our attention here to Andrew Wareham for the purposes of this article. He’s a British author who specializes in military, mercantile, political and industrial tales set anywhere from the 1700s to WW2. Most of the stories are in the form of medium to long series (sometimes very long) and many of them are in progress at the same time (he does keep churning them out, though some seem to be relatively complete). Though I’m not generally disposed in the direction of military fiction, I make an exception for these, because of that career structure which I’ve learned to treasure, whatever the focus.

One big structural question becomes: how do you take a long career with many crises and actions (and years), and divide it up into several series entries, each of which is satisfying, such that the accumulation is still manageable and satisfies the overall goal?

For Wareham, I find it’s a combination of things. Most importantly, the protagonist, however naive or even criminal is his beginning, learns character over time, as misfortune acts upon him. It may be slow in coming, or quick, but eventually he is making decisions and being motivated by impulses you can approve of, even if ruthless. Not only is he improving his lot in life, he’s starting to look at others as actors worthy of care or attention, not just victims, or antagonists, or opportunities. (He’s not sentimental about them necessarily, mind you, but at least he understands much better over time what they may be worth to him, in a civilized sophisticated fashion that we can sympathize with. He may even find himself passing out overt instructions along these lines to his own progeny, by the end of a particular series.)

There are two structural things that make this work for me. The first is the ability to sustain interest over the long haul in a particular protagonist, when the next book in series might not be out for another year or two (or more), and you want to be able to remember who everyone is without a complete re-read. The second is to strew enough clues into the story to tease the predictive tendencies of the reader to keep him involved and guessing.

As an example of the latter, I was reading a series entry set in the English civil war. Our protag is an orphan, fresh from a slate mine, and ignorant of all except his native small town when he joins a recruiting party and begins his life as a soldier. Naturally enough, he soon encounters young women of interest, including a baker’s daughter, someone he finds far above him at that point, someone whom he only dreams of eventually being respectable enough for.

Years go bye, various female interests are encountered in the usual impermanent way, and still the reader remembers his first potential marriage candidate as his fortunes rise. Every time he meets a new woman, the reader wonders will he ever return to that first one, now that he’s (more than) worthy? Eventually he looks back over his distant past and all the distance he has come, married into the gentry, on the rise socially and financially. And he wonders casually about his first interest, whom he thinks of as “what was her name? I wonder what happened to her?”, as he takes satisfaction with his current situation. The reader can but shake her head in chagrin at the reduction of her sentimental “will he meet that girl again, I wonder?” speculation to a reduced-to-commonplace memory, as a cynical nod to how things really work. And the reader sees that this is clearly the effect the author was going for. 🙂

You can learn a lot observing how Wareham juggles his multiple-simultaneous-in-process series to help the reader remember what happened in the prior entries without being obvious. The in-series entry interest, like the never-to-be-a-love-interest baker’s daughter, is part of that — it’s not coincidental that he keeps us wondering. I have a lot of fun looking for the bits that make his glue work, with an eye toward ripping them off myself.

What sorts of techniques do you use or notice for holding a reader’s interest, either for the fragments of the in-story interactions, or for the larger “what’s going to happen next” material? Bite-sized plot pieces and liberal reminder clues work for me (as reader or writer). How do you keep the reader involved and under your magical control?