There are clear structural differences in writing series books. I am, currently, writing the middle book in a tight trilogy. This entails not only keeping the plot of the book in mind, but the beats to set it properly within the short series. In this case, I can’t make it longer. The series needs to have a clear definitive end, because to come back later and plunge the characters back into the conflict would be a profound betrayal of what they had to do to win. Pulling the rug out from under them. It would hurt them, the readers would hate it, and frankly so would I. I won’t give them hope, only to yank it away and write another book. Betraying their trust would break the compact with my readers, make me very unhappy as an author, and the downstream consequence is that I would lose readers and struggle with writing as I fought my own brain which would be pouting at me for that betrayal.
I am planning, once I finally finish this book (it’s taking rather longer than I’d planned), to write an installment in another series, this one an open-ended series. That is a beast of a rather different shape and size. Plotting those books is… interesting. For one thing, when I started the Groundskeeper with a short story, I had no idea what it would grow into. For another, I still don’t know that there will be an ‘end’ to that series. I suspect that at some point in the future I will reach a point I don’t care to write past. If I see that coming, I can give the readers satisfaction by tying up any loose ends, delivering a warm farewell, and letting it fade into the sunset. Alma Boykin, our own TXRed, is doing this currently with her Familiar books, and I am observing while taking notes.
The goals for each kind of series can be very different, and that will shape the books which make up the parts of the whole. In a tight trilogy, everything needs to move the overarching plot along. In the looser mystery series (which is what the Groundskeeper truly is) each book can and should stand on its own two feet. The tight-series book I’m working on, book 2 in the BOHICA series, leans heavily into book 1, and book 3 will be even more so. Because the plots are intertwined to an ultimate conflict and shared goal for the characters. Now, can a planned trilogy become a longer series? Absolutely.
So how does a planned trilogy turn into five books? Even when working from an outline, you can have things you realize should be written differently. Sometimes this can mean that what you thought was one book is really two. Sometimes that’s for the practical reason that a book over 120,000 words should actually be two books. Maybe even three… But that’s a different post, one about the business of publishing, not the art of writing series. Write the story, worry about length later. If you write it too long, you can always break it and publish in rapid tempo.
I have finished two trilogies. Both of them have spin-off works, in different ways. I plan to revisit the worlds again, for the Tanager series by writing Julia’s stories, and for the Underhill series to tell stories about the children of Pixie for Hire (the core trilogy) and other characters from those books. From a marketing standpoint, it’s very difficult to market an unfinished series. It’s also something you want to consider when you start a series (I did not, and it is biting me in the behind now). Starting a series with short stories that gradually build into novels is, I think, not uncommon. It is, however, not what a new reader wants to see. They want full novels. Due to my lack of planning I’m faced with needing to adjust series numbering on two series, at some point, which is going to be awkward at best. Don’t do that to yourself. I didn’t even know I was writing a series when I started those – the characters hijacked my brain and insisted on more – but I learned from them that I shouldn’t do that.
How have the rest of you handled the difference between a closed arc and an open-ended series? Especially if the characters decided the plan for you.
Off topic: I’m turning my essays on writing into a bite-sized podcast, for those of you who enjoy that sort of things.
6 responses to “Closed Arcs and Open Ends”
I thought Hunter Healer King was a trilogy, with maybe a book zero/book four about the trilogy’s hero’s parents, and a book 0.5/book 5 about the trilogy’s hero’s troublemaking cousin. Book four’s on preorder, and I started writing book 5 about a month ago. I can now see book 6 (about trilogy hero’s longlost other cousin) and book 7 (about one of their distant ancestors) looming in the distance and I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I do know that splitting the prequel-ish books into a separate series (Ancestors of Jaiya Series versus Jaiya Series) did not help from a marketing POV, so I don’t feel like doing that again.
And then there was the space opera where I wrote book one and thought, “gee, there’s a lot of places this could go; if it’s a big hit I might expand it to a quadrilogy or quintology” and yeah, no, turns out there were only two books in my head in that setting. Something a little similar happened with The Stars By Degrees/Space Austen: there was a period where I was dead convinced that it was going to be four volumes including a Mansfield Park retelling, but most of the major plot points instead ended up in the P&P retelling or will end up in the S&S retelling.
I’ve learned to not argue with my characters.
But then I don’t so much as have a series as an environment where I can have a few books that string together, a few detective novels here, a romance there . . .
I’ve broken it up into separate “series” that group the stories roughly in political regions or before during and after major events.
I recently re-read Wine of the Gods, all 400 of them. You’re right: It’s not really a series.
I remember when you switched to the Empire’s perspective and I didn’t like it. I persevered and loved The Directorate sub-series, which pretty much is a series. Although, the names! Very few of them stick with me.
I still don’t like the Fall of the Alliance sub-series, although I enjoyed the Ice sub-sub-series, which I don’t think is explicitly separated.
I think what makes everything hang together semi-coherently is the reading order. First published to most recently published is the reading order for you; unlike the sprawling vastness of 1632, which has no ‘correct’ reading order, or the “should I read the prequel first?” problem.
Sometimes you set out and discover that the problem you thought could be solved in one book will actually require more than one, unless you are Michener or Clavell. Thus groweth a series – one problem, but the protagonist has to reach the point that he/she/it/cast of dozens has the knowledge and other tools to be able to solve the original problem, or the Big Thing behind the original problem.
I’m a series junkie as a reader, rather than short stories. (A stand-alone book is effectively a very short series). Not surprisingly, most of what I’ve produced as a writer has been in series form from the beginning. My design challenge is how to limit the length of the arc.
I mean, I could just keep the story going, book after book, the way some Families-Romance books do, but I think of a series as one long story, not a series of (loosely or otherwise) related episodes. So the series has a goal of some sort that it’s working toward, and a satisfying overall closure point of some sort.
I do feel it prudent in the plotting to make it possible for follow-on additions to exist, if I think them necessary (though I’ve never felt like I had to invoke that option so far), to extend the main story and keep it going. My full-series arcs so far feel complete enough not to need it, and I think just cobbling stuff on after closure ruins the form.
Book one is nearing completion. Chapter 25 went on the ‘done’ pile over the weekend; probably around 30 for the whole thing. They keep splitting (24 in the original outline), so we’ll see.
I am also a series reader who doesn’t much care for short stories because just as they get interesting, they end.
My publishing plan (which is more hope and prayer than actual plan) is to be working on book four when book one is published then trot them out every two months. I expect book five to be about half done when book four goes out (about a year from now, I hope).
There’s a branching point there. If I have legions of adoring fans, the series will continue until it ends (nine or so books, I think, but considering book one isn’t done, that’s not accurate). If no one loves me, I’m destroying Earth and ending it in book five. That’s not out of nowhere; that’s a plausible ending. (Take that, haters!)
The point of the first book is to prove to myself that I can actually write a book. If it sells, great. If it doesn’t, I will not be crushed. First novels usually aren’t very good. I’m trying, but I’m sure everyone else does, too.
One book by a new author is not going to be found and read. Amazon revenue almost requires a series, and I like them, so that’s what I want to write.