WI4: Strong Series Potential

Do you know the feeling of drowning in your own story’s details as the book series monster you’ve created grows? I feel you.

Over three years ago, My friend Nichole introduced me to the inkling of a story arc she’d built in her head. Through the conversation that followed, that arc sizzled back and forth between us, building energy with each detail contributed.

It became obvious that this arc would be broken into three parts, which turned into three books. One of the hooks became the fact that each book would follow one of three sisters in a different time period. Present, then past, then future. Another is that the world takes place under a metaphorical and literal purple sky (hello fun with imagery!). This world has its own rules, great forces unknown, extensive family trees, and God save us, time travel.

I had floundered from the start as I’d attempted to create a system to organize my thoughts. The word documents on Google Drive grew. And grew and grew and grew. They became nonsensical with random old and new details.

Once I finally had the first book written, and then started in on book 2, I found I had to go back and rewrite book 1. Now that I’m on the third version of book 1, I’m starting to feel like the details are stabilizing.

But had there been a way that would have streamlined my efforts?

I wish I’d seen Silvia Acevedo speak three years ago! During my time at the Writer’s Institute conference in Madison, WI, I attended her workshop entitled Keep Your Story Straight. Through her own grueling experience writing a series, she’d picked up a few tips she shared with us:

What am I writing?

Identify what kind of series you’re writing:

Episodic: stand-alone stories that don’t have to be read in order (Magic Treehouse)
Sequential (Harry Potter)
Spin-off (The Darkest Legacy, a spin-off from The Darkest Minds series)

This is when you’ll have a better idea of how much homework you’ve given yourself. Our own book, Guardian Lights, is essentially sequential (essentially… you know, because of the time-travel), so we’d given ourselves quite a bit of homework. And, with a sequential series, you not only need to work out your:

Book Arc: the problem/question and solution over the course of a single book

But also your:

Series Arc: the question posed in book one answered slowly over several books through theme

Characters

As important as it is to make decisions about how many books, how many narrators, and when to introduce characters, the characters themselves are what pull a reader in and make them care about the rest. Those characters need to be:

Unique
Have layers
Grow through their experiences

Characters of similar personality and purpose should be blended into one to prevent reader confusion over the course of a series. And don’t make the mistake to neglect backstory or stretch established traits to fit your plot needs.

Details

Even more complicated than creating characters are the many many details.

Create a date and time timeline to keep events straight, even if it’s just for yourself
Establish the rules of your world and abide by them
Plot so characters can solve their problems rather than employ the deus ex machina

Characters need traits, names, backgrounds. Your world needs city names, constructs, laws. Your resolutions need subplots and character flaws. World building requires notes and more notes. Find a way to organize early and often. Scrivener was suggested as a helpful plotting software.

Plot Building

Silvia shared a picture of her own plot building technique. She would print a page for each chapter, spreading it all out on her dining room table. She then print and cut apart plot points and physically assigned them to a chapter. This is how she kept it all straight and organized, and it made it easy to change up the flow and reassign chapters as needed.

She then shared the famous image of JK Rowling’s series grid from Order of the Phoenix. Silvia demonstrated that even Rowling needed to keep straight not only OOTP’s place within the Harry Potter series but the series of stories within the book itself. I’m a fan of this article, which delves further into Rowling’s series grid:

Promises

A very important thing to remember about writing a series is to keep your promises. Readers expect a resolution to the stories within your story, not just the main arc. Answer the questions you pose throughout the series in order to contribute to your satisfying ending rather than detract from it.

My focus-shifting lesson learned thanks to Silvia Acevedo:

If series writing sounds too daunting or time-consuming, Silvia urged us to be open to the idea of writing a stand-alone story with strong series potential. This way time is not lost if traditional publishing is your dream and you haven’t gotten an agent or publisher to show interest in your first book quite yet.

This was an eye-opening lesson for me. I’ve already spent three years on book 1 and am halfway through book 2. But I don’t have an agent and aren’t yet interested in the self-publishing route. So why spend more effort on book 2, or book 3 for that matter, if book 1 hasn’t yet garnered interest? This was the workshop that made me want to dig back into book 1 from a technical perspective. Analyze it, tear it apart, get more critique, make it truly GREAT. So thank you, Silvia, for that lesson!

Talk to you soon,

Crystal

Here’s some info about Book 1 of Silvia Acevedo’s God Awful series, God Awful Loser. Being a huge fan of Percy Jackson, I’m going to have to check these out:

Cupid, that egotistical, jet-setting love master, leads a charmed life. He’s got it all – until a meddling stranger challenges him for his crown. Not even the advice of his war-mongering father, Mars, and embarrassingly underdressed mother, Venus, can save him from the skids. Facing enraged immortals, epic battles against The Underworld’s most vile creatures, and the dread of becoming mortal himself, Cupid teams up with an unlikely band of fallen celestials in the hopes of saving himself, Olympus, and humans the world over. But can such an inept team of losers finally win when it counts?