Delights (and Risks!) of Writing a Series
On our camper trip, my favorite part of the day is curling up with a good book after dinner. Everyone (two humans, two dogs) piles on the bed. Lights are low, it’s raining or windy outside (by the ocean it’s been raining these past days), and the dogs usually snore. But I’m lost in a fictional world. So far, in the ten days we’ve been on the road, I’ve read Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout; The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus; and Cloak of Darkness by Helen McInnes (picked up in a campground free library). I feel very luxurious. Reading this much reminds me of being a kid.
As a kid, my favorite Saturday activity was a trip to the local library. I’d come home with a stack of books, then shut myself in my room all afternoon. My family were all readers. When we gathered in the living room by the fire or on the screened porch in summer, each person was absorbed in their own book. My mother even read standing up in the kitchen while she cooked. I remember my current novel on my lap at the dinner table, reading between bites until I got scolded.
My favorite stories were series. If I fell in love with a character, no way I wanted to let them go. I wrote letters to my favorite kidlit series authors, encouraging them to write more! I even got a reply back once, a huge thrill.
My biggest compliment when my last novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published was this: When are you writing the sequel?
Haven’t you gotten to the end of a favorite book and wanted more? If the characters are compelling and unforgettable, it’s natural to wonder what would happen next. And as an author, it’s equally hard to let go of characters you’ve grown to love. (Or happily hate.) So you write more.
Series mean a longer stretch of time to explore character conflicts. To expand learning and set up new problems. To bring in backstory with more depth. To create future alliances.
As an author, series make sense for marketing too. Once readers are hooked, a series provides a backlist for selling all your books (one of the reasons Amazon often “bundles” books—because if a reader liked one, they’ll probably go for another).
We live in a culture of readers who love to follow a group of characters through many books. Similar to a great Netflix series, we think about them when we’re not reading. Like one of my advance readers of my forthcoming novel, Last Bets, said, “I want to text [these characters] to find out how they’re doing!”
But as this great article on series from NY Book Editors says, it’s hard enough to write one book. Considering a series might put most writers into complete overwhelm.
Your thoughts?
What do series books require?
Depending on how you approach your book(s), series writing may require a certain amount of forethought and structure decisions. I am a combo plotter and pantser, which means I don’t necessarily love outlining ahead of time. I do love to brainstorm plot and character arcs via a storyboard, and I will often use those trajectories to create an outline or two, but it’s not my starting point. That’s just my way, and yours might be completely different. But if you are at all a “let’s see how it goes along” kind of writer, you may not be able to make the kinds of decisions that series require when you’re writing your first book.
I’ve spoken with series writers who get super excited about plotting multiple books at once. It just makes me tired. If you get juiced by it, though, and you have full knowledge of how the next and the next will go even before you’ve finished the first, all power to you!
In this article, I’m not speaking to you guys, though, as much as the rest of us, who struggle just to get one completed.
But since I’ve now written a series despite my best intentions, just because I couldn’t stop thinking and dreaming about the characters, I know there’s another way to approach it even if you’re not a plotter at heart.
Sometimes a series just happens!
Like I said above, I did NOT start out intending to write a series. My first novel, Qualities of Light, was a stand-alone. I wrote the story of Molly Fisher at age 16, and what happened to her one summer when her little brother was in a boating accident. But the ending kinda startled me—it was not the wrapped-up conclusion I thought I should have. And it did leave an opening for another book about Molly.
My unexpected series (above)
In fact, I got a lot of questions from readers (and requests too) about continuing Molly’s story. So I played with that. What would happen three or five years later, to her and her family, to complete more of the story started in Qualities of Light?
A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue was created to answer those questions, but as I wrote it, many more questions came forward. And new characters, and different plotlines than I anticipated. Yes, it’s about the same family. Yes, it shows the continuation of Molly (and Zoe’s) story. But it also brings in a completely different arc—about Molly’s mom and her estranged sister reuniting.
This second book in what is becoming my series (a third is now roughly sketched out) is a bit like a play with a bright spotlight that roves from one character to the next, highlighting their particular story. First book, the spot was on Molly. Second book, it was on Kate, her mom, and Kate’s sister, Red. Three years between the two stories, a lot of changes, and a bunch of new dilemmas, but the same cast of familiar, favorite players.
I didn’t plan this! But I am very glad it happened.
Returning to these characters was a surprise. I love them, as characters, even Mel, Kate’s errant husband (he has an affair). I remember taking a class with Josip Novakovitch, and I was a bit ashamed of Mel, angry at him, and Josip helped me see his humanity and his good intentions, despite his screw ups, so I grew to love him too.
Molly has been a favorite ever since Qualities of Light. I always promised myself that I’d continue her story with Zoe, find out what happened to that relationship. And that’s how a series was inadvertently born. So you don’t have to be a plotter—you just have to follow your nose sometimes.
Do series limit or inform you about the characters?
A reader asked me a great question about the ways series books impact each other, in the author’s experience. Whether knowing the characters in an earlier book limits your ability to make them different or whether it informs you about what new places they could go in the next book.
In my experience, the first book informed me about the characters, rather than limited me. The first novel left questions that the second could answer—or at least explore.
One example was Kate, the pilot mother. Kate always felt like a conundrum, in both books. She was hard for me to grasp, always poised to run away. I knew peripherally why, but the first book was spotlighting Molly’s story, so less was spent on digging into Kate’s reason for running.
It wasn’t until the second novel that I got informed about all the levels of betrayal in her past. Not just from her straying husband, but also from the father she worshipped and the mother she avoided. In the second novel, I got to put Kate in a position where she was unable to blame anyone else for having to stay and face herself, as painful as it was. She had to stay and fight, not flee. That was a revelation for me as I wrote—to be so surprised and discover the truth behind someone I thought I knew well.
I did run into one limit: my second novel, A Woman’s Guide, didn’t have a good use for Sammy, the younger brother who was so featured in Qualities of Light. He just didn’t fit in the second book, but he was part of the family, so what to do with him? It was a challenge, and I had to come up with a solid reason why he wasn’t onstage in this new novel, since he was such a primary player in the first. And so I did.
Stand-alone as well as series
One of the challenges a writer faces with a series is how much to make each book a stand-alone. It’s a good idea, if you can do it, because there’s no way to count on readers knowing your earlier book(s). Yes, you’ll probably develop a fan base as you put out more books about these characters, and readers will follow the sequence, but what if someone picks one of the books out of order? Their satisfaction counts too.
Certain “world rules” and relationships will need to be established in the early chapters of each book to make this satisfaction possible.
Consider the techniques of series writers like Louise Penny, whose Inspector Gamache cozy mysteries are so popular. Penny allows each novel to be a stand-alone (readers don’t have to be previously acquainted with the cast or setting). How does she do this? By weaving in enough detail in the first chapter to orient.
Make a list of the repeating factors in your books, perhaps the setting details, quirks of certain repeating characters, elements of backstory that feature in every book. See what’s essential for a first-time reader and consider how you’ll do your world-building in each book, so no one gets lost. Study the series writers you admire—how do they keep readers oriented? What repeating details need to be reworked and original for each book? Sometimes Penny’s placement of certain facts, like the bistro owners’ sense of humor, feels artificial when I’m reading it again and again.
Are sequels harder to sell?
If you’re a debut author, consider that a sequel might be hard to sell unless your first book was a blockbuster. Agents might be reluctant to take you on.
I’d published Qualities of Light in 2009 and decided to shop for a new agent in 2019, ten years later, and I got rejections steadily when I presented my second novel as a sequel. So I tested this out: I changed the names, backgrounds, and setting of A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue to divorce it from its prequel.
When I signed with an agent who loved it, we proceeded as if A Woman’s Guide was a stand-alone with no relationship to the first book. Which it was, after my rewrite.
But the rewrite never felt right to me. As we worked through edits, I finally ‘fessed up that I was still in love with my original cast. By then, I guess my agent liked the story enough. And I’m very glad to have the book I always wanted to write.
Satisfying endings answer the primary question of each book
One of my pet peeves with series writers is the inability, sometimes, to effectively “end” the first book. Yes, there needs to be a hook to make us want to read the next. But if the first book’s main questions aren’t at least somewhat wrapped by the end, it can leave a reader frustrated.
Writing a series for print is not the same as writing a series for television—there’s not just one week between episodes for readers to wait. There might be years. And if there’s not a sense of completion about your first story, they may not wait for your next one.
I may leave something unsolved, or ask a new question, as a hook to end the first book, but I always completely answer the question that begins my stories.
In Qualities of Light, the book’s opening question was about Molly’s relationship with her family, especially her father: would she continue to be outcast or would she be valued and loved by the end, and would her father also take full responsibility for the accident that changed them all. That is completely answered. But I do leave a hook, a new question, about Molly and Zoe’s relationship and whether it will continue. That question is developed in A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue.
This makes the two books stand-alone as well as part of a series. That was my primary goal, to keep my readers satisfied.
Your thoughts about series? Your experience writing or reading them?
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
If you’re hooked on your characters and don’t want to let them have just one stage to play on, you may be a candidate for a series. This week, check out the article mentioned above from NY Book Editors, one of the best I’ve read on the pros and cons of writing a series. Test your ideas against their tips.
Things to consider
You need to plant a hook for the next book, somewhere in the final chapters, but also wrap up the primary questions of this book effectively. You need readers to satisfied and curious about what’s next.
There’s often an overarching dilemma, possibly a character’s lifelong quest, that carries throughout the series. Consider how you’d create this and if it would be strong enough to hold for more than one book.
Think about how you’ll reintroduce the setting, the repeating players, and any details that carry to the next book without boring your repeat readers.