S. K. Dunstall

The series arc

Now that we’ve gotten the ‘why’ of writing a series out of the way, let’s talk about some of the things you need to consider when writing it. The first is the series arc.

You can write an open-ended series where each story is standalone. Or you can write an ongoing story that ties everything up in the last book. Then there’s the combination of these two—standalone books that have an overall arc that ties up nicely by the end of the third book.

Everyone has their own likes and dislikes about series. As readers we love the third type ourselves. Stories that finish at the end of a book—it’s so frustrating when you get to the end of a book and the story stops, with nothing resolved—but that work to a bigger picture that becomes clearer as the story unfolds.

As readers, too, we don’t like a series that goes on seemingly forever without important issues being resolved.  Wheel of Time, I’m looking at you here.

I confess that I get tired of a series after about four or five books. As a reader, and as a writer.

I’d rather (we’d both rather) write series’ the way Robin Hobb does.

Three books about Fitz (the Farseer Trilogy). “I’m done. His story is finished.” Or words to that effect. So she goes off and writes Liveship Traders, set in the Rain Wilds, a different part of the same world. With a guest appearance by my absolute favourite character out of the Assassin books. Meantime, she’s been thinking about Fitz and the Fool. “Maybe I do have another story I can tell.”

Yes, please.

And she gives us the Tawny Man series. “I’m done with them now,” and she writes the Soldier Son trilogy, and then another Rain Wilds series (four books this time). And now … another Fitz and Fool series.

As a reader, I love it. She tells the story, she finishes, she moves on to something else.

As a writer I love it too. Imagine if Robin Hobb had written all nine Fitz and Fool books one after the other. She’d be getting awfully tired of her characters, I think, and it would show. Instead, when she has a story she is ready to tell about them, she tells it. And when she doesn’t, she gets to tell other stories.

This keeps the writer fresh, and also means that the story has to finish within the original three book arc. Nowadays, a series usually means three books. We can all point to exceptions, but unless you have an outstanding proposal, it will be three books.

The fourth arc

That means the writer must provide four story arcs. The story arc for each individual book and one for the whole series. And they must keep that overall arc unresolved without leaving too many loose ends.

Writers do it with varying degrees of efficiency. Some writers plan one big story and then seem to chop it into three parts almost arbitrarily. So you really only have one arc, not four.

Me, I find it frustrating to get to the end of a book with nothing resolved. It’s even worse when the story ends on a cliff-hanger. As a reader I like some sort of closure to each book. I also lose a tiny bit of faith with the writer when he/she does that.

If they do too often I tend to stop reading them.

Pantsing it

It’s a smart thing to know the story arc you’re working toward when you write your series.

We’re pantsers, not plotters, but even we see the benefits of knowing the story arcs that we’re working to. Particularly the overall story arc.

It doesn’t have to be set in concrete. It doesn’t need to be long. And you don’t even require it for the first book, especially if you wrote it as a stand-alone.

You need to know it as you work through book 2, though. Otherwise you may end up doing far more rewriting than you planned.

We have a one sentence overall story arc for LINESMAN—which we’re not telling, for obvious reasons—but it’s enough. By the end of book 2 you may not even realise what we’re working to.

You’ll definitely know in book 3 though, because the overall story arc has to tie in closely with the smaller arc of the third book.

Part 3.

You’re a newbie author, trying to work out what to write. Should you write a series, because if you sell the book, chances are you’ll be asked to write two more books, all about the same character? Or do you write standalone books, to give yourself a better range of options when you’re looking for an agent and a publisher?

There’s no one answer to this. What works for some authors won’t necessarily work for others. In the end it comes down to how it works best for you.

We started by writing standalone novels. That suited us. We had lots of stories we wanted to tell, and they were in mixed genres. Fantasy, young-adult, science fiction, and at least one science fiction mystery cross.

Our agent took us on for a science fiction novel. Naturally, we mentioned our other work, and even sent her a fantasy novel we’d written, but she told us very early that she would prefer initially to establish us as science fiction authors.

We were fine with that, especially as the science fiction we had sent her was the science fiction we loved to write.

Be sure that you love the genre and style you are submitting in, because if you get an agent or sell your book, they’ll likely want more of the same.

Ensure that you and your agent have the same business vision for your writing.

Having said all the above, if you write genre there is a good chance your publisher will want a series. That’s usually, but not always, three books.

If you don’t think you can write three books in the series, be honest about it up front.

This was another thing we discussed with our agent. We chose to write another two loosely-related books. That is, two more books set in the same universe but with different main protagonists. We loved the setting and we had lots more stories to tell.

When our agent sold the book, however, the editor wanted three books about the same character.

We had spent considerable time and discussion on the other stories, but the main character was only a secondary character in the new stories.

Be prepared. Be flexible. Understand that what you offer may not be what the editor wants. Don’t say, “Yes,” just to get published. Think about whether you can deliver it. If you don’t think you can, be honest up front.

Because, after all …

You have to deliver what you agree to.

We talked about it, and decided we could write three books about Ean Lambert, and came up with some ideas. We came up with them in a hurry, maybe not the best idea on reflection, but we got our three book contract.

Now, we’re authors who normally sit on a book idea for months, keeping it in the back of our mind, gradually adding other ideas to it as we go. We’d already written book one, we were ready to start on book two. And we hadn’t really thought much about the plot of the second book yet.

Know how you write. Understand the limitations, accept them, and work around them.

I don’t think we could have done it differently to the way we did, but it definitely made book two more difficult to write than book three, which we’re working on now. Book three has had six months to germinate, and as a result it’s a better, cleaner story. We think it will be easier to write too.

The writing itself comes with its own challenges. Keeping track of names, remembering who did what, and trying to give backstory in books two and three without dragging the story down, all the while remaining true to the characters and how they behaved in the earlier books.

But that’s for another post. But first, we have to talk about the series story arc.

We finished revising a major draft of LINESMAN Book 2 recently.

There’s a lot more work to do on it, but this version is essentially complete. We’re at the stage where we’d normally put the book aside while we write the first draft of the next book.

Except this time we don’t have time to do that, because the book is to be delivered on the 1st May. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to write the next book, because we’re starting on that today. It does mean we won’t get Book 3 finished before we have to go back to Book 2.

We’ll give it a month if we can.

But we also did what any sensible writer would do in the meantime, and sent it off to our agent for her to have a look at. (She offered.) Then last night at dinner we sat down over a glass of red wine and talked about the problems we thought she would come back with.

It’s an early draft. We wouldn’t normally show it to anyone yet, but there was something cathartic about sending it away. Just like that, relaxing and talking it over, we were free to analyse the issues we knew were there but hadn’t been able to fix.

We even came up with solutions to two major scenes that had been bugging us for a while. Good solutions. We were tempted to recall the email, rewrite and resend, but that may have been the wine talking.

Getting deeply into the story like this. It’s between you and your co-author, and it’s one of the best parts about writing.

We’re 80% of the way through our second major draft of LINESMAN 2, which has the working title of KARI WANG, named for the secondary point-of-view character.

“What does Kari Wang look like?” I ask Sherylyn.

She thinks for a moment, before she admits, “I don’t know.”

Either do I.

Some writers would shudder to be so far into the story without having a complete view of such an important character in the book. Some writers can’t start if they don’t know what their character looks like.

Not us. We know the important things that make her who she is. Like how she insists on walking even though her legs are too weak to hold her up. That she’s a captain in a military fleet, so she stands straight (when her legs will let her). That her arms are muscled and strong, because she works out on the bars. Not so her legs, which are pale and weak, because they’ve just given her a new pair. That her body is scarred from all the operations she’s had. That she’s good at her job.

We know what uniform she wears, for she’s part of the Nova Tahiti fleet.

But as to the colour of her eyes, or the shape of her chin, or how she cuts her hair. It’s not important to the story yet. It’s not important to anyone in the story. As a result, it’s not important to us yet.

We know she is 20mm too tall to fit comfortably under the bulkheads because that’s something we need to know.

By the time we’ve worked through another couple of drafts we’ll have a good idea of what Kari Wang looks like. We may even put some of that into the book.

We may not, either.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain?

I enjoyed Big Hero 6, but there was a moment in the movie—where Hiro is turning everyone into superheroes—where I went, “What, get out of my movie. You’re spoiling it.”

The first part of the movie was everything I wanted it to be. Heartwarming, with smart, entertaining characters and a good story.

And then … Hiro takes all these great characters out of the lab and turns them into common, garden-variety superheroes.

Nooo. Disney, you didn’t need to. Couldn’t they have worked out of their lab? Couldn’t they have simply used their brains instead of putting on klutzy costumes and gimmicky weapons?

I know, of course, that was the whole point of Big Hero 6. It’s a Marvel comic. They’re superheroes. This is their origin story. But still.

That same week I received a novel I’d had on pre-order for months. I’d read the initial excerpt of the book, loved both the story and the protagonist, and was looking forward to reading more. I dived in, only to discover that a quarter of the way in the book turned into a run-of-the-mill ‘lost heir will save the kingdom’ story.

Normally, I love it when an author takes a story in a direction I’m not expecting. And half-way through a story you’ll follow where the author takes you. Most times you enjoy the ride, too.

There will be some people who adore the novel I put down three-quarters read. There will be some people for whom creating the superheroes was the best part of Big Hero 6.

I think that for me, both of these stories were going well until the writers got to where they ‘had’ to be, and then the story fell apart. “Plotline says we turn them into superheroes here. Let’s do it.” Or, “My plotline says he discovers he’s the heir to the kingdom now. Make it happen.”

To be fair to both stories, I don’t think either of them were badly done. It was more that the stories were chugging along nicely, entertaining and refreshing. Then suddenly they seemed to be pulled back into the mundane.

This particular reader/viewer found it jarring.