towards some thoughts on series
Mar. 11th, 2021 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerI've had discussions with other writers about how there's tons of advice out there on writing novels, but very little on writing series.
File this one under "stuff I know how to do, but don't know how to articulate or explain." But this one will be less polished than the pieces I wrote on the structure of paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, because I'm really thinking out loud as I go here.
Step one, I think, is to take a look at what a series is. A set of interconnected books, okay. But there are ways and ways of connecting things, and they're not all going to operate the same. After chewing on this for a while, I've decided that you can very roughly sort different types of series into a spectrum from discrete to linked (with two semi-outliers that I'll note as we pass them.) So:
At the absolute discrete end, you've got books whose only connection is that a single author wrote them. Not actually a series; 'nuff said.
In this type, the connection between the books is that they take place in a single setting, but otherwise they share no connection of character or plot. (They may not even share authors.) I'm having trouble thinking of any pure examples of this; most often this tends to be a superset of other series, e.g. Discworld or Valdemar being settings that contain both stand-alone novels and series within them, or a shared world like the Forgotten Realms. If you can think of an example that is purely stand-alone novels, whether written by the same author or different ones, let me know. (I think it would need at least three books to serve as a good example; two books in the same setting is a series by the most technical definition, but I'd like something stronger.)
This is the type of series you commonly find in romance, where each book follows a different set of protagonists and a different plot, but characters from one book appear in another. (Romance often sets this up by presenting you with a group in the first book, e.g. a set of siblings, with the implicit promise that you'll get to see each of them get their own story eventually.) These naturally share a setting as well.
As the asterisk indicates, I think this one's an outlier. It's the Nancy Drew model: each book shares a setting and a core cast with all the others, but in between books the slate gets wiped clean, which means they have less plot continuity than the Cast Series. Nancy will always be eighteen; Ned will never graduate from college. I'm not sure this is very popular anymore, except maybe in children's fiction -- and maybe not even there?
Closely akin to the Nancy Drew model, this has a core cast and a new plot with each installment, but there's no reset button. As a result, change and growth do happen over time. You see this a lot in mystery novels and police procedural TV shows, because it's very well-suited to those genres: each installment starts with a crime and ends with the crime being solved, while in the background there might might be some ongoing character-based subplot about the detective's marriage falling apart or whatever.
This one is a hybrid between the previous and the subsequent types. It has self-contained episodic plots, especially early on, but there's also a longer-term metaplot that those episodes may be helping to set up, and the episodic structure tends to fall away toward the end. Examples include Harry Potter and each season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and yes, I realize the creators of both those works are not exactly looking great right now, but they're well-known illustrations of the model). Many trilogies feel at least a bit like this, because it's sensible from a business standpoint to write a more or less stand-alone novel that can serve as the foundation for the later two installments.
Our other outlier, which I think I've only seen in soap operas on TV. Here there can be many arcs going at once, such that while an individual plot may end, the series as a whole doesn't (until it gets canceled). This would be an extraordinarily hard trick to pull off in traditional novel publishing, I suspect, though it could work in indie.
Here there's no real attempt to wrap up a self-contained plot in any particular installment. From the start, you know you're getting a long-term story, and unlike that trilogy approach I described above, the first volume doesn't feel like it could stand on its own. A Song of Ice and Fire is a prominent example of this, along with TV shows like Lost.
And to cap off the other end, we have our other form of non-series: a single novel that just happens to have been published in multiple volumes, i.e. The Lord of the Rings. The difference between this and the Metaplot Series is that in theory the author of the latter type gives each book its own satisfying structure, even if that structure doesn't end in resolution; the author of the Single Book non-series just whacks it apart at the necessary intervals.
I think that covers the whole gamut. Obviously some things are going to straddle the divisions, because no system of categorization is ever perfect; the goal here is to distinguish what shifts of interconnection happen along the way, rather than to make clean boxes that absolutely everything will fit neatly into. And series can change over the course of their lifetime, e.g. what the author intended to be Episodic Growth sprouts an arc plot along the way. I'll chew more on those bits of the concept later. But for right now, I think this is a decent framework? Is there anything significant I'm missing?
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/KmOFjZ)
File this one under "stuff I know how to do, but don't know how to articulate or explain." But this one will be less polished than the pieces I wrote on the structure of paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, because I'm really thinking out loud as I go here.
Step one, I think, is to take a look at what a series is. A set of interconnected books, okay. But there are ways and ways of connecting things, and they're not all going to operate the same. After chewing on this for a while, I've decided that you can very roughly sort different types of series into a spectrum from discrete to linked (with two semi-outliers that I'll note as we pass them.) So:
The Non-Series
At the absolute discrete end, you've got books whose only connection is that a single author wrote them. Not actually a series; 'nuff said.
The Setting Series
In this type, the connection between the books is that they take place in a single setting, but otherwise they share no connection of character or plot. (They may not even share authors.) I'm having trouble thinking of any pure examples of this; most often this tends to be a superset of other series, e.g. Discworld or Valdemar being settings that contain both stand-alone novels and series within them, or a shared world like the Forgotten Realms. If you can think of an example that is purely stand-alone novels, whether written by the same author or different ones, let me know. (I think it would need at least three books to serve as a good example; two books in the same setting is a series by the most technical definition, but I'd like something stronger.)
The Cast Series
This is the type of series you commonly find in romance, where each book follows a different set of protagonists and a different plot, but characters from one book appear in another. (Romance often sets this up by presenting you with a group in the first book, e.g. a set of siblings, with the implicit promise that you'll get to see each of them get their own story eventually.) These naturally share a setting as well.
*The Reset Button Series
As the asterisk indicates, I think this one's an outlier. It's the Nancy Drew model: each book shares a setting and a core cast with all the others, but in between books the slate gets wiped clean, which means they have less plot continuity than the Cast Series. Nancy will always be eighteen; Ned will never graduate from college. I'm not sure this is very popular anymore, except maybe in children's fiction -- and maybe not even there?
The Episodic Growth Series
Closely akin to the Nancy Drew model, this has a core cast and a new plot with each installment, but there's no reset button. As a result, change and growth do happen over time. You see this a lot in mystery novels and police procedural TV shows, because it's very well-suited to those genres: each installment starts with a crime and ends with the crime being solved, while in the background there might might be some ongoing character-based subplot about the detective's marriage falling apart or whatever.
The Episodic Arc Series
This one is a hybrid between the previous and the subsequent types. It has self-contained episodic plots, especially early on, but there's also a longer-term metaplot that those episodes may be helping to set up, and the episodic structure tends to fall away toward the end. Examples include Harry Potter and each season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and yes, I realize the creators of both those works are not exactly looking great right now, but they're well-known illustrations of the model). Many trilogies feel at least a bit like this, because it's sensible from a business standpoint to write a more or less stand-alone novel that can serve as the foundation for the later two installments.
*The Perpetual Motion Series
Our other outlier, which I think I've only seen in soap operas on TV. Here there can be many arcs going at once, such that while an individual plot may end, the series as a whole doesn't (until it gets canceled). This would be an extraordinarily hard trick to pull off in traditional novel publishing, I suspect, though it could work in indie.
The Metaplot Series
Here there's no real attempt to wrap up a self-contained plot in any particular installment. From the start, you know you're getting a long-term story, and unlike that trilogy approach I described above, the first volume doesn't feel like it could stand on its own. A Song of Ice and Fire is a prominent example of this, along with TV shows like Lost.
The Single Book
And to cap off the other end, we have our other form of non-series: a single novel that just happens to have been published in multiple volumes, i.e. The Lord of the Rings. The difference between this and the Metaplot Series is that in theory the author of the latter type gives each book its own satisfying structure, even if that structure doesn't end in resolution; the author of the Single Book non-series just whacks it apart at the necessary intervals.
I think that covers the whole gamut. Obviously some things are going to straddle the divisions, because no system of categorization is ever perfect; the goal here is to distinguish what shifts of interconnection happen along the way, rather than to make clean boxes that absolutely everything will fit neatly into. And series can change over the course of their lifetime, e.g. what the author intended to be Episodic Growth sprouts an arc plot along the way. I'll chew more on those bits of the concept later. But for right now, I think this is a decent framework? Is there anything significant I'm missing?
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/KmOFjZ)
no subject
Date: 2021-03-11 08:00 pm (UTC)I read the first when it came out on the understanding it would be a 10-part series, then read the second which was about completely different characters, and briefly picked up the third (different characters again) and never read it because there were *so many* characters I'd lost track.
I suspect there's a strong tendency for the Setting Series to be an early phase on the way to it becoming the superset of something else, because somewhere along the line the author decides to do more with those characters, or to bring those two stand-alone bits together into a third thing
Absolutely. One usually has more story than will fit into a book, and the temptation to write another book about a character/write a prequel or sequel/have them turn up in a cameo is just too great. I guess I should write a post about that, as my current WIP is part of a Saga arc. (I have two reasons to write this: one, I like the world and the people and it's something I can have fun with in times of stress or little brain, and two, I started out with a basically ok but in places pretty fucked-up culture. No single hero will come in and change everything; the change is part of a concerted effort of many people over a long time, so I'm writing about multiple protagonists who each make a contribution.
[Pern] When did that start?
After the AI thing. I can't recall how long it went on, I remember Dolphins being the one where I recognised the pattern and lost interest, though Moreta/Nerilka also had overlap IIRC, and I seem to recall that some of Jaxom's story overlapped with another book.
The book where I completely stopped reading Pern was Masterharper because it undoes a lot of earlier story, and I just Could Not with Robinton getting all of the credit. (I never read the books that were published after that. I see there's quite a few.)
no subject
Date: 2021-03-12 02:11 am (UTC)It blew my mind even in high school that she wrote the series ending in All the Weyrs of Pern (1991) and then just . . . kept going. I accepted the existence of the collection The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall (1993) because it was all prequel. And then we hit The Dolphins of Pern (1994) and I tapped out for good.
Nerilka's Story (1986) is effectively a companion to Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern (1983) in that it covers much of the same material from a different character's perspective, hence the titling. The early novels are packed into the same time frame in a way that actually resembles the cast series model: the protagonists of one book are supporting cast in another, the same events affect different groups of characters, there's a lot of crossover but no exactly duplicated perspectives. Dragonsong (1976) and Dragonsinger (1977) are effectively concurrent with Dragonquest (1970). Dragondrums (1979) happens during The White Dragon (1978). I believe The Renegades of Pern (1989) revisits and is interwoven into this period, but it was written sufficiently later than the rest that it doesn't feel quite like the same phenomenon: McCaffrey was writing the two original trilogies at the same time and it shows in how tightly they're linked. [edit] Wikipedia reports that McCaffrey's preferred reading order had the Harper Hall trilogy spliced in between Dragonquest and The White Dragon.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-12 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-12 04:14 am (UTC)It was given to me as a present, so I must at least have tried to read it, but I remember bupkes. I just remember seeing it in bookstores and not even understanding why it had been published.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-12 10:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-12 02:20 am (UTC)This is one of the things I've been chewing on as part of this mass of topics: how to handle reader expectation, especially when the structure is unconventional (e.g. three seemingly separate books that are all setting up a connected story later). Marshall Ryan Maresca has been doing this with his Maradaine novels, where he's got multiple trilogies in the same setting -- which was great right up to the point where I finished the trilogy I'd chosen to read and discovered that its actual conclusion was in another castle. I didn't know that was coming, and it threw me for a not-good loop.
re: Pern, I think I stopped at Dolphins, either in the sense of that was the last one I read or I looked at it, said "wtf?," and didn't bother trying.