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: 2021-03-12 04:05 am (UTC)Generally recommended, especially now that you can get the entire thing from the LOA.
I appreciate that this is the model which most closely resembles real life, but after a while I tend to lose interest because it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere.
I've never had the experience of really attaching to a series of this kind and then finding that it ran so long that I tired of its people or wished other lives for them. I don't like all nineteen of the Campion novels equally, but I like its central characters through to the end. My major grief with Torchwood is that there are slightly less than two seasons of an ensemble cast whose interactions and evolving relationships I really enjoyed in the midst of ridiculous alien weirdness plots. I have one open-ended, episodic series that I never returned to; it's the Dresden Files; I read as much of it as existed and I could lay my hands on while my grandfather was dying; Spiders Georg is an outlier and should not have been counted.
I'm curious as to why.
"Resent" is probably too strong; it just chimed irresistibly with the earlier assessment. I don't enjoy the inherent shapelessness of this model—I have read many first books of planned series which do not function as novels so much as whacked-apart portions of plot—and the absence of structure often makes me mistrust the writer's ability to catch up to their ambition. If it sticks the landing, great. But I'm having a hard time thinking of an open-ended, non-episodic series that's done it, even outside of cases where it's unfair to blame the author because they died. In the interests of fairness, because this is a mode of long-form narrative I don't especially enjoy, I haven't read tons of it.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-12 04:37 am (UTC)I wouldn't say I've had it happen to anything where I was passionately attached, but there have definitely been episodic series that palled for me before they ended. More on TV than in books, though; where it happened with books, it was most often with things like Valdemar or Pern where the setting as a whole is more than a single series. I enjoyed early Anita Blake, though, and then it just . . . slid inexorably off a cliff.
"Resent" is probably too strong; it just chimed irresistibly with the earlier assessment. I don't enjoy the inherent shapelessness of this model—I have read many first books of planned series which do not function as novels so much as whacked-apart portions of plot—and the absence of structure often makes me mistrust the writer's ability to catch up to their ambition. If it sticks the landing, great. But I'm having a hard time thinking of an open-ended, non-episodic series that's done it, even outside of cases where it's unfair to blame the author because they died. In the interests of fairness, because this is a mode of long-form narrative I don't especially enjoy, I haven't read tons of it.
And in fairness, I can't presently think of any examples of a successful metaplot-style series that didn't at least have their first installment feel reasonably self-contained. I don't believe it has to be inherently shapeless; just as there can be substructures within a single novel, I think there can be substructures within a multi-book series. But we don't have a large number of models to follow, the way we do with other types, and the most prominent models we do have (e.g. the Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire) are . . . kind of rolling disasters when it comes to their structure, because the authors visibly made some very bad decisions about how to approach the work. So I'll admit that in its pure form, I can't name any good examples of this off the top of my head. (Though I'm going to ponder and try to find some.)
no subject
Date: 2021-03-12 09:30 am (UTC)Yeah, I was just trying to think of one too. Even back in the sprawling fantasy epic days, they tended not to be entirely lacking in some ability to stand on their own, if only because it was a lot riskier for a publisher to take a chance on the first book of an open-ended series that might or might not do well if it couldn't be marketed at least somewhat independently.
About the closest I can think of are some shortish series (trilogies/quadrologies) that function as a fairly tightly plotted unit, basically a single book that's 400K long - like Julian May's Pleistocene Exile, say, where the first book (IIRC) very much does not feel like a book that is complete in itself, but the series doesn't wander on for 20 books either.
I think this model does exist in manga, but doesn't really seem to have caught on in Western publishing. And even there, the first few installments are usually at least somewhat standalone until it becomes evident that the series has legs.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-12 10:27 am (UTC)Right -- these days there's definitely a strong push to sell a stand-alone book "with series potential." If you try to do something that's metaplot out of the gate, there's a much bigger risk of leaving your readers hanging if the publisher says, on second thought, nah. I don't know if that was equally true, say, thirty years ago.
About the closest I can think of are some shortish series (trilogies/quadrologies) that function as a fairly tightly plotted unit, basically a single book that's 400K long - like Julian May's Pleistocene Exile, say, where the first book (IIRC) very much does not feel like a book that is complete in itself, but the series doesn't wander on for 20 books either.
That's my suspicion, too -- that if I dredged my brain not for the famously long series, but for trilogies and the like, I'd find some examples where it's more clearly a continuous story (without being a clusterfuck of bad pacing and structure). But trilogies in particular have been stamped so very strongly with what I think of as sonata structure -- which I could have sworn I wrote an essay about already, but my website shows no evidence of such a thing having ever existed -- basically a stand-alone movement in a major key, a complication in a minor key that ends without resolution, and then the recapitulation of the theme, now Bigger! and Better! and in a major key once more -- so you're going to get a lot of the "well done; medals for everybody" endings in the first book.
I think this model does exist in manga, but doesn't really seem to have caught on in Western publishing. And even there, the first few installments are usually at least somewhat standalone until it becomes evident that the series has legs.
Now I'm thinking of Chinese webnovels -- except that my impression of those is that they tend to be published a chapter at a time, without the additional layer of structure imposed by separate volumes. (I could be wrong, though; what I know about those comes secondhand.)