Expanding your story into a series can be creatively and financially fulfilling. You get to delve deeper into your characters, captivate a broader audience, and hopefully make a much larger literary impact.
In this blog, we explore the questions to ask yourself when weighing up writing a series. (Also, weirdly, it turns out there’s a lot of symmetry between committing to a novel series and committing to a romantic partner.)
Am I in love?
First things first. Before committing to a series, stand back and weigh up whether your characters, narrative and general premise have the depth and charisma to sustain multiple books – as well as your own creative ambitions.
Writing a series is a double edged sword: if you’re lucky, some of the heavy lifting in terms of character and voice has already been cracked in writing the first book by the time you’re onto the second book and beyond – but continually writing books about the same people will fast become a slog if you’re not in love with them and the idea of spending a healthy chunk of your waking hours thinking about them.
It may be that you have to date different books for a while before you get that feeling. But then when you know, you know.
Is this going somewhere?
Just as a novel needs a plot structure, a fiction series will generally have an overarching arc to connect all the stories together.
If we take Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series for example, the individual crimes have no connection to one another, but each book develops and deepens the relationships between the characters – Strike and Robin, Robin and Matthew, the two ‘lead’ characters and their families, and so on.
Regularly thinking about and updating the roadmap for your series and your characters will give you North Star to follow and help make the series as a collective greater than the sum of its individual parts.
The comic crime book I’m currently working on is intended to be the first in a series, and I’ve plotted (at high-level) the cases and core character arcs that I’d move through in the next five books. Whether I get that far is anybody’s guess, but it at least allows me to set things up in a certain way now in the hope that we’ll get to a full payoff later on.
Readers should connect with your characters and care about their journey, so figure out how your characters will grow and how they’ll stay the same, how their relationships will evolve, and which new characters may enter the fray along the way to create new angles.
How do I keep the spark alive long-term?
Finding the right balance between maintaining continuity from one book to the next and delivering fresh, engaging content can be a challenge. Readers should recognize the world and characters, but also anticipate new and exciting developments. Ensure each book has its own unique story while contributing to the larger narrative.
That also feeds into your release schedule. Decide how many books you intend to write and establish deadlines for each one. You don’t want to make your readers wait years for each installment.
As with any writing project, writing a series requires you to have a plan and the discipline to stick to it as much as possible. The stakes are just a little higher in writing a series than an individual novel as the time commitment and lifespan of the project is much greater.
If your series is fortunate enough to find an audience, try to connect with your readers. Listen to their feedback and use it to challenge your own ideas about your characters’ journey forward from here. Your roadmap will be an evolving document until the last book is written, after all.