Building a Better Series
The art of setting multiple quality stories in the same fictional world
An original idea is a rare gemstone.
Ecclesiastes famously declared “there is no new thing under the sun.” This concept seems especially true within the creative arts. For evidence, look no further than a deluge of sequels, prequels, reboots, and spinoffs streaming out of every profitable intellectual property in Hollywood.
You see similar tendencies infecting traditional publishing and indie publishing.
Authors are encouraged to expand story ideas into a series that goes on forever like a daytime soap opera. The logic behind writing a series is simple. Hook readers with a story populated with compelling and complex characters and then they will want to follow those same characters through numerous stories. If, for example, the characters in question appear over a half-dozen novels, it typically means financial success and popularity for the author.
Sounds good in theory, right?
In the real world, authors often encounter problems when expanding one book into a full-fledged series. Later entries quickly grow stale and repetitive as the same cast of characters go continually from point A to point B while nothing evolves or changes in a lasting, meaningful way.
If you want to build a story premise into a series, you need a foolproof plan to make it work from page one until the end.
Here are a few effective series planning elements to consider:
Develop a complex world: People in real life are shaped by the world around them. Religion, politics, history, culture, geography, and biology all play key roles in molding a person's identity and personality. The same principle should hold true for your characters. You need to flesh out the world your characters live in and consider how their environment shapes their identities. A fictional world should exist beyond a specific character or set of characters. I applied this principle in developing planets like Lathos in my Alien People Chronicles series.
Create realistic characters with depth: A story is only as compelling as the characters who drive the narrative. For a series to work, you need a cast of characters who readers will care about. Sketch out your primary characters and secondary characters to get a better idea of how to bring them life in your story. Create complete character biographies detailing personality, physical appearance, personal history, relationships and friendships, and so forth. Taking this approach will help you avoid leaning on tired cliches and stock characters.
Defy stale tropes: A series will have staying power if your stories branch out beyond simply using stale recycled tropes as their foundation. Do we really need another zombie apocalypse saga? Or another chronicle of space marines battling aliens on far-flung planets? Dare to be original and creative. Readers will embrace quality fiction that either offers an original idea or an unexpected twist on a familiar idea.
Don't ignore the finish line: All stories eventually reach a natural conclusion. Part of the journey is the end, as Tony Stark would say. Your series should be structured with a definitive ending in mind before you dive into page one. The worst thing an author can do is let a series drag on and on until they or their readers become bored and their series fizzles away with unresolved storylines and character arcs. I purposely structured my Alien People Chronicles series as a trilogy to give me a proper framework in which to build and resolve multiple character arcs and storylines.
When you take sufficient time to build the world and characters of your series, the result can be a series of compelling and dynamic stories that will entertain a legion of loyal readers.
That's all good advice. Especially if you write character-based stuff.
I think to do a series if you start with book one with the main characters which is 'right in the middle' then all you need to do is just expand it either side of that middle (and add new characters as they organically arise).
With the ongoing series I'm doing, though, I went totally postmodern. After writing god knows how many hundreds of thousands of words for 'the character in her world' I then suddenly thought 'what would happen if that character showed up in this world?'. And hey presto - there we have it. Katrina shows up in this world, no one believes that she's from a utopian parallel world, and there's your setup. Just follow her adventures and misadventures. Then it becomes a character-based thing - how would she (your main character) react to being in this world, and how would people here react to her being here. And as she changes things, you end up with a new parallel world. (you can follow this on my Substack, by the way).
So I think it's not so much about the characters, but more about subjecting those characters to different settings and problems and so on. The world-building simply follows them. The trick is to make the world-building secondary, in that sense. And drip-feed it. A lot of writers probably, and understandably, fall in love with the worlds they create and want to tell everyone about them - but sometimes you have to be a prick-tease lol.
My two pfennigs there, anyhow.
(p.s. just so as you know I got to this post via a note from Brian Reindel/Lunar awards guy - I shall be perusing your site in due course - that's how to grow your audience - make best use of notes!)