S is for Series Planning #atozchallenge

[jessicasteiner]

Here's a subject I don't see talked about a lot in books about writing - how to plan a series. There's a lot of different things I could say about this subject, but just a few little tips. The main goal behind these tips is to keep the series from getting out of hand, and succumbing to the trap many series fall into - power creep and going on too long.

1. Have some idea of how it's going to end before it begins, and shadow the ending in the beginning. You don't have to have a firm and complete idea of how it will end, but you should have a direction, some thought of how the whole thing is going to turn out. If you have some hint of that in the very beginning of the first book, the entire series will have a tidy feeling, and the ending will be more likely to feel as though it fits the series as a whole, rather than spinning off into strange directions.

2. Make some rules, and keep them. If magic can only be performed with ritual in your fantasy story, then it should always be done with ritual, and you should think long and hard before you give your character the ability to do magic without bothering with ritual. If your science fiction hyperdrive uses wormholes and instant teleportation is impossible, don't give your ship a teleportation drive in book 5 to get yourself out of a fix.

If you set firm rules and keep them, you will avoid power creep in your main character and the reader won't get frustrated with you for breaking your own rules. You won't end up in a situation where your enemies have to get more and more powerful every book to counter the cosmic power you gave your main character in book 3. Rather than breaking your rules, find creative ways around the rules and keep them. It'll hold your reader's interest better.

Comments

[gehayi]

Make some rules, and keep them.

I'd like to suggest a corollary to that: If something is bad when the villains do it, it's also bad when the heroes do it.

It's very easy to get into a situation where you have a double standard operating. After all, you know why the heroes are doing something questionable; they have all kinds of reasons, rationalizations and justifications. And the villains are just, well, bad.

The problem is that if you ask the villains why they're doing X, Y or Z, they'd come up with a ton of reasons, rationalizations and justifications, too. And having a double standard can irritate the reader. Unless you're writing wish-fulfillment fiction--and some people do--the odds are that the readers will be annoyed if you don't play fair.

So play fair. One of the best ways is to have consequences for an action and make them stick, no matter who they affect. If mind control is a bad thing in your universe and yet you really need to have your character use mind control to get out of a jam...fine. Let him use mind control. But let it come back to bite him in multiple ways. Maybe it weakened his magic. Maybe his magic is just as strong but now won't work properly. Maybe using a forbidden power has made him thirst for more taboo magic. Maybe he can't switch the mind control off now that he switched it on--you can imagine how well that works in everyday life. Maybe the people around him see his way of thinking and personality changing and start to lose faith in him.

And you can't run any of the film in reverse and make the consequences unhappen, because that's too easy.

[jessicasteiner]

That's a really good point, also. This is something I see sometimes in urban fantasy and it irritates me a lot. Characters should always face consequences for their actions anyway, but it's especially jarring when the heroes do something you've said is wrong and it's just dismissed.