Six Issues to Consider When Writing Your Series

Series writing is serious business. Series writing encompasses the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good? You really know your characters. You hear them in your head. You write without false steps because you know how they’re going to react in situations you throw them into. Your writing group knows them so well they speak of them as friends. Also, your readers come to expect certain reactions and dialogue. Characters’ foibles are adorable to your fans. Fans also like getting to know your setting and, if a real place, they revel in identifying where that particular gas station is.

The bad? Your characters’ foibles, so adorable to fans . . . Not so much for you after a while. Must she always open the door where everyone knows the bad guy is? Must he always ignore the advice of those who know better than he does? You’d think they’d learn, right? Also, if your setting is a small town, you are likely to encounter the Cabot Cove Syndrome, so named for Jessica Fletcher’s small town that no rational insurance company would ever provide coverage for, given the death rate per capita. And speaking of murder, can you run out of ways to kill people?

As an aside, I tackled that one for you. Go to April, 2016 in this blog and you will find 26+ Ways to Kill (in Mysteries).

And the ugly? Well, let’s just say the bad can deteriorate to the worst. Fans will berate you if you forgot he had hazel eyes in book two and by book four they’ve turned glacier blue. Much worse is that your concept is not big enough to last for several books. What are your themes that stretch across the series?

What to do about these and other limitations of series writing?

Surprisingly, a Google search turned up very few articles about issues in writing a series. Maybe people don’t have trouble with series writing and so there’s no need for such articles. Nah. That’s not it. There are too many series writers out there. I think it’s because we figure out what to do and don’t go hunting for or writing articles about troubles in series-land.

Across these articles and with my own experience, I’ve identified several major features to approach series so that you can be successful.

1)   Consistency is a blessing and a hobgoblin.

Readers like consistency. They want expectations for characters to be met. They approach the series as encounters with old friends. However, don’t be so consistent that there are never surprises. In book two of my culinary mystery series, I have a character drop a bombshell. The revelation is consistent with some earlier clues planted in books one and two. However, this one would never have been predicted. So, be consistent but allow for new information and character changes consistent with the behaviors to keep characters fresh. And if you have someone being totally inconsistent, you should be able to explain it with the onset of dementia, for example.

2)   Time can trip you up.

Both within and across books in a series, time is a lurking peril. Kinsey Milhone is a wonderful example. I believe I read long ago that Sue Grafton said if she’d known the alphabet mysteries she wrote were going to take off she wouldn’t have chosen the alphabet. She was committed to writing a series with 26 books! Is that a record? I can’t say for sure, but if not, it’s close to a record. And Kinsey is the same. It’s as if we are seeing her work on these crimes over the period of a few years instead of decades. If you have grand plans along those lines, avoid events, characters, car models and the like that will tie your book to a specific time. Within a book, make a calendar for your protagonist/antagonist so they don’t do too much within one day or week.

3)   Expand your characters’ world.

Some series authors find the created world of the cozy to limiting. Especially in cozies, the death toll can be high. I took my cooks to the Aegean in book four. They were demo cooks on a high-end cruise ship and they could get into all kinds of foreign trouble. Some series authors have their characters in a job, like being a travel writer or airline personnel so they can be in different locales. Lots of times mystery writers kill off traveling visitors or itinerants instead of regular residents.

4)   Keep a running log on characters, cars, and conflicts.

Oh, yeah, that 25-year-old silver Camry cannot become 20 years old and blue in book four. Eye color, body type, tics—all of these need to be logged so that you have a reference for checking. The running argument with Aunt Mabel in book two can’t be the same one your character has with Uncle Glenn in book eight. Make a spreadsheet (electronically is my preference, but paper works) and jot down everything that could conceivably be changed across books. Is this a pain in the sweet patootie? You betcha. But you’ll be so proud of yourself for not screwing up details.

5)   Allow for some mystery. Not everything has to be answered by the end.

We’ve all seen movies that, as the final credits roll by, you say, “Oh, yeah. There’ll be a sequel.” Things left raveled, hanging threads, unresolved issues. That’s like real life. So wrap up the biggies, but don’t feel you have to let your readers know everything. And just like in real life, characters can change given the right circumstances.

6)   Decide how much readers need to know if they read book five first.

This is the toughest one, frankly, for me. I want the reader to know EVERYTHING. But that is impractical and boring. Make character sketches for your ensemble, recurring cast. Those are the things that need to be known. Sprinkle them in here and there. Show personalities through actions and reactions. If there is need to explain the mystery in a past book, sprinkle that even more lightly. I ran into that problem in book two. How do I explain Alli visiting her brother in prison. Remember that each story must be able to stand alone. Someone reading the series gets value added by reading these connected standalones.

What have you had to deal with in your series writing? Comment below to share with others.

Resources:

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/5-mistakes-to-avoid-when-writing-a-fiction-series

https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2011/11/02/writing-a-series-continuation-issues/

http://www.nownovel.com/blog/how-to-write-a-series-mistakes/

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Guest Post: "All Good (and Bad) Things Must Come to an End" by Charles Salzberg

Not only is Charles Salzberg an engaging Thanksgiving dinner partner, but he writes darn good mysteries, too! I am pleased he agreed to guest post here so you can get the behind-the-scenes scoop on his books. Welcome, Charles!

They say all good things (and bad ones, too, we hope) will come to an end. But it’s not always easy to know when the end is. Sometimes even the beginning comes as a surprise.

That was the case with the first detective novel I wrote, Swann’s Last Song.  The truth is, it wasn’t even supposed to be a detective novel or a novel about crime. The original idea was to take a well-worn genre and turn it upside down and inside out. I began with a down-and-out skip tracer, Henry Swann, who on the surface at least fit the description of the typical American detective: an outsider, a man living on the margins of society, a man who will do almost anything for money. A beautiful babe comes into his office and convinces him to find her missing husband. The convincing comes in the form of offering him a lot of money. He takes the dough, a daily stipend, and begins the search only to find out that the missing spouse is really a corpse. Case over. But wait, not so fast. The cops think the murder was simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but wifey doesn’t think so and she hires Swann to find the killer.

That’s the set-up. But from there things don’t quite fit the typical detective novel because in following the clues to find the killer Swann finds out something even more interesting, namely that the dead spouse, Harry Janus, might not be Harry Janus at all, that in fact he was several other people during his breathing days.

Thus the novel became being about who we are and who we might be and Swann, who believes the world is an orderly place, where everything ultimately makes perfect sense, which is what every detective must believe, i.e., that he or she is there to put the messy world back into place, winds up spent and disillusioned. This is especially so when he finds that following all the clues essentially leads him nowhere, because the crime was, in fact, totally random and all the clues he’s followed, which take him half-way around the world, are for naught.

Trouble was, no one would publish that version, so I after more than two decades I had to rethink the ending and, giving into the same incentive that got Swann on the case in the first place, I changed the ending and took the cash (don’t get the wrong idea, it wasn’t much cash and it was a check, but it was enough).

Case closed. Or so I thought.

As luck would have it the damn novel was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel. I lost, but dammit I’m the competitive type and so I decided to keep writing the damn things until I did win something.

And so a one-time project, trying to write a detective novel, turned into a lifetime calling. Next, came Swann Dives In, and after it, Swann’s Lake of Despair.

But as it turned out writing them was fun. I began my writing career thinking of myself as a literary writer. I liked all the right authors: Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer. Now I was a crime writer. But wait! Who said you can’t use literary techniques and be a crime writer at the same time? No one. And so these Swann novels became about something and that something wasn’t necessarily murder. In fact, I decided to shun such violent crimes and instead focus on other crimes, crimes nearer and dearer to us. Fraud, treachery, theft, broken hearts. Weren’t these crimes and couldn’t they be just as lethal, especially if they happened to you?

I thought so and maybe did a few others, since my last Swann novel, Swann’s Lake of Despair, did manage to make it to the finals of a couple other literary award contests.

And so I embarked on a fourth Henry Swann, Swann’s Way Out, in part because people seemed to like the character, as did I. But about halfway through this tome a thought came to me. At first it was just a feeling, I guess. Did I really have to write this character and his amusing cronies and allies for the rest of my life? I mean Swann has grown through the three novels. He’s gotten older and, I hope, wiser. His world has expanded. I began to wonder, have I taken this character as far as he can go? But even more important, what about me? Maybe I was getting a little tired of Henry Swann and his world. Maybe I had said all I had to say about him. Maybe we were a little tired of each other.

Maybe I was the one looking for a way out.

In the interim, I had written another novel, a stand-alone, Devil in the Hole, based on a true crime. Much to my surprise, it was named one of the Best Crime Novels of 2013 by Suspense magazine. Maybe I should write another stand-alone. Or maybe even make it the beginning of another series, where I could examine other worlds, other people.

By the time I finished Swann’s Way Out I had convinced myself that this one might really be Swann’s last song. Don’t worry I didn’t do anything drastic, like kill him off. Maybe I’m just going to put him out to pasture for a bit while I plow other fields. Or maybe he’s just gone. After all, think about real life. We know someone pretty well and then they move on and we move on and we don’t know what they’re doing with their lives and they don’t know what we’re doing with our lives. I mean, we’re both still alive, but we might as well be dead and gone because we don’t keep in touch anymore.

But one day, who knows, I might get a call and that call might be from Henry Swann. He says he’s in town and he’d like to see me and catch up. And he might have another story or two to tell me.

And you know something, I’m a curious guy and I’d probably make that date, you know, just to find out what’s happening.

Charles Salzberg is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in New York magazine, GQ, The New York Times and other periodicals. He is the author of the Shamus Award Nominated “Swann’s Last Song” and the sequels, “Swann Dives In” and "Swann's Lake of Despair". He teaches writing in New York City, at the Writer’s Voice and the New York Writers Workshop, where he is a Founding Member.

www.charlessalzberg.com

Click here to order my new novel - Swann's Lake of Despair - on Amazon