Writing a series

Carrie Vaughn says very intelligent things about creating a series here, which isn’t surprising, because she’s a very intelligent person:

When I realized Kitty was turning into a series, I thought long and hard about this question. I had some examples of good series to study — and I had some examples of series that had gone horribly, horribly wrong. I also had my own anti-series bias to contend with: I prefer a good stand-alone story to a series pretty much any day.

One exception to this is the Miles Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, and that’s what I’ve used as my ur-model of series writing. Bujold has written something like a dozen books covering about 15 years of military genius Miles Vorkosigan’s life. I’ve read them all, and I’ll follow him anywhere. So how did Bujold hook me in like that? What could I do to hook people in like that and make them follow me anywhere? Here’s what I’ve come up with.

1. Make each book a stand-alone story in its own right. The goal here is to have someone be able to pick up any book in the series and still get hooked. Don’t make it harder for readers to get into the series by forcing them to figure out what order it goes in, or confusing them if they get it wrong. The first Miles book I read was Mirror Dance, which is not only in the middle of the series, but in the middle of a three-book story arc. I still loved it enough to rush out and read everything else — completely out of order. But I never felt lost. (It did result in a lot of “oh, that’s why that happened!” moments, but that’s okay.)

Incidentally, it was Lois McMaster Bujold and Terry Pratchet that I turned to as people to emulate when I thought about how to make my series when I got the second book contract.

Filed under the topic On Writing: Craft on April 7th 2008 at 5:51 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.