In this weeks episode, Crys and JP talk all about how to plan a series. They discuss how to anchor your characters, the different type of series, and the difference between series and serials.
Show Notes
Abhorsen by Garth Nix
The Secret School by Avi
Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger
Transcript
JP: Hello, friends. This is episode number 45 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is the 27th of May, 2021 as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my co-host…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: Hello, Crys. How has your writing week been?
Crys: Ah, damn. Why don’t I look and see what I did?
I feel like it’s been productive. I remember moving a lot of things on my Notion to do list from the daily list to the archive and the done list. I feel like a lot of that happened.
Oh! I know what I did. The bright shining moment of my week is I had a good call with my co-writer. We haven’t caught up in a minute, because we’re not actively working on anything at the moment, catching up on a lot of other projects.
But anyways, I called her and I was like, yeah, we need you to make a cash grab for the end of the month. I need a little extra money because whatever we make this month, in May, we have to spend in August. And August is when I start the van adventure, fingers crossed on that one, all that good stuff.
And it was going to be one of my lowest paid months in a really long time. So I was like, yeah, let’s make a cash grab. What are ways we could do that? And we had talked about writing new content for the end of our series bundle, which we normally do. We normally write a new short story for each character. We put it at the end of this series bundle and then we get extra money from having new content, yada yada yada, with the Kindle reads.
And we just didn’t have the time and attention to write new content right away. So we’d been pushing it off. The series wrapped up, I want to say end of last year. I’m not exactly sure when the last book was. Actually, no, it might’ve been quite a bit while ago.
Anyways, series wrapped up a while ago and we have not released the box set yet. That’s fine. It’s good to have a space of time between the end of the last book and when you release the discounted box set and I was like, let’s just put it out there, let’s do it. And it turned out that I had written two short stories for previous series in this world that weren’t anywhere else.
They were used for newsletter builders, promotional things, and they had not been published on Amazon ever. We split the box set into two. We have the first three books in one box set, second three books in another box set, and one short story at the end of each to entice people to buy these. And they went live this week.
So that is my big win for the week.
JP: Nice. I’m actually really interested in having a conversation at some point about what you call cash grabs, but I think is like revving up your audience.
Crys: I was just saying cash grab is more just the timing of it. It’s, hey, I didn’t plan a big thing out for this.
But I happened to need the money now and I have IP. This is why we want lots of IP. I have IP I can utilize. So we’re going to make a very calculated maneuver. And we are also going to call it a cash grab because we’re snooty. Not snooty. Snooty is the opposite word. I’m using snooty a lot, but we’re opportunistic like that.
JP: I think I totally love it. I love the idea. And I love that. I don’t know if like people talk about it enough in the author space of, yes, you do need what we would call “cash grabs”. I think that it would be a fun conversation to have as to like what methods you use. Because I would be very interested.
Crys: Maybe next week we can talk about cash grabs. What is a cash grab question mark? That’ll be our question.
JP: Question mark. Indeed.
Crys: How was your week? Yes, I am going to, right now! I’m not going to forget you this time!
JP: Wow. Thanks.
My week was good. So I did do revisions. But, I got them done and I sent it off to the editor. Yay. But you will still hear me say revisions because guess where I am now in book one, doing revisions.
Crys: Okay. Wait, why are you going back to book one?
JP: The editor notes and just like additional scenes that are needed.
So what we doing is we’re going through drafting book one. I revised it two times. And then I cleaned it up and I send it to the editor. I get the editor’s notes back. And then at that point, my co-author has also read it because he hasn’t seen it since he did his first draft. And so he has some notes of just, hey, I like the direction, this is fine, but maybe like just corrections here. And then I just go through again and I’m going to comb it through again. But yeah, it should be in a really good place. So I think book one will be way faster to get completed and then we’ll just keep moving forward.
Crys: Will you go through it again after subsequent book has it’s notes or…?
JP: No. So right now…
Crys: Because that seems crazy making.
JP: It does seem crazy, but this is the process that we’re still figuring out. I think part of it is that with the episode we had last week about world building. We didn’t have the whole world built. When we wrote book one, we were letting the story kind of drive it.
But what we discovered is that there are pieces that naturally came that it just makes sense to throw a little glitter bombs in at the beginning. And our plan is draft, I revise, we send it to what would be considered like in between a dev editor and like a diagnostic. I don’t know what you would really call it, but it’s J’s diagnostic thing.
So it’s not really dev edits as much as it’s just make sure that all the structure stuff is there and that it hits all the notes. And then beta readers to just get a vibe on it and then line editors right after that. And then we’re pretty much golden. So that’s our plan.
Also, because I’ve just been doing so many revisions and I have this week off, I am going to be drafting or writing something. I just don’t know what yet, but I just need that creative output. So probably the villain story that I haven’t started…
Crys: I know, that was what popped into my head.
I was like, he’ll probably do the villain story, which means that I have to do my villain story, which we also have to finish by the end of this month anyways. So yes.
JP: Yeah. I’m just gonna drink my coffee.
Crys: Anyway…
JP: Anyways, this week’s topic. What is it?
Crys: Series!
JP: Series.
Crys: We were just talking about your series. I could have done a really smooth intro from, “Hey, since we’re talking about how you’re structuring your series…”
JP: That’s not how we work here at Write Away.
Crys: No, it’s not. Absolutely not. Bridled chaos. We are bridled chaos.
JP: Indeed. So.
Smalls: I’m not.
JP: We’re leaving that.
Crys: “I’m not!” You are unbridled chaos, child.
JP: Perfection.
Crys: Okay. All right. Moving on with this bridled chaos.
So you have worked on one series, this one with Abe while you’ve been setting up other things that could be series? Or have you like moved beyond book one in creating a series on any other project? Basically where you at in your series land, JP?
JP: Sorry, there’s a motorcycle that decided that they wanted to drag race at 7:45 in the morning. I think they’re done.
Where am I at in my series life? I would say that what you had said is correct, that I have basically this one series with my coauthor that we have liked been pushing through for the series part.
Now, before that, I am a big world builder, big outliner. So I probably have Between 5 and 10 projects that I’ve outlined and then never did anything with. But more or less like I’m a person who makes a lot of room for multiple books in a series. I don’t do stand-alones, but I just kinda wanted to get the vibe.
And then with the whole serials coming up, I wanted to talk about that too.
Crys: Yeah. And the difference between series and serials. So I have written mostly series. I’ve written one standalone, which I intended to be a series, but the writing of it was so painful that I wrapped it up and it was done, which was fine because it was a romance and it could be just one.
No, I’ve written two. They were both intended to be series. I think in series. But romance lends itself to series where you just move from character to character. One of the things that I am super excited about stepping away from romance, is the ability, the expectation rather, you can do this in romance, but the expectation that you are going to sit with the same group of characters in depth over multiple books. That excites me.
So quick overview of what the differences between different kinds of series. I’m just gonna make these up as I go along from stuff I’ve learned. So you can have stand-alone books in a series. That’s what a lot of romances are, is if you’ve got like a small town romance, any book can be read on its own without truly ruining the other books because you know that the characters end up together.
But they don’t have a story that carries on from one book to another that reaches its conclusion in the final book. You have really long stories. Okay. JP has a question.
JP: I don’t know if you want me to ask questions in between, but I’m going to anyway.
So question with series that don’t follow the same character. How do you anchor them to make it still a kind of a flowing series? And do you always introduce like the next set of characters in the book beforehand?
Or how do you go about that?
Crys: I’m going to answer these probably in reverse order. You don’t necessarily have to introduce the characters, but it’s going to be really hard to pull people through unless they are there hardcore for the trope or the hook, whatever it is, and that hook is present in every single book.
I highly recommend that all of the characters are linked in some way so that you can hook each reader who starts at book one into book two into book three into book four.
That is your best bet for grabbing that cash from the whole series versus just being like, oh, book one was lovely. Maybe I’ll read book two or not.
Just like any series, you want to somehow introduce the second book’s characters and their individual hooks so hard that they’re like, I need book two.
How do you anchor them? A lot of times this will be a friend group, a team, a military unit, a small town, a family.
Bridgerton is the series of all of the Bridgertons getting romanced out. So you’ve got the whole family there.
Team fiction where you’ve got a SWAT team or special ops, firefighters, whatever it is like there’s a crew who are tightly bonded, not by blood, but by some framework. That also gives you really great external plots as they’re fighting missions and whatnot. That’s a really good way to anchor your team.
Sometimes it’s just small town and loose friend groups or acquaintances, but you’re still able to build those hooks in as these people are interacting with each other in a small town, and you see these perhaps like seemingly disparate characters, and then all of a sudden there seems to be a spark there. And you introduce that in one book and it’s going to be culminated in their book.
So that would be how you would anchor those, particularly for romance. I don’t… trying to think how you would do that in any other kind of series.
Probably a slightly related kind of series. And that is the old school cozy mystery style or thriller where you have the same character, whether it is Hercule Poirot, Columbo, Jack Reacher, whoever your character happens to be it, no matter what story you drop into, what you’re going there is for the same experience with the same character who has a personality that you’re drawn to is going to do the thing they always do.
Generally it’s fight injustice because this tends to be a very mystery thriller style of book and it’s just like copy paste, as far as the emotional journey that you take your characters on every book and the circumstances might be new and exciting, and you’re there to see what happens.
The A-team is like this… MASH even could be like this and that’s more of a humor style, but it’s, there’s always a problem that they have to fix.
A lot of sitcoms could be like this, that they tend to have a tie through the whole series of the story as well.
JP: Yeah. And I think with those series where you have that kind of same character, you’re more looking towards like plot arcs, if I understand correctly, than character arcs because the character doesn’t really change all that much because the idea is that you drop in whenever.
Crys: Correct. Early Sherlock Holmes is like this where he does not change. It is simply the intrigue of how the story progresses. You are going there because the character does not change in fact.
JP: Yeah.
Crys: Another kind of series, one that I’m really drawn to is the really big story. And that is where epic fantasy tends to set. You can not just read one Game of Thrones book and say, “that was a lovely story,” because it doesn’t have a true ending by the end of the book. You have to read the whole thing. It’s one big story. They just couldn’t physically print it in one unit.
I think Sanderson’s second Stormlight Archive book actually nearly exceeded what the printer was physically capable of printing in one unit. And so we have physical restraints as to how large a book can actually be, as long as we are considering an actual print facilities. Ebook, you can make them however long you want to be.
I think that you lean that way a bit more as well, but one of the things that not epic fantasy big stories prefer is that there are pretty clearly defined arcs that start and each book in service of the larger arc.
That’s a step back from the really big story, because you are focusing on these concrete arcs for each book where something is being resolved in each book while you’re serving the whole big story, in service of the giant big story.
Older epic fantasy doesn’t seem to do that as much. They just are like, here’s where we have to end because of page restraints. Come back for the next book. And that’s honestly fine. The readers of that genre are fine with that.
One other type of series is the tightly linked sequential stories that don’t necessarily have a big arc from book one to the last book. And the series that I’m thinking of specifically for this is the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Some of the books in that series are tightly linked. There’s a duology where in the middle, it’s a cliffhanger. And so you need to read those two books to get the end of that story, but most of those books are mostly about Miles Vorkosigan. There’s one about his mom, one about his cousin, most about Miles Vorkosigan at different things in his life. Each story is its own unit of his life and you see him progress and age and grow throughout the books, but there isn’t one giant arc that covers the books. They just happened to be about this very interesting person and the interesting people that surround him, and each book is just another piece of that story without it being a giant big story.
JP: There’s a trilogy that I really liked growing up. It’s the Abhorsen Trilogy. The first book is about a character that technically never shows up again. The next one, Lirael, follows her as she goes through the next few books and figures out who the Abhorsen is, who’s basically this person who can control or wield death in a way.
But no, like that trilogy is always viewed as a set, as a trilogy. And that main character in the first one never shows up again.
Crys: So how did they hook from one to the other?
JP: I think they hooked it by the world. And then by this role of this character, the Abhorsen, and the expectations that character is supposed to have. Because at first, the character is, and Lirael is viewed as this, a supporting character.
And so you believe that she’s taking up the mantle of the previous character. And then you just start to learn more and more about it. But it’s very interesting that I resonate so well with that trilogy, but we never followed the same character from book one and book two.
Crys: Yeah. I remember adoring that series and I want to reread it because Garth Nix is one of my favorite authors. He just makes me feel like the world is slightly off kilter in the most delicious way.
JP: I really love his Keys to the Kingdom books too.
Crys: I don’t know if I’ve read those.
JP: They’re madness.
Crys: So how would you describe the series that you are writing with Abe? What kind of series is it?
JP: I think epic fantasy with a plot point for each book that is an open and closed loop. So if you were to look at like the Harry Potter series where you have these kind of concise points within each book, and then you have that overarching story.
I think we introduce the overarching story earlyish on, but we probably follow that same Harry Potter standpoint, where like the first book, you don’t really know what’s going on and you just slowly start to develop it more and more. And then the piece that we are also taking from that is, our book, our series of six books. We’re not going to really exceed the six books for this series, but what we did instead was build platforms for those other stories.
So that the world still lives because we have very strong investment in this world. And all we want to do is make other people interested in other facets of it so that we can build other series off of it. Which is interesting because I think we’ve had the discussion a few times of could we make this series longer?
And we’re both like, yes, but we’re not going to. Because we want that cutoff because we want to tell the other stories.
Crys: Yeah. So that’s an interesting thing to talk about is the world as separate from the series, which we’ve talked a bit about in our book club discussion on You’re Going to Need a Bigger Story, but it is entirely possible to tell a really big story over multiple series as well. And then we wanted to talk about the difference with serials.
And serials, hoo, we could probably do a whole episode… yeah, we could probably do a whole episode on serials, with all this stuff that we’ve both been researching and learning. So serials. So , how does a serial differ from a series?
And there’s some pedantic nonsense we could get into. Some people would say that some of those types of series we’ve described are actually serials because they do depend on each other. Like the big, really big stories some people would say are serials.
But serials in the modern sense are stories that are told in small bits. We’re not defining how small those bits are because we’ve had serials that are 20,000 words. You have serials that are 500 words. The pieces, individual pieces.
And one of the unique elements of serials that you’ve seen somewhat in indie publishing in general, as authors have published really fast and had the ability to publish very fast, is the ability to take in account reader response.
And that’s not to say that you should adjust your story or change what you planned for your story based on reader’s responses, but being able to incorporate the reader’s response of characters, they really unexpectedly fall in love for and grow that character’s presence.
This is not limited to serials. It’s just that serials are able to really take advantage of this ability. I think for instance the True Blood series, the character Lafayette in the books dies very early on, but he was a fan favorite. And so in the TV show, they kept him alive for much longer.
And thankfully.
JP: Yeah. Agreed. I think too, with serials, the intrigue I have is how you can make the middle portion just so much longer, depending on the response you get from people.
When I think about the series that my co-author and I are doing, yeah, we could maybe squeeze out on other book, but really we formulated it with really strong pillars that almost depend on each other in one way or another, so that there isn’t really room to stretch it out without it becoming a little too contrived.
The part that I’m really interested with serials is just the fact that like that middle part can just go and it really can just keep going and there can be other different arcs and pieces to it that you can develop over time based off of how the responses.
Crys: Absolutely. And I think that some serial authors do right without knowing what their ending is going to be. And so they could basically write forever because they don’t have an end in mind.
One of the ways that you can capitalize on that is introducing multiple characters that readers care about so that maybe some characters’ stories do end, but other characters’ stories do not.
You have characters that come in later in this serial, you carry out in their stories. And so it is a different way of packaging that world concept in one format versus in multiple formats.
I’m really excited to see the serial community grow over the next couple of years, because as I’ve dug into it, I remember reading a serial in the newspaper, actually. And it was a book by Avi, I think, but I’d have to look it up. I know it was really cool just to see, oh, like I would get a little bit of it each week in the newspaper, which is old school serial style.
It’s now published as an actual book, which is another one of the advantages of the serial style is you get the feedback in a less permanent medium, and then you revise and publish as a more permanent medium. The planning for it, for me the way that I’m planning for a serial is very much the way that I’m planning for a series, in that I know my beginning game, I know my end game. The difference with the series and the serial is that I have particularly put in a point in the serial I’m like, here’s where they have adventures, and I don’t limit what those adventures are. Whereas with a series, I tend to have a bit more of an idea of exactly how many books I want to tell. I have, and granted, my experience with series has been romance. So I know exactly how many books I want to tell, because I know how many characters I have.
So I know exactly how many stories I have to tell. And I do like to have an overarching plot that brings readers from book one to book six or seven, which is normally where I wrap up. I haven’t in the past, super planned out what all those steps were going to be. I’ve done it very intuitively, this mix of pantser and plotter.
And that I’m like, okay, here’s my six characters. Therefore, these are my six books. I don’t necessarily know what order they’re going to come in. I will figure that out as I get to know the characters. We try and introduce a big bad in book one that we will bring back to like truly deal with in book six, like they get some bit of come up, it’s in book one, they maybe pop up in the middle books to cause trouble, and then in book six they become big trouble and they handle it.
JP: So I think I mentioned to you this last night when I was texting you, where like when I’m writing a serial, I almost make my main character like super strong at the end. They basically become like God mode. I think my biggest concern with writing serials and not knowing how long it’s going to be is turning my character into a super-powered unstoppable force, like right in the middle of it and being like, okay, where do we go now?
Other than take their powers away or dismantle everything that they had, which I guess are the tools that you would use. Do you have that in mind when you’re like saying an adventure has happen? Do you have limitations on how much you’re going to develop your character?
Crys: So for my serial, I know that my character, she has massive power by the time the story ends.
She also has reasons to not want to use that power. But she can, she absolutely can. She will, if she needs to, but it’s also, it becomes less of a priority for her. There are other things that she wants to do. So she was a mage. She gets these massive mage powers. Then she moves on to wanting to teach children who are like her.
And so you can’t magic kids into learning jack shit. So that becomes her new challenge. It becomes a different kind of story. And my plan for her actually ends as she’s establishing this school, but that leaves the door open for where I can pursue this new realm. And also gives me the potential to introduce these characters who are at the beginning of their growth cycle, that I can follow them as they grow, because the growth element is what really pulls us into stories. It’s the characters growing and changing. When power no longer becomes a growth element, then you need to lean into other growth elements. And that tends to be relational, emotional, all the powers of the world, little bitty living space. Like how do you deal with the emotional elements of the genie being free?
Like that’s where my mind goes as far as continuing those stories on.
JP: It almost sounds to me from what you’ve told me, that you’re starting your story as a hero’s journey and then halfway through you’re changing it to a heroine’s journey, and that your ending is more about your character building that community with others to build them up.
Whereas like maybe in the beginning they’re gaining their own understanding of their power and reaching this turning point in which they can then express and show to others.
Crys: If that’s a helpful way of looking at it, for sure. I definitely approach a lot of things as a heroine’s journey. We’re referring to Gail Carriger’s, heroine’s definitions.
One of the things I really liked about her discussion is that you could have hero or heroine type characters in different stories. For my main character, I definitely imagine her as a heroine and I’m thinking this through live as we’re speaking. She does pull a hero move, though, that leaves her very alone.
And that’s the hero’s success. It’s not what she wanted. Honestly, that’s not her success point. That’s her dark night of the soul when she has to pull the hero move. And then it ends with the connection and heroine’s journey like coming together. So that was me thinking through things in a muddy glumpess.
JP: Having you say that about serials made me think about like how I would approach it, which is maybe why I was saying like the hero to heroine journey, or maybe it’s more focusing on the internal and then shifting to the external. Where one portion of it is the character understanding themself, reaching this point of self-actualization in which they can then teach others.
And I think having an ending that exceeds beyond the character’s own means. For me, for creating serials means that middle portion is so much bigger to play in because I have these pillars to hit, but there are so many more to hit than just, my character becomes OP, the end.
Crys: OP means overpowered for anyone who’s not familiar.
JP: With a high DPS! That’s damage per second.
Take that, world.
Crys: Yeah. How was it that you phrased the question about like hard stop points?
JP: I think so. I don’t know.
Crys: Honestly, I think that the only hard stop is when the writer stops being interested in telling stories in that line, in that world. That’s honestly it. That’s the only hard stop in my mind. And a hard stop for now is not necessarily a hard stop forever.
There’s been plenty of authors who hard stopped their series, they thought, and then years or decades later, they were like, actually, now that I’ve grown and have this experience I really want to explore how this character would deal with X.
A hard stop for me is more just like a satisfying point at which the reader can leave the story. It means that there’s very few hooks left to pull them in. There’s no hard hooks left to pull them forward.
You are hamstringing yourself if you ever do want to come back. But most of the time, when you put in a hard stop, it is very much, the author has told the story that they wished to tell at this point and they don’t want you asking for more.
Readers are always going to ask for more though. There’s always going to be tiny open loops that you’ve left, littered all throughout the story, intentional or not. You cannot possibly wrap them all up because you can’t wrap life up in a bow. And readers will always want more stories. Bless them, we love them.
Sometimes it’s exhausting and this is why sometimes characters get killed off without there actually being a reason for it. And that is simply because their readers have asked for this story so much and the author did not want to tell it.
JP: That’s a fair point. If could kill your characters, the end. Unless they don’t in your world.
Crys: Industry secrets. Any other things we should go over for series? Do you have to know your last scene? No. It’s certainly helpful though. You’ll hear some authors say you have to know your last scene because you need to know where you’re writing. It’s helpful. But plenty of others do it very successfully without doing so.
JP: Yeah. I think as a last point for me was how I develop series is by using the three-story method. I do the complex choice consequence for the whole series, and then I’ll break it down into pieces and try to determine what each of those pieces have for conflict, choice and consequence.
And that has really helped me to look at it from a bird’s eye view of the entire story and just keep getting more and more granular, almost like a snowflake method with three story. But I know that they are working on some other things that may help expand the three-story method network and world, but that’s what I use.
Crys: I have had a really hard time using three story for larger than a scene. And I came to the realization fairly recently, that part of that was my brain’s expectation that conflict, choice and consequence all equaled act one, act two, act three, because there are three parts and therefore the three parts is going to be equal. And that’s not true. The choice often will come in act three, generally should right before the conflict. So it may be more possible for me to comprehend three-story method on that grander scheme and scale. But it is something that has been terribly difficult for me to comprehend, heaven knows why, when I can get it on a scene level with absolutely no problem.
JP: Yeah, I think that was one part that I had to keep telling myself was if the question is what is the most difficult choice that the character has to make, more than often that choice is made in act three or near the end.
Crys: Yep, absolutely.
What question shall we leave our listeners?
JP: Another drag race. What should we ask?
Crys: Not the fun kind of drag race.
JP: No, that would be amazing though. If a bunch of drag queens just started walking down my sidewalk, I would leave. I would just hang up on you. You’d be like, “Where’d he go?” and I’m like, bitch, I’m gone.
Crys: I would call you on WhatsApp so you could video me a whole thing.
JP: I’m sorry. There’s a real drag race going on.
Okay. What questions do we want to ask people?
Crys: How do they plan their series?
JP: Yep.
Crys: Excellent. If you would like to get early access to these episodes for as little as a dollar a month, you can join us on Patreon, the link will be in the show notes. We also recorded our latest episode of our Guiding Our Year with Tarot. We called it The Planning A Year with Tarot. It’s more guidance, we decided this morning.
That will be going up on Patreon soon, as well as other bonus episodes and the chance to join the live stream for our book club.
Thanks for joining us this week.
JP: See you later!
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