Tips on writing series, or how SIREN SUICIDES grew from 1 book to 3

I've only written one box/thing/bundle/whateveryoucallit of the series, just off the bat, just so you know. SIREN SUICIDES grew from 1 book to 3 via 5 drafts, well, 7, if you count 1 full pass done by my editor Colleen M. Albert, and then 1 final one by me after that. Many folks asked me to share the wisdom on writing series. As such, I don't know how much wisdom I have, but I did learn a few things from writing this beast over the course of 1 year, and I think next time I decide to write series, I might be prepared to do it better. Or so I hope. Here is what I did, and you can try doing too.

Treat your series like 1 book first, like series second. I don't know how true it is in the overall landscape of writing series, and I'm sure there are well seasoned authors who have cracked this nut and will give you much more wisdom on the topic. What I learned from my experience is that by treating my book as 1 story, I was able to round it up in the end nicely, keeping 1 story arc across all 3 books, but at the same time creating 3 separate smaller arcs in each of the books alone. At first it happened unconsciously, but then in the 4th draft I stared seeing clearly the separations in the story. It was almost like certain chapters seemed to be conclusions to a much bigger story, and certain others seemed to be the beginnings. In the end, I realized something funny, and it might only apply to a trilogy, so those of you with more books planned, don't look at me funny, okay? Back in the time when I wrote screenplays, I read STORY by Robert McKee and sort of used it as my guide to write. In it he stresses the point of 3 very simple story parts, namely, beginning, middle, and end. I don't remember exactly how he calls them, so don't quote me on this, but it fits a trilogy very nicely. The beginning is book 1, middle book 2, and end book 3. This is exactly what I did, I simply expanded my book in its 3 acts, and, BAM!, ended up with 3 books.

Decide if you want to center around the character or the world. Since I'm writing fantasy, I guess we're talking fantasy here. In light of this, once you have decided on your story and on its beginning, middle, and end, you have to decide if it's about a particular character who goes in different adventures, or if it's more about the world where your story is happening. For example, compare Harry Potter and Discworld. Harry Potter goes on a new adventure in each book, where as in Discworld Pratchett sends multiple characters on their own journeys within the world he has created. I would say the majority of the series I have read center on the character going places, doing things, like in The Dark Tower, but in others the world itself plays a major role, like A Game of Thrones or Abhorsen trilogy. You can still treat those books like beginning, middle, and end, but it's rather beginning, middle, and end of your world. Or, as the story typically goes, the end, the middle, and the beginning, since at the very end your world will probably shake off some evil creature and come back to prospering, shining, and all that other good stuff. SIREN SUICIDES for me was the character driven series, but now that a few people who read 1st draft of ROSEHEAD have asked me for sequels, if I ever write them, I would have to center them around the rose garden fantasy world.

Create multiple characters and kill off multiple characters. This is not necessarily something you can do in 1 book, but if you're writing series, not only should you do it, you must do it. I didn't do enough of it in my 1st novel, still being timid and afraid as a newbie writer. I should have done more. George R. R. Martin is a master of that. The whole point of the series is to draw you deeper into the story, to make you want more, to make you experience a multitude of emotions. Killing off characters at the end of book 1, only to introduce new characters at the beginning of book 2 is what keeps the story fresh. You throw a spin on the old idea, so to say, and spin it freshly into the reader's mind. J.K. Rowling likes to do it too. In Harry Potter, if you noticed, she introduces a couple (or more) major characters in the beginning of each book, my favorite being Gilderoy Lockhart. You notice how he will get demoted, and how he gets mentioned later here and there, until one day Harry and friends discover him in St. Mungo's Hospital. It's a minor thing, but it adds richness to the narrative, makes it more real, and the more you do it, the better. My biggest problem was, I was afraid to handle too many characters in my 1st novel, so I limited myself on purpose, having only 8 characters in SIREN SUICIDES. In ROSEHEAD I braved 24! Well, 2 of them are dogs, although 1 is talking, so I suppose it counts. Anyway, ROSEHEAD is not part of the series, at least, not yet, so forget I mentioned it. 

I think these are 3 major giveaways I have glimpsed through my own process. The other thing that is important is staying consistent throughout, which is very difficult, because writing series spans over a long time, and while you're writing them, you grow as a writer and your writing style changes. You have to learn to be okay with it and keep going forward anyway, without being tempted to go back and rewrite the 1st book. Instead, why don't you start new series! So, this is it. Anything I missed? Anyone? Anyone? Chime in.

Making fantasy REAL

Photo by Brooke Shaden

This is one of the scariest topics for me to write about, and, frankly, it didn't even occur to me to write about it until I asked my followers on Twitter what they would like to see next on my blog, and this particular topic, suggested by Brad Ulreich, stuck. Because it's one of my biggest struggles, bigger than writing dialogue. Writing fantasy is hard. Writing good fantasy is harder still. When starting out on SIREN SUICIDES, I blithely charged forward, naive and oblivious to any kind of notion of how to create a fantastical world that is also believable. And it's only in Draft 4 that inconsistencies started bugging me, as they did my beta readers, so in Draft 5 I tried paying close attention to the world building. I'm saying, tried to, because I'm still learning. What follows is what I have glimpsed so far, and I'm by no means an expert. Proceed with caution and be careful not to get tangled in the notion that this might be the truth somehow. it is not, it's no more than ruminations of a rookie writer.

Establish clear rules. I'm guilty of not being very clear about my world, and now that I'm almost done, I see it, but it's too late to go back and change the story. By rules I mean very distinct things that can or cannot happen in your fantasy. Imagine your story being a play of chess. If you had to explain it to someone who never played it, how would you do it? Now, if you had to explain it to someone who merely hasn't played for a few years, you would say it differently, right? Here lies the catch. As a writer, you know certain things that your readers don't. But simply because you know them, it doesn't even occur to you to explain them in very specific detail to the reader. But the reader will thank you for it! The reader is like that person who never played chess. The reader has no idea. Everything needs to be painstakingly explained, and not all at once either, but gradually, as the world of your story unfolds. But before you can do that, you have to know yourself what works, how, when, why, etc. This is the reason Draft 5 of my book turned into 3 books, because I simply slowed down enough to explain things.

Consistency over plot. This is a tricky thing I noticed when reading books, and I haven't seen anyone talk about it in the same vein, so I'd be curious to hear your comments. What I mean here is this. Once the rules of your world are clearly established, as in, all people in Dreamlandia are purple, they eat green capybaras for dinner, sleep 2 weeks out of a year, and live on one big baobab tree... err, let's not get carried away here, so, once your rules are established, feel free to not feel the pressure for providing a logical explanation behind everything that happens. This explanation is different from the one I was talking above. What I meant above was telling people that people in your book are purple. What I mean here is explaining why those people are purple. Who cares? They just are. You're the writer, you get to come up with anything you want. The point here is to believe in it yourself, and then we will believe in it too. The perfect example for left-out plot loops is Murakami's 1Q84. Read it and see for yourself. Because you believe in his world, you don't care about how it all happened, you want to know how it all resolves.

Supply made-up facts. This is another trick I picked up from reading, and it goes along the lines of yourself believing in your world. Because you now established the rules, and you made us believe in it, make it real by giving us facts about it, as if we were to read about it not in your book, but in a newspaper. Be as specific as you can. For example, purple people have only 4 right toes but staggering 10 left toes. And they always dream of pink zebras on Tuesdays, and on the first day of summer they each burp up a butterfly with the speed of 30 cracacacs a minute (now, who cares what a cracacac is, the point is, it sounds credible). Stephen King does this in Carrie by writing up actual news articles. Yann Martel does it in Life of Pi, inventing a fictional novelist and a report for the sunken ship. And in Harry Potter there is a whole wizarding newspaper which creates a sense of added credibility for the whole thing. I can keep going with examples here, but you get the idea.

Minimize or maximize outside contact. Like in any fantasy, there is the other side of the coin. The non-fantasy. Not all books have it. Pure fantasy doesn't deal with the outside world, and that is great, it gives you the freedom to operate within the world you created. But if you happen to write a book that does throw characters in the real world, then you have to either, spectacularly describe those interactions, showing how it impacts both sides, or, if you are unsure, which is my case, minimize the contact with the outside world, to avoid situations where you might lose the reader completely, by not supplying enough information on what happens when both world collide. Of course, I'm using a very general simplistic example here, because there are countless books written on the subject. Again, I'm simply sharing with you what I've learned myself so far.

Above all, no matter how fantastic your world is, don't forget the purpose of any story. Your every sentence has to either develop the characters or move the action forward, so if you spend a whole page describing the beauty of the left pinky of one of the purple people after he has applied freshly made crimson coating on it in accordance with an aardvark season tradition of the west bough of the baobab... no matter how divinely it's written, we will yawn, put the book aside, and move on. I'm sure I have missed a gazillion other tricks, so feel free to share your insights in the comments, as always!