600 – Crafting a Long Series

Oh wow, that’s six entire hundreds. Honestly didn’t expect we’d ever make it this far, and now we’re lacking a plan. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean your long series also has to lack a plan, or lack a smooth transition for that matter. This week, we’re discussing how to lay the groundwork for a story that goes on and on, hopefully in a way that doesn’t leave you trapped four books into an epic work of dark fantasy with no idea how to continue. ## Show Notes - The First Mythcreant Podcast Episode - Should You Outline? - Magnum Opus - The Abbess Rebellion - Willow - Temeraire - Fractal Plotting - Voyage of the Dawn Treader - Discworld - Series Bloat - Sokka ## Transcript **Generously transcribed by Manasa.** Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. **Oren**: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.  **Chris**: And I’m Chris. **Oren**: I was there, Chris. I was there 3,000 years ago when some nerds recorded the first Mythcreant Podcast episode. **Chris**: Oh, we’re so old. **Oren**: I told them to cast it into the fire, and they dramatically said no, and then 600 episodes later, here we are. **Chris**: Well, since we have another opportunity, we can cast it into the fire again. **Oren**: No. We don’t, we don’t do that. We don’t cast things into the fire around here. You think fire’s free?  We can’t afford fire. **Chris**: So yeah, maybe just cast the intro music into the fire. **Oren**: I like that intro music, but we have had it for quite a while. **Chris**: Yeah. A big thanks to Jonathan Coulton for, for giving us permission to use his song. It was great. It was just from a different time, having that long of intro music. It was time to modernize by just getting right to the episode. And I don’t know, maybe later we might add a more modern, shorter intro sometime if I get around to it. I, I might never. **Oren**: We don’t say “100%” nearly enough to be a modern podcast. We have completely lost the lingo. **Chris**: Well, maybe our retroness still has some charm. **Oren**: People don’t realize….Before we get to the main topic, uh, if you have enjoyed the podcast, we could use your help. We are currently looking for more transcription volunteers to help us make sure every episode launches with a transcript. We are grateful to our existing volunteers, and we wanna make sure they don’t get burned out. We typically send an episode every six weeks or so at the most. If you’re interested, go to mythcreants.com/volunteer. **Chris**: All right. So what is our topic today? Is it that we’re so old? **Oren**: Yeah, it’s so old. **Chris**: 3,000 years. It feels like 3,000 years. It does. **Oren**: I was hoping that it would, it would work out to 3,000 days, but no, it’s more like 5,000 days. So it didn’t quite work out math-wise. Today we’re talking about how to craft a long series. **Chris**: Long series, like this podcast. Which is totally the same. **Oren**: Which we didn’t plan at all. So, you know, if you wanna end up like us, don’t plan, I guess, is the lesson here. Because, of course, the planning versus pantsing debate is eternal, and I’m not gonna try to solve it here. But if you are talking about a series, you do have to consider the extra wrinkle that unless you’re writing the whole thing all at once before publishing (which some writers do, but I don’t think most of us do), then there’s gonna be stuff that already exists in the world and that you would be very hard-pressed to change if you end up deciding you wanna take the story in a completely different direction. So planning can be a little bit more important there because as long as it’s a single book, you can theoretically go back and change things if you decide, “To heck with this outline,” or, “I don’t do an outline.” But if you’re doing a five-book series, and the first two books are already published, well, you gotta kinda abide by what you set there, or you should. I suppose you don’t have to. No one has to do anything. **Chris**: I mean, if you plan the first one and write it without planning the series, and again we could talk about the best case scenario versus the worst case scenario. In the best case scenario, if you do know what you’re doing, we will talk about how to leave things open so the story has some place to go even if you haven’t planned it out. If you leave things open instead of like writing yourself into a corner after the first installment, you can be okay. But you are gonna have more constraints after the first book because now you have to adhere to whatever you established in your first story. On the other hand, though, I have definitely seen people, you know, especially with their magnum opus, they jump into a series right away, and it’s almost like we have the same constraints but in reverse – which I think is worse – where now they’ve planned the end, and so the beginning can’t change. Or I’ve even had people add scenes that feel really out of place in their first book because it’s intended to set up something for a later book. And the first book is hands down the most important. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re plotting because, of course, like any good plot, you wanna escalate and have the last book be like the most epic. But from the reader’s perspective, the first book absolutely has to succeed in order for anybody to read the later books. Again, depending on what kind of series we’re talking about. We can talk about anthologies later. **Oren**: Yeah, that’s one of the most difficult things as an editor when you’re talking to the author and suggesting, “Well, this thing isn’t working. This plot element isn’t functioning well. We should revise it to strengthen it,” and they’re like, “No, that can’t be changed. We need that to set up for the twist in Book Four.” Well, you didn’t hire me to edit Book Four, so there’s only so much I can do about that. I ask for very broad details of what happens in the later books, but I can’t even *read* a full series outline. That would be a ton more work that no one paid for. So at some point, we do have to acknowledge that fixing the first book should probably be the priority.  **Chris**: Yeah. I think ideally people would, as they practice writing and plotting, slowly scale up the size of their stories so that they don’t commit to a long series before they kind of know how plotting goes a little bit. Not that there isn’t… I think most writers still- they try something different and then they have surprises and things don’t go how they expect, right? So it’s not for a lot of people, it doesn’t necessarily become super regular. But I think the issue that happens in the very beginning is: if you start a long series like right away, but you’re still learning some like really important story fundamentals, you end up with something that is really complex and puts tons of constraints on the first book. And it’s just really hard to make that first book a success, which it absolutely needs to be. So that’s a situation where I might say, “You know what? Maybe you should just not plan. Maybe you should just write the first book and make sure that works.” Again, ideally planning can, can do worlds of good, but… **Oren**: Right, and even if you are at the stage where starting to plan makes sense, I’m not suggesting that you need to plan every single detail and have like a super rigid plan to hold yourself to because as you write, things are gonna change. Things are gonna be different, and you will have to probably make adjustments. That’s just the nature of it. And if you get too rigid in your planning, that’s going to be a problem, and every writer is gonna have to find that sweet spot for themselves. I can’t tell you what it is for you. But I would generally recommend, if you’re serious about this series and you have like some experience with what that means, I would usually recommend at least some basic plotting of what you think the later books are gonna be, so that you’re setting yourself up for them early instead of trying to scrounge a plot out of the ether later on. **Chris**: So maybe it’s worth talking about: how do you leave yourself with somewhere to go? Let’s say you are just plotting the first book, but you wanna make it a series. You’re not gonna plot out the entire series because you’re gonna see how well the first book does before you commit to working on book two. **Oren**: Right, like what I did. Admittedly, I was surprised at how many people saw the ending hook that I put in “Abbess Rebellion” and thought that it was a – even described it as – a cliffhanger ending. I was like, “Is that a cliffhanger?” **Chris**: Oh, I mean, I certainly didn’t think it was a cliffhanger. **Oren**: But there were definitely some people who read that and were like- even that hook was-…You know, they were like, “Well, where’s the next part?” And I’m like, “Well, the next part will be there if any significant number of people read this,” which, you know, they didn’t, as expected. **Chris**: I mean, unless you have a huge marketing budget, that’s to be expected. And from what I’ve heard, if you’re gonna be indie publishing, it makes sense to finish three books before you start spending money if you wanna advertise yourself, because then there’s three things for people to read if they do start reading your work. So who knows? You know, we’ll see. I think there are a lot of people who did like “Abbess Rebellion” and wanted to see a sequel. So if things pick up, it’s possible. Um, you know, it’d be nice if you still return to that.  **Oren**: You know, with all this free time I’m gonna have in law school. Chris: Yeah, could be a long time coming. Okay, so let’s talk about it. The main thing that really screws writers over and makes it hard to do another installment is: when we tie up everything in the plot, and everybody gets a happy ending, and there’s just no problems left. Because at that point, if you want to create problems for the next book, it feels like we have to take the happy endings away from people, and that doesn’t feel great. We’ve seen a lot of…like the “Willow” show … A lot of these were, don’t get me wrong, fairly unforced errors. At the end of the “Willow” movie, the classic movie, you know, Willow now is like learning magic and he’s happy and doing great. And in the beginning of the show, he’s miserable, and it drags out the question of whether he can actually do magic for a surprisingly long time. When the whole movie was about him getting to the point where he felt confident in himself, and then he was ready to actually do real magic. So that was just so unsatisfying, the idea that he couldn’t do magic anymore. And, again, we can have new threats appear and that works, especially if you want relationships to grow, but everybody is like getting along perfectly and they’re like really close to each other, it may not feel…and you *can* create new problems, it’s just definitely easier if there’s some room for growth. The enemies become friends, but they’re not yet lovers, or what have you. **Oren**: Yeah. Well, “Willow” is weird because “Willow” has basically zero world building. Like, there is so little effort devoted to what this place is like beyond that there’s an evil witch and we gotta stop her. Like, what we’re even stopping her from doing is very vague. So it’s not like they don’t have anything left to explore because they basically explored nothing, which is one of the reasons why the sequel series is so weird to me. But ideally if they had wanted to set themselves up for a sequel, there would’ve been a little bit more of an attempt to demonstrate that this world has things going on other than this one evil witch. **Chris**: Yeah. Which, again, the world building, brings me to this also really matters for allowing sequels because if you have just like a single world threat that kind of defines the plot and it doesn’t feel like this is a world that has that same level of problems regularly, then it can be really hard to come up with “What’s the next problem?” Whereas if you have a world where stuff is happening all the time…So like for instance, in “Lockwood & Co.”, we have a ghost apocalypse kind of, so there’s ghosts everywhere. And during the story they have to tackle different ghosts haunting houses, and then we climax with a big mansion that has tons of ghosts in it. It’s super creepy. We don’t get rid of *all* of the ghosts in the setting, right? We don’t fix whatever caused the ghost apocalypse and send all of the ghosts to rest at the end of the first book. If we did that, then it’s like, well, “the entire concept of this book is fighting ghosts, but now we took care of all of the ghosts. Where do we have to go?” Whereas if we’re just fighting, okay, “this is one mansion that’s particularly dangerous, this is gonna be our climax, the post-apocalypse is still here”, then we can just pull up more spooks and ghosts for future books, and we have plenty of room to keep writing sequels. **Oren**: And I suspect that you wouldn’t have a Willow type situation in novels very often because Willow kind of gets away with the fact that it does zero world building because it’s a relatively short cult classic movie that doesn’t really need world building. It’s just got quirky, fun characters that people like, and it’s funny. Whereas with a novel, I think you would have a hard time getting people to buy a fantasy novel that had that flimsy of a world. Like even fantasy novels that aren’t known for their world building do more than that. **Chris**: I mean, a fairy tale fantasy can be very flimsy in its world building, right? Because it’s really light and kind of low in realism. **Oren**: Yeah, that’s true. **Chris**: So there’s just like kingdoms everywhere, but, you know, we don’t necessarily have a map and it’s like “how many kingdoms can fit in such a small space? We have like princes and princesses running around everywhere.” So it may depend on the type of story. Willow is pretty campy. So I don’t know. But again, because it’s left open, right, there’s plenty of room to be like, “Oh yeah, did you know there’s another big empire next door that is headed by an evil wizard and the wizard wants to kidnap Elora or something?” You know, so there’s just … There is actually plenty of room to build on that because it’s not thoroughly explored and the premise of the original Willow is just magical people and armies running around on the map. **Oren**: Yeah. Although Willow does highlight another potential issue which is that if you want to leave room for sequels, it’s usually best to be modest with your initial scale. Because they’ve saved the kingdom from a super evil powerful sorceress, and it’s not that you can’t escalate past that, it’s just what do you escalate to? It feels like that witch is about as powerful as a bad guy could get before the power levels start to become meaningless. **Chris**: So generally the rule is, because you do want the series to be a non-anthology series that is closely tied together, you do want it to escalate. But you have other options. Instead of escalating the tension, which usually in many cases requires increasing the scope of the story…so it’s a town, now we’re focusing on the kingdom or what have you. You could also change things up more so that you’re adding more novelty to make up for the fact that the tension is not going up because something is new and refreshing in the new story. But then the question is: what is it gonna be? I mean, again, Willow is open-ended, right? Maybe we could add some unicorns or something. The unicorn lord. Something that’s different enough to make a sequel work. Again, that might be harder with something like Lockwood & Co., that is very specifically about fighting ghosts as opposed to a general magical epic fantasy setting like Willow. Not that you couldn’t create, add variety to Lockwood & Co., but like that would definitely be harder. **Oren**: I want to talk about two very broad methods for series plotting. You got what I will shorthand refer to as the Lockwood method and then the Temeraire method. Because in Lockwood, there is a series plot about figuring out, like, what the heck happened with this ghost apocalypse, what’s going on, and we start to get towards solving that by the end. But that’s not apparent from the first book. In the first book, they don’t receive, like, the riddle of the ghost apocalypse, which is what I would probably recommend to newer writers. It’s something that is implied, but you don’t come right out and say it, and then that gives you the option to either continue it or to say, “All right, I’m done with this series,” before you actually get there. As opposed to in Temeraire, it’s very clear that the throughline is the defeat of Napoleon from the first book. And Naomi Novik does it. Nine books later, they get him, but that’s a nine-book series. That’s pretty ambitious for most of us teeny baby writers. And if she had started that and then decided that she was done with that series, her name would be George R.R. Martin. \[laughter] Who opened with a very clear, obvious through line and then was like, “Eh, nahhhh, I’m done”. So, you know, just be aware that that’s a possibility. **Chris**: I think it’s worth talking about just how overarching or how anthology-like series are, and what that difference is. So just to start, we’re often asked how to plot a series, and the thing about this that is funny is that you plot a series the same way you plot a novel. Yep. Because plot structure is fractal, meaning you have the same structure repeating at different scales, and you can zoom in or zoom out and just see the same thing. Just like you would have your … we’ve talked about through lines for novels, right? You should have, using a typical tension structure, you have one tense problem… that you introduce near the beginning and that gets solved in the end. Then you wanna break that up with sub-problems. You do the same thing with a series. You have one tense problem that represents the series, and then you break that up into steps or obstacles that make your child arcs. And then you can do one child arc. If it’s a novel, it’s per chapter, or \[for a series] one child arc per book. Then that gives- completing that step in the throughline and making it feel like we’ve moved closer to the end gives a sense of satisfaction at the end of each book even though the throughline is still open. **Oren**: Yeah. **Chris**: But within that we can make a story more or less episodic, and basically how this goes is: if those child arcs have more tension than the throughline, you have something that feels more episodic where they feel more like episodes. Like a book like “Voyage of the Dawntreader”, for instance, is an episodic story where they have a quest where they’re supposed to find these guys that disappeared, but that’s not really tense. It gives it some level of holding it together, but that’s not really a big deal. Instead, the tension comes when they go to a mysterious island, that has something weird going on with it. And then that creates problems that they need to solve. So those episodes are tense, but the bigger structure holding them together isn’t very tense. And the difference is what Oren was talking about, where when we have something like Lockwood & Co, we can see that there’s a big series throughline in figuring out what happened with this ghost apocalypse, but it’s not very present in the first book. That throughline is kind of implied, but not really there, and that means that we get a satisfying finish for the first book because it has its own problems. But it doesn’t necessarily feel like if it ended there, then we’re on a big cliffhanger. Whereas if we had a really strong throughline holding it together immediately, then… it has some advantages. If you know you’re gonna keep writing the series, then that inspires people to pick up the next book more. …Neither is bad or good, right? It’s just about prioritizing how much you want people to jump in or put something down versus how much you wanna really incentivize them to keep going and hold the series together tightly.  **Oren**: Yeah, and the more emphasis you put on the series’ throughline, the more people will expect each book to directly deal with that. Whereas if you put more focus on the characters or whatever they’re doing, you can get away with some detours. Like in Temeraire, there’s one book where they get exiled to Australia, which is the fallout of some choices that the main characters made in the previous book. And that one’s not very related to defeating Napoleon. Like, Napoleon’s not doing stuff in Australia. That’s more about the characters and what happens to them. And I can see someone being kind of frustrated with that if they were really into the Napoleon arc. They’d be like, “Hey, there’s a whole book with no Napoleon. It’s just Australia, and those are different.” But I think for most readers, the Napoleon story was not so urgent that that would be a problem, and the story’s pretty good at building attachment. So yeah, we wanna see what happens to these characters when they have to pay for their crimes by going to Australia. **Chris**: Whereas you have a really important plot holding your series together, there’s just a higher expectation that each book will move that series’ plot forward more, and then you gotta stay on task more. Yeah. So that’s kind of the difference. Then if we get all the way to the point where we don’t necessarily have a throughline, we get something more like Discworld. Which is mostly just a bunch of stories in the same setting that often share characters. And there are series within Discworld that are same storyline.  **Oren**: Yeah, Discworld is like five different episodic series in a trench coat. But even those series are defined more by the shared characters than by a specific plot, right? Like, there are some arcs that run through them, but The Witch storyline: it’s not like in book one they encounter the evilest witch and they’re fighting that person for the whole series. Every Witch book is fairly independent of the others. **Chris**: One thing that I think is really important if you’re making, especially with a long series, is you have to watch the chronic series bloat. … Okay, so again, if you add new things: what happens to a lot of writers, they add new story elements, they introduce new characters in each installment, they may introduce new places in each installment, magical abilities, whatever it is, viewpoints – I wish they didn’t, but often they do – **Oren**: So many viewpoints. **Chris**: So many viewpoints, and what happens is it just accumulates. It snowballs and gets bigger and bigger as the series goes, and gets really out of control to the point where nothing in the story has enough time, right? We don’t see the main character very often because their viewpoint switches off with everybody else’s viewpoint, for instance, and we’re trying to find ways for our two dozen characters to be involved in the plot. And then movement is just extremely slow, and it’s not cohesive anymore, and all of those things happen. You can have books introduce new things if you are willing to let go of other things, right? So if you have something like in Voyage of the Dawntreader, each episode we’re traveling to a different island, and then we say goodbye to the last island. **Oren**: Yeah. We don’t try to keep bringing the island with us. **Chris**: Or just like we have characters. These characters are gonna be around for this book because they’re heavily intertwined with the plot of this book, right? Like we have a detective character, for instance. This is the person who is the wife of the person who was murdered. And then the next story we have a new mystery with a new set of people that are, you know, suspects in the next murder, but we’re gonna leave them behind for the most part in the next book… So if you’re willing to let things go and have them just be story elements that are for one book, it can be okay. But we know lots of writers who just get really attached to everything they introduce and just want to keep everything coming back and not let go of anything. In which case, you know, a prevention is worth an ounce of cure. Because it’s just gonna get out of hand, and get really, really hard to plot, and get really, really slow on the reader’s end, and really complex. **Oren**: And for the record, readers, I know the saying is, “An ounce of prevention is a pound of cure,” but the part that Chris didn’t mention is that she’s talking with, like, a little gram of prevention, and that’s worth an ounce of cure, so it still works. **Chris**: I did- **Oren**: The unit measurements still, still work out … **Chris**: What did I s- what did I say? **Oren**: Uh, what you said was, “Prevention is worth an ounce of cure.” Oh, okay. Which is, you know, not wrong. I just needed to clarify your units. **Chris**: Oh, amazing. **Oren**: Yeah, it’s fantastic. I do have a question since we’re coming up on the end. There’s one thing I wanted to talk about, which is: how do you design characters, especially the protagonist, so that they can have multiple arcs? Because character arcs are cool. We like them. They help a character grow and change, and they feel l- you know, emotionally relevant, but, you know, if you just randomly give a character a new arc each book, it’s gonna feel weird. So how do you make sure that, like, by the end of book one you haven’t resolved all the character’s issues, and now they’re just a static emotional character? **Chris**: Yeah, so internal arcs are really tricky, and this includes relationships too. So there’s several different strategies you can use. The first one is you can just make things worse so that you can come up with your external plot. Here’s the first step. So maybe we hate these other people who have been the mortal enemies of our country, and we want our character to soften up, for instance. Maybe at the end of the first book, the character, like, grudgingly agrees to work with them, right? And there’s one step, and maybe they’ll marry somebody from that culture by the end of the series or something. So you can make it more severe. For character arcs, though, this can be a big problem because if we make the problem too severe, maybe they won’t be likable anymore; readers can’t stand them. So we have to watch out for that. For relationships you have to be willing to wait for characters to grow close, but some people will have, like, a really slow burn romance or something like that, or two characters be- enemies becoming friends over a long series. That’s one way to do it. Sometimes you can do something that’s more…layered, where you have one issue that seems like the obvious issue to take care of now, but when that’s solved, you realize there’s an underlying issue. So emotionally, for instance, let’s say your character is really into toxic guys. Has to learn they’re no good, right? And, starts to…finally breaks up with the toxic guy in their life and is over that, but then in that process realizes they have like a history of abuse with their father that resulted in them believing that toxic guys…were the way to go or something. And now they have… they’ve undercovered a deeper emotional issue they can solve in the next book or something like that. **Oren**: Yeah. That makes sense to me. **Chris**: So something that’s layered and then finally you can have new problems happen. … And you have to have a reason though. Usually you would have some event, right? Uh, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sokka watches Yue die, and then he’s really anxious when he meets up with Suki and is overprotective. So that kind of thing, but you can do it at like a book scale. It can either be an event in the first book, or if you wanna have something happen at the beginning of the next installment that opens up a new emotional issue they have to resolve. Same with a relationship, right? You could create some kind of wedge issue in an existing relationship that could open up new problems. Again, none of this is particularly easy. It’s definitely trickier than an external arc to make those longer, but those are kind of the options that we have. **Oren**: All right. Well, I think with that we can go ahead and call this episode to a close, continuing our extremely long-running series. **Chris**: And if you would like this 600 episode series to keep adding new installments, supporting us on Patreon is a great way to make that happen. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. **Oren**: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Cathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week