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5 Tips for Writing a Series

Thu, 2015-05-14 04:59 -- Jocelyn Green

Many stories work best as stand-alone novels, but if you think a series is for you, there are different ways to do it. Here are just a few:

Sequential timeline, same characters. Take the same main characters in different episodes (novels) of a chronological story.

Sequential or overlapping timeline, different characters with some unifying theme. That theme could be occupation, such as The Midwives series by Laurie Alice Eakes, or the stories of siblings, or of close friends. In Carrie Turansky’s Edwardian Brides series, the heroines are all tied to Highland Hall: a governess, a daughter, and a refugee.

Overlapping timeline, overlapping characters. In my Heroines Behind the Lines Civil War series, the timelines overlap somewhat but each novel is set in a different part of the country. While each novel has its own main characters, I brought secondary characters from previous books of the series back into the story where it made sense. No matter which structure you choose for your series, here are five tips to consider.

  1. Read the previous books in your series every time you begin to plot/write your next one. This way your characters and their issues will be fresh in your mind, as you pick up the story again.
  2. Write each book so that it makes sense if the reader has not read—or doesn’t remember—the previous books. Gently remind readers of a character’s history, a little at a time to avoid a big backstory dump. For example, by the time my readers pick up Yankee in Atlanta, book 3 of my series, I’m not sure they’ll remember that Ruby O’Flannery is the Irish immigrant they met in Wedded to War, the first book. So in the first scene where she appears in Yankee, I needed to jog their memories, or fill in the blanks for readers who never read Wedded to War at all.
  3. Listen to the same soundtrack to help you establish the same tone and mood. I have a playlist of eight Civil War movie soundtracks I listen to as I write. Sometimes I get sick of it and turn it off, but it at least helps get me in the right frame of mind.
  4. Change how the reader feels about a recurring character. Think about which of your characters might be “shape-shifters,” to borrow a term from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey pattern. Take a character your readers hate and create sympathy for her. Or turn a blasé secondary character from a previous book into a hero after all. Allow a saint to fall from grace, or turn a sinner into a spiritual sage. The Hatfields & McCoys miniseries with Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton is one of the best examples of this that I’ve ever seen (or read).
  5. Keep it interesting. Make sure each book deserves to be its own book. I’m sure we’ve all read a          series of three books that really could have been told in just two. Keep the conflict, action, and character development moving the plot forward in every scene.
About the Author: 

Jocelyn Green

Jocelyn Green inspires faith and courage as the award-winning and bestselling author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books, including The Mark of the King; Wedded to War; and The 5 Love Languages Military Edition, which she coauthored with bestselling author Dr. Gary Chapman. Her books have garnered starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, and have been honored with the Christy Award, the gold medal from the Military Writers Society of America, and the Golden Scroll Award from the Advanced Writers & Speakers Association. She graduated from Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, with a B.A. in English, concentration in writing. As a speaker, Jocelyn inspires faith and courage in her audiences. She loves Mexican food, Broadway musicals, strawberry-rhubarb pie, the color red, and reading with a cup of tea. Jocelyn lives with her husband Rob and two children in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Visit her at www.jocelyngreen.com.

Comments

Wow, I'm so glad I read this today! My husband and I just finished watching the Hatfields & McCoys on Netflix -- or rather, we watched the first episode together, then he filled me in on the rest. And I agree! The characters morphed and changed and our sympathies were constantly shifting. Which is important in a story like that one, where the origins of the feud were so complex, and neither side was fully right or fully wrong. (At least, that's the sense I got from the series.) I hope to read your Heroines Behind the Lines series eventually. In the meantime, I'm curious what you think of Lynn Austin's Refiner's Fire series, if you have read it? It's also Civil War historical fiction with overlapping timeline, overlapping characters, and, at least from what I remember when I read it years ago, Austin did a really good job keeping a unifying theme going and pulling you into each new tale.

Submitted by Jocelyn Green on
Good morning Rachel! Yes, Hatfields & McCoys is not for the faint of heart-pretty violent-but in terms of storytelling, I found much to admire! I have read Austin's Refiner's Fire series (well, two of the three books), and I agree with everything you said about it. I appreciate that she was careful with the nuances and complexities of the war, rather than painting any angle with broad brushstrokes. She covers more of the war in each of her novels than I do, in terms of timeframe. My Widow of Gettysburg just covers June - November 1863, for example. Wedded to War covers April 1861-September 1862, and Yankee and Spy both go from 1863-1865. So I go into greater depth in a particular location, but there is definitely an appeal in how she covers the entire war in each of her books, too. I'm just so wordy, I can't imagine covering four years of war in one novel. ha ha :)

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