An interesting protagonist or team of protagonists who solve the problem in the first story but remain somehow unresolved as characters by the close.Series books are very popular, with publishers and authors. Many – my own included – started out as standalone novels, then turned into a series because a publisher asked for more. It’s flattering to find that something you thought was a one-off book provokes sufficient interest for readers to want to return to your characters time and time again.
What makes a book the start of a series instead of a standalone?
An interesting protagonist or team of protagonists who solve the problem in the first story but remain somehow unresolved as characters by the close.
A world that’s vividly painted and so ‘real’ that readers will want to return to it time and time again.
A commitment from the writer to devote himself to the same kind of book, and the same characters, over several years without getting bored, without worrying that he runs a serious risk of being typecast, successful or not.
If you think the book you’re embarking upon could be the start of a series here are a few issues to consider first. For those of us already in the game they probably fall into the category of ‘things I wished someone had told me before it all began’.
Readers will sometimes whine about the number of series based around cops or secret agents or people connected to law-enforcement agencies in some other way. Perhaps you’re even of this mind yourself. You have a bright idea. Something completely original.
Here’s a tip: when you can hear the sentence ‘No one’s ever done this before’ forming in your head, flee the computer and do something else for a while. There’s usually a reason why others have walked away from that same bright notion.
Series books hinge upon characters who, time after time, find themselves in situations that spark a story. For that to work they have to do something professionally or in their private life that makes it natural for trouble to find them.
Let’s imagine you’ve set out to create a ‘different’ kind of crime series. Your detective is a floral arranger. She goes to deliver a very expensive bouquet to a rich family mansion and walks into the scene of a horrendous murder. Whoever did it ordered the flowers in the first place. He was setting her up for the blame. All of a sudden her biggest worry is no longer ‘Will the chrysanthemums look fresh?’ It’s ‘How do I find the bad guy, reveal him for what he truly is and get back to the boring little life I had before – if that’s possible?’
That could work for a story. And next time round? Well it’s hard to get away from the idea that she’s going to deliver a bouquet and find she’s surrounded by dead bodies again. Perhaps the readers will forgive you once. Come book three they’ll surely be screaming, ‘Why the hell do people use this woman? Every time you buy flowers from her someone winds up dead.’
You could try and broaden things a little. Let’s say our florist discovers there’s a hot detective in the cops, someone who believes her and gets into trouble for it. She could still be fancying him in later books, perhaps even pursuing an on-off relationship. Since he’s a cop he could get into trouble. Oh, but hang on. We’re back with cops, aren’t we? Not florists at all. That ‘original’ idea just fell by the wayside.
Inventiveness is a very good thing, provided it’s sustainable and believable. There’s a point at which the struggle to be ingenious in differentiating your protagonist becomes untenable. Trying to define a character through labels – ‘I know … he could be a black/gay/psychic/war veteran/disabled wedding planner with vampire tendencies’ – rarely works. Most crime series are set around people working in law enforcement for a reason: it’s natural that they should meet the problems that will provide new stories.
The same goes for fantasy. If you’re a trainee wizard or a vampire hunter your day is never going to be boring. Ordinary citizens are fine for a standalone book in which they come face to face with the dark side of human nature. If it happens on a regular basis readers will very soon begin to think … these people aren’t normal at all.
The best way to differentiate series protagonists is through character and the world that encloses them. With Nic Costa I wanted to buck the trend for middle-aged, melancholic, divorced, alcoholic, shabbily dressed detectives who are somehow perennially attractive to women and trapped in a grim urban environment. So Costa is young, full of integrity, bright and determined, terrible with women and working in Rome. His character manages to work on those around him who are cynical. It’s a twist on the old way of doing things. Evolution not revolution.
Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem in 1893. Two years before he’d written to his mother, ‘I think of slaying Holmes … and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.’
His mother responded, ‘You may do what you deem fit, but the crowds will not take this light-heartedly.’
Within a decade Conan Doyle disinterred Holmes due to popular demand. He had a clever old mum.
Authors who write series books frequently fall out with their protagonists after a while. For the first couple of books you love them. By book three they’re old, familiar friends. Come book six they’re the muchloathed house guests who never want to leave and sour everything with their presence, including the books in which they appear.
How do you avoid Conan Doyle syndrome?
Like most authors I came into a series by accident. I wrote the first Nic Costa book as a standalone. It was turned into a series because my publishers saw an opportunity. I was, however, very aware of series drift and ennui. I never set out thinking, ‘I’ll write six of these books then try something else.’ Some people can manage that. I’m not sufficiently organised. The only way I could approach a series was in the belief it would somehow run for ever, with other standalones threaded in between. I wanted the books to have sufficient variety and texture built into their fabric to allow me to improvise and switch perspectives from title to title. The principal way I sought to achieve this was through the introduction of a team, a family of characters surrounding Nic Costa, who was very much the protagonist in the first story. So in the second book, The Villa of Mysteries, I amplify two minor characters from the first book and introduce a new key player.
From that point on we have Costa, his boss Falcone, the pathologist Teresa Lupo and his sidekick Gianni Peroni. Four people who love and respect one another and give me a lot more opportunity to stretch with each story. Series books that run out of steam are often based around a single dominant character and follow the same kind of format from title to title. A case floats into the in-tray, gets investigated, then placed in the out-tray at the end. The protagonist occupies the same desk, the same office throughout. Tedium lurks around the corner.
What I try to do with a team book is shift the camera constantly. We see Costa progressing in his career as his older colleagues start to flounder in theirs. We observe changing relationships happening beneath the single story that’s the focus of each book. The ensemble approach to a series – even if it encompasses nothing more than a simple partnership such as Holmes and Watson – allows the author freedom over the stories to come.
In a way the Costa stories aren’t a series at all. I write standalone stories that just happen to involve the same set of characters. You don’t need to worry about any of this too much with book one. Just remember to build in some interesting minor players from the start. Later on they could save you a trip to the Reichenbach Falls.
When it comes to fiction, and series fiction in particular, time stinks. It’s a blight on us all, a nasty chunk of so-called reality that tries to poke its ugly head in where it’s not wanted. Let’s leave aside those books that use time the way statisticians use chart paper, as pegs on which to hang an argument. You know the kind. The ones with the X-Files-style chapter headings – ‘Peter’s pantry, 11.09 a.m., Thursday 13 August, Stoke Newington, London, England, The World.’ Nothing wrong with that. I wrote one myself once.
There are often practical reasons for marking down a timeline as your story progresses. That doesn’t mean you have to use those time slugs in the finished version. Readers don’t obsess about the passage of time. Try to remember the last book you really liked. Then ask yourself: over what time period did it take place?
My guess is you don’t really know. A few days. A week. Years. Mostly time doesn’t matter. Yes, readers want to know what comes next. But that’s because they’re keen to know where the characters are going. They’re not stopping you in the street and asking you to check your watch.
Yet writers still agonise over time. They nag people who make writing software to include some kind of timeline feature so they can map out the chronology of their story to the last second. They – you may wish to look away here – plan their tales in sad columns in Excel spreadsheets as if they were lines on a P&L statement (and may the Lord have mercy on their souls). They worry that, in the real world, it may take a DNA sample two to three months to come back from the lab, when in the pages of their story it happens in a couple of days, not that the reader is any the wiser either way. Use time in a book in any real sense and it will, more than likely, complicate matters unnecessarily and run the risk of making the whole thing as dull and full of languid pauses as ‘real life’ itself.
If you’re thinking of going down this path, let me plead with you now: don’t. It’s ridiculous. Books stay around for years. If your series works you’ll find that, after a while, absolutely no one reads them in order anyway, so your artificial timing habits will either go unnoticed or baffle them. At the same time you’re inevitably building in continuity gotchas that will come back to bite you. Imagine you’re at book ten and want to do something but can’t because of some concrete timing event you placed in book three. Why burden yourself with this? Isn’t writing hard enough already?
Time is important only in so far as it makes, or keeps, your story credible. All fiction is a whopping great lie. The secret is to lie so well that your fabrication takes on the mantle of truth. Objective reality is dangerous bunkum that belongs to newspapers and TV stations (not that you’d know it some of the time). Subjective reality is, to the novelist, everything. If it seems genuine enough to touch inside the page, then it’s real inside the reader’s head, and that’s the only place that counts.
In practice this means that all you need ask of time is that it sounds feasible. You can’t fly from New York to Beijing in a couple of hours. You mustn’t put someone in hospital with multiple fractures one day and have them walking round biffing people on the nose the next. The moments in your story must add up in the sense that they shouldn’t contradict one another, or make some other event impossible or improbable. But that really is it.
Let me give you one concrete example in which time trips up writers. I write a Costa book a year. Like many series authors, I started off thinking this meant the year between books meant a year between the lives of the characters in them.
This is insane.
After three books Nic, who was twenty-four or so in the first book, was twenty-seven. His colleagues, who were much older, were suddenly entering their fifties. I love writing these books. I could write them for ever, alongside other things, of course. But I can’t age my people one year every year. Otherwise very soon Peroni and Falcone would be up for retirement and Costa would be looking to settle down, breed children and wonder about which brand of safety seat to buy for the back of the car.
Treating time literally will kill any series. I deeply regret all indications I’ve given in the earlier books that will allow readers of a sufficiently anal bent to add up the warped and highly inaccurate chronology of the series. You won’t get those clues again. They’re needless and confusing.
Here’s the real rub. I do need time in one very specific way. These stories are very much about Nic Costa and his entry into adulthood. The growing up of a decent yet naive young man as he finds the world’s a rough place where you have to cut corners from time to time. I need him to age just a little. That shows him experiencing changes in his life and adapting to them. But at the same time I need my older characters to stay where they are before they get pensioned off.
You see the dilemma? You see the solution?
No? Well, here it is. Lie and lie big. Throw the whole space–time continuum out of the window. Nic gets older. Falcone and Peroni don’t. The later books mention Nic’s age but blur theirs. If you were picky you could go through the books and work out how this process is going on numerically. No, I’m not going to do this for you. All I will say is that at his present rate of ageing Nic, if I spelled things out, would overtake mid-thirties Teresa Lupo in age about six years or so from now, and do the same to early-fifties Falcone and Peroni somewhere around 2019. Ridiculous? Maybe. But it’s fiction, and fiction fundamentally is ridiculous. The only thing more ridiculous is the literal. I am not going there.
And if you want proof here it is. This two-stage process of ageing has been going on for six or seven books, one a year. Until I point it out to people no one notices.
That’s how important time is in the great swing of things. Not at all.
Once in a while a reader emails me to say something like this.
‘I love your books. I’ve read every one of them. I just enjoyed the latest. But why oh why do you keep telling me what Costa/Peroni/Teresa look like? I know by now. You don’t have to keep repeating that information.’
Oh but I do. Once a series starts to become established you will pick up new readers who will never experience your stories in the sequence they were written. When you have two or three books out it’s easy for them to keep up if they want. Those titles should be on the shelves. People can sift through them, spot the first and start with that. That won’t last when you’re up to book four or five. Very few stores will keep an entire series in stock. So when people discover your work they will tend to buy what’s in front of them which, after a few years, will usually be well into the series. That’s why you have to describe your characters in each and every book. Many readers will be meeting them for the first time. You can’t just pitch your titles at people who know them already.
This leads on to a more difficult question: how do you get your backstory – the things that happened before – into later books? There’s no easy answer. My approach is to leak small amounts of information into the present book that give a hint of what’s happened before. But I don’t do any more than is necessary. I really want to avoid the kind of preface you see on some TV programmes that spend a few minutes at the start telling you what you missed earlier.
It’s very important to me that no one should have to read one title in order to understand another. There’s a continuing story beneath the surface, primarily that of the relationships between the principal characters involved. But each story is an individual tale. That’s very different from something like Harry Potter, say, which is a series of books set in direct chronological order, joined by linked events and themes, travelling towards a fixed conclusion.
Whatever kind of series you’re writing, make sure you keep character and location notes in your book journal as you go along. They’re going to be priceless as your world and its people develop and you refer back to them to inform a new generation of readers as they appear. Long-term fans are fabulous. We all love and appreciate them. But to be honest they’d get as fed up as everyone else if we wrote for them and them alone.