5 Tips for Writing a Series

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.