how to write a really, really long series

I’ve recently passed my 94th published book, and SEVENFOLD SWORD: GUARDIAN will be my 95th.  I’ve come to realize something. There’s a lot of advice for new and new-ish writers, but much less advice for experienced ones. Which makes sense. There are more people who want to be writers, or who have just started writing, than who have been writing for a while.

So today, I thought I would share my thoughts on a problem that only veteran writers face – how to write a really, really long series without it going stale. I’ve had some experience in this area – I’ve written twenty-five books with Ridmark as the main character, twenty-two with Caina, twelve with Nadia Moran, ten with Mazael Cravenlock, and nine with Jack March.

I gotta say, it’s worthwhile. It’s fun to develop characters and a world over a long period of time, though you do need to work on new things from time to time to refresh your brain. Commercially, it works well. People seem to prefer really long series. I haven’t written anything new in DEMONSOULED since 2016, but I still sell at least one DEMONSOULED book around the world every day, and usually quite a few more than one. And it’s not just me saying that – JD Robb just published her 48th (!) book in the IN DEATH series of futuristic police procedurals. There are 26 Jack Reacher books, and a lot of people really, really like Jack Reacher.

So, here’s how I write a really long series.

First, whenever possible, make sure each book in the series has a self-contained plot. People mostly hate cliffhangers. There’s a time and a place for cliffhangers, but they’re like garlic – best used sparingly. Usually, it’s best to use cliffhangers near the end of a big series, when people can tell there’s a big, big climatic book coming up. In other words, cliffhangers are like writing a check against your readers’ goodwill – you had better have the funds on hand to pay it later on!

Second, when working with the main characters over a long series, it’s important not to betray the character’s main premises. By “main premises”, I mean the foundational aspects of the character. Like, how Nadia is paranoid, a little ruthless, and obsessed with saving her brother, but has moral lines she won’t cross, or how Caina hates slavers and strongly dislikes sorcerers. One of the biggest ways to tick off readers is to make a drastic change in the foundational aspect of a character as a means of generating a plot. To use another example, it would be like retconning Captain America so he was a HYDRA agent all along. That’s just lazy storytelling. It would be like if Nadia decides to murder her brother for personal advancement, or if Caina decides the Magisterium was right all along and joins them to help re-institute slavery in the Empire. That would annoy long-time readers of the series, since that would be a betrayal of the characters.

Third, while you shouldn’t betray the main premises of the characters, they should evolve and change. The trick to keeping a character over a long series is to have them evolve, albeit slowly. Ridmark in SEVENFOLD SWORD is much more emotionally balanced than he is in FROSTBORN. That is a change to the character, but it happened over the course of several books and the readers could see that it didn’t happen easily. Caina changes over the course of twenty-two books as well, as does Nadia. Caina goes from being anonymous and absolutely hating sorcerers to becoming famous and strongly disliking sorcerers with a few exceptions. Nadia probably changes the most over the course of her series – she goes from caring only about her brother to worrying about the weight of the responsibility her power gives her. When starting a long series, it’s good to build in some emotional conflicts and personal failings to give the characters something to overcome later.

Fourth, while letting each book have its own individual plot and villain, it’s good to plan long story arcs over the multiple books. That lets you work out things over the long-term, and hopefully prevents problems down the road.

Fifth, one of the big problems in long SF/F series is the characters becoming overpowered. Like, the protagonist becomes so powerful he can defeat all challenges with a wave of his magic staff. For example, Nadia is much more powerful in the twelfth book of her series than she is in the first.

The key to overcoming this problem is to remember that power comes in different forms, and all power has limitations. Think of a physically dominant athlete who gets accused of a crime – his athletic abilities will be useless when dealing with police and lawyers.

Not every form of power is equally applicable in every situation. There’s social power, physical power, financial power, political power, and in fantasy novels, magical power, and one kind of power might be totally useless in a particular kind of conflict. Like, your hero might be able to kill a man with his little finger, but that’s not going to do him much good in a battle with a wizard…or, more prosaically, if he gets sued and doesn’t want to become an outlaw. (Or if he’s libeled in the press or framed for a crime he didn’t commit.) De-powering characters always seems like a cheap trick, so you can instead put your characters into situations where their power won’t help much. Like, a rich man who gets shipwrecked, or a charming woman who has to physically fight for her life, or a warrior who has to fight a battle of the wits.

As for the limitations of power, I hate to use this example, but political power is probably the best illustration of that principle. (Please don’t cite any specific examples in the comments.) People are always disappointed in politicians, because politicians can’t live up to their promises. But the reason politicians can’t live up to their promises is because their power has severe limits, and every politician has well-organized enemies working to thwart him. In the US, an individual Congressman can’t get much done without the help of many other Congresspeople. The President is powerful, but he’s limited in what he can do without Congress on his side. Congress is theoretically the most powerful part of the government, but only if a majority of Congress agrees to act, which almost never happens. In Westminster-style parliaments, the Prime Minister’s grip on power is even more precarious. If enough MPs vote No Confidence, that’s that. And all the Cabinet secretaries think they would make a better Prime Minister, so they’re just waiting for a chance to stab the Prime Minister in the back and take over.

Even in countries unfortunate enough to have absolute dictatorships, the dictator’s power has limits. If the dictator doesn’t keep the generals or the clerics or the Secret Police or the Politburo or whatever happy, the dictator will “unexpectedly” commit suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head six or seven times. Then someone else gets to be dictator!

So if your main character becomes powerful, always remember that power in all its forms has limitations, and you can write the challenges and conflicts your character faces around the limitations of power.

Sixth, don’t be afraid to improvise. Sometimes halfway through a series you’ll have a good idea, and if you can work it into the series outline, do so! In FROSTBORN, Mara and the Anathgrimm really weren’t in the original outline, but they strengthened the series. For that matter, in SEVENFOLD SWORD, I improvised the character of Selene because I wanted another villain with personality in SEVENFOLD SWORD: SHADOW, and many people have written to say that Selene is their favorite new character in SEVENFOLD SWORD.

Seventh, don’t repeat challenges for the characters. By that I mean you don’t want to have the characters facing the same internal problems and the same kind of external foes over and over again. In fiction, a character to fails to learn from his or her trials quickly becomes exasperating. It’s all right for a villain, but it becomes annoying in a protagonist. For that matter, the characters need to face new kinds of antagonists. If the bad guy is a power-mad evil baron in the first book, it would be annoying to have the villain be a power-mad evil baron in the second book.

Finally, it’s good to take a break every so often. I don’t usually write books in the same series back to back, which allows my brain to refresh a bit. After I write a SEVENFOLD SWORD book, I switch to GHOSTS or CLOAK GAMES or another series for the next book. The last couple of months I wrote two SEVENFOLD SWORD and two MALISON books back to back because I got so far behind in 2018, so I’m looking forward to starting on CLOAK OF DRAGONS, since writing a Nadia book is a very different experience than writing a SEVENFOLD SWORD one.

-JM