Killer Serials
As y'all know, there's nothing I like more than a good process discussion. So for the past few days I've been reading with great interest the posts at the Fangs, Fur, & Fey livejournal community, where a bunch of authors have been posting their responses to the question of the month, "How did you plan the last novel you wrote (and successfully finished)? Outline? Synopsis? Summary? Divination Rod? Nuthin' at all?" (Here's links to a few, and you can seek them all out using the link above: Laura Anne Gilman's, Maggie Stiefvater's, Janni Simner's, and Megan Crewe's.)
This all falls under the category of when you're thinking about something, suddenly you see it everywhere. One thing I'm trying to do as I approach my next book (or what I'm fairly certain is my next book) is give it a little more cooking on the front end. My process seems to be shifting over time to allow more planning, with the caveat that the story still sometimes manages to jump tracks and end up somewhere completely different. I have no expectation that I'll ever completely eliminate that track-jumping, at least not in the smaller sense, and I don't really want to. What I do want to try to do is get more of a feel for the story, the world, and the characters before I start actually constructing them on the page.
So I've been thinking about that–stopping myself from actually starting the book, as is my usual modus operandi–and slowing down and letting the pieces come together a bit more first. I'm sure this won't actually turn out to be that slow a process, since I also believe that too much planning can be useless or, worse, detrimental. Witness all the research I did on Aztecs and the Romani in the earliest of early drafts of what was to eventually become a book that uses only Greek mythology (the book I just finished). Now, that stuff will come in handy–in fact, I expect some of it will come in handy on the project I'm doing all the thinking about. But I certainly didn't end up needing it for the last book, so I'll be doing my researching as I go this time. Because despite all this front-end work, I still thoroughly expect that I won't know exactly what I might need to research until I get into the placing of one word after another.
Which brings me to the second thing I've been thinking about–what are the elements that seem to be common to successful series? By series here I mean both open-ended series with lots of books and the more traditional trilogy; for my purposes, the key elements would likely be the same. I'm thinking the next thing I write might be such a trilogy, and that also necessitates more planning up front, at least in theory. Here's what I've come up with so far, and then you smartypants can (hopefully) add or comment on things I missed.
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