Writing A Series

About two weeks ago, my book King Stud was published, and for about an hour I was just like this:

 

Yeah, I was just that excited. Sadly, though, the euphoria didn't last. I mean, book promotion can be fairly time consuming, but it is fun to get out and meet new readers. No, there was one thing that brought me down to earth faster even that writing an unimaginable number of blog posts. You wanna know my biggest buzz-kill?

The sequel.

King Stud is the first in a five book series about the O'Connor family. I know which O'Connor kid will star in each book, who they'll fall in love with, and the order of their stories. I even know the book titles!

King Stud  -  Loose Cannon  -  Same Love  -  Rock Solid  -  Queen Bee 

The problem is the writing. I can think of ways to make a series out of every book I've written, but I've never actually done it before. (So if you're looking for a post where some real experienced writer with seventeen series under her belt tells you exactly what to do....um, sorry. I'll make it up to you. Promise.)

We've all read series where characters or events morph from one book to the next. You know, that, "wait a minute" feeling you get when something bumps you out of the story and you have to dig through the previous book to figure out if there's really an inconsistency or if you're just crazy.

Probably you're not crazy.

Rather than talk about How I've Done It Before, I came up with the top three things I'm fretting over as I approach writing the next book, and how I plan to deal with them. 

1. The Details

When I finished King Stud, I knew that Ryan's eyes were blue and Dani's were hazel/green and Ryan drove a black Ford F250 and Dani drove a white Mini Cooper. Those are pretty important details, but there were others - minor characters' names, dates in the timeline - that got a little bit foggy in the time between finishing the project and getting it published. And now that I'm starting book two? Foggier still. No one can keep it all in their head, so here are some strategies for maintaining continuity between books.

• The series bible  I learned how to put together a series bible in a class by Lisa Wells through the Lawson Writing Academy. (Jump HERE to see the course description.) For my series bible, I'm using power point. I started with a list of all the main characters and another list of key locations. Each book has its own section, and each character has their own page(s). I've got notes about story lines that are particular to each book, and lines that cross over several books. I've got pictures of the characters, because I like to work from an image. My goal is to have as much information as possible in one place. 

The cover of my series bible for The Seattle O'Connors

• Detailed character sketches  I know this kills the creativity for some people, but I like the character outline I use. It's basically something I cut and pasted together from a couple different authors' outlines, and it helps me get to know the characters as I write them. I save these sketches to my thumb drive in each book's folder, and put summarized versions in the series bible. If I know Maeve is going to feature in a scene in book three, but I haven't written her in a while, I can take a glance at her sketch to make sure I get it right. I can amend the doc as I go along, if I discover new things about the character, but the hard details - height, weight, eye color, basic personality traits - are preserved.

• Consistent beta readers I know if lose track of something between the beginning of a book to the end, my beta readers call me on it, and I'm hopeful that a few of the people who read King Stud for me will be willing to take a look at the subsequent books. Hopefully. Right guys?

2. The Energy 

So how many times have you picked up the fifth book in a series and thought, "yeah, they shoulda quit at number four"? Because not every premise/character/theme can sustain an endless number of books. Once an author tosses a story out into the universe, it belongs to the readers, and their affection for the characters can motivate an author to keep writing. Authors love their characters, too, and that can keep them pushing past the freshness date.

So how am I going to sustain the energy for the five books I have in mind? There's a couple plot lines in King Stud that won't be entirely resolved until book five.  Each book will stand on its own, with storylines that reach a satisfying conclusion, and some lines will carry over two or even three books.I don't want to give the big ones away yet, but if I get it right, readers will keep coming back to see how it all works out.

And then, that's it. Finished. Done. I can see a couple possible novellas involving side characters, but there are only five O'Connor siblings, so when they each have a book, I'm on to the next project.

3. The Writing

And here's where the irrational terror sneaks in. I've done a fair amount of planning already. What if the characters insist on taking the story in a completely different direction? What if my ideas don't work? What if? What if? What if?

Yikes!

The only strategy I have to deal with this is simple. 

Write. 

Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard. Get the words on the page. Which I'm going to start doing. Any minute. As soon as I'm done hyperventilating. 

I expect to learn and grow as a writer, so my approach to book five, Queen Bee, will be different than when I wrote King Stud. It's all a process, but in the end, I expect to be as happy as Johnny Karate down there. Family is important to me, and so is acceptance and open-mindedness. I've got four more books to explore how those themes work in the world of The O'Connor Family.

I know there's stuff I haven't thought  of yet, so if you know what you're doing with series writing, feel free to leave me ideas in the comments. Cheers!
Liv

If I've whetted your curiosity, here's a peek at King Stud's cover...

Buy Links

Amazon - Evernight Publishing - ARe - Barnes and Noble 

Shh...it's A LOT cheaper from Evernight...don't tell...

From Drab To Fab

Recently I read Margie Lawson's lecture on Empowering Character Emotions. In it, she talks about strengthening your emotional pull with your characters through setting, dialogue, internal and external thoughts and actions. I came across a section where she discusses basic sentences and I realized, to my horror, that this was the reason my manuscripts are basically flat-lining.

Now, I'm not going to go through everything she said in her lectures because her lectures are long and she teaches them as a class and they cost $22 a lecture, but I do want to discuss what I discovered about my own manuscript. 

When I say basic sentences, this is what I mean:

My stomach churned.

Nothing special, right? It's a basic description, and one probably all of us have used more than once. It's one we've read a million times in other manuscripts and it's a sentence that does just fine on its own. But is there a way that we can transform it? Give it a little pizzazz?  Make it our own and fresh?

Sailor Pluto

How about this line from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire:

Just the sound of his voice twists my stomach into a knot of unpleasant emotions like guilt, sadness and fear. And longing. I might as well admit there’s some of that too. Katniss Everdeen, p. 14

There is so much more emotional charge than the basic My stomach churned.

Basic lines are great. They give us the base emotions we need when writing a rough draft, but do they really pull the reader in? Our goal, as authors, is to give the world something they've never read before in a way that pulls them in and keeps them there. To charge the read with so much human emotion that we're drawn in. We can see ourselves in the characters and never want to leave. 

We don't want to write a manuscript that's flat-lining.

Do a search for the phrase, or similar phrases such as she smirked, he raised an eyebrow in your manuscript. How many times do those same basic lines appear? For me, it's a lot and one of my biggest flaws. Right now I'm going through my entire manuscript to spice up those flat-liners.

Consider sitting in a restaurant and watching the people around you. 

This weekend I attended a wedding for a friend of my husband. The reception was held at the local Moose Lodge complete with dingy carpeting, pool tables, pictures of past Moose Lodge members and an open bar. For those of you who know me, you know that I don't drink and I didn't know anyone at the wedding. I did what anyone would do in that sort of situation. 

I people watched.

Rocky and Bullwinkle

People are interesting creatures. We fidget. A lot. A much older gentleman walked in with his beard dyed pink. The entire dinner he twisted a wooden cane in his hand. He turned it faster the more alcohol he drank. A woman, after a man that hadn't been sitting with her, crossed and uncrossed her legs a dozen times while he sat and chatted with her. Another woman smoothed the back hem of her skirt repeatedly, probably because the hem was half an inch from revealing all the goods. All of them staggered and whooped and hollered when they hit the dance floor without a care in the world.

Angry Beavers

People have quirks. 

Characters do too.

When I'm nervous, I bite on the edge of my acrylic nails, so why don't any of my characters do this? Surely one of them bites their nails, chews their hair or feels the need to pee, right? So why do we forget to mention these things? I can imagine myself in the Hunger Games with Katniss and repeatedly thinking, please don't let me pee my pants. Please don't let me pee my pants!

Giving your characters these flaws makes them human, gives them personality traits outside of dialogue. If you're struggling to give your characters separate identities, give them flaws when they're interacting.

Here are more examples of basic lines being made over into something amazing:

They held hands.

I never used to understand why people bothered to hold hands as they walked, but then he runs one of his fingertips down my palm, and I shiver and understand it completely-Tris, Divergent.

Veronica Roth didn't come out and say Tris and Four held hands. She hints at it. She gives you the imagery, and that basic emotion is stronger for it.

He was frustrated.

Up and down he paced, consumed with anger and frustration, grinding his teeth and clenching his fists, casting angry looks out at the empty, star-strewn sky every time he passed the window. Dementors sent to get him, Mrs. Figg and Mundungus Fletcher tailing him in secret, then suspension from Hogwarts and a hearing at the Ministry of Magic – and still no one was telling him what was going on. -Harry Potter, The Order of the Phoenix.

J.K. Rowling didn't just say Harry paced in anger. She gave us visuals that show us just how upset and isolated he was. 

A great resource for character emotions is The Emotional Thesaurus. It lists various emotions and the physical and mental attributes that will help take the basic into the amazing. Don't let your disappointment be simply lips pressed in a tight line. Allow it to give a bitter smile, break eye contact, and fill your body with lead. Take these drab sentences and make them emotionally charged while turning them into something fabulous. Don't just gasp. Gasp with one hand over your mouth and bulging eyes. Don't just shake hands. Shake hands firmly enough to make his man boobs quiver. Find a way to strengthen those basic sentences and turn them into a mesmerizing read.

Rocko's Modern Life

Get out there and turn the drab into something fab!

Literary vs Genre: The Smackdown

Posted by: Fern  On channel: WhatGifs.com  At: Sun, 12 Aug 2012 23:20:27 +0000  Originally posted by at Reading Is Educational

The other day an author I'm friends with on Facebook went on a multi-status rant about Gone Girl, the novel by Gillian Flynn. Let me say right up front that I have not read this book, because early on a couple people told me the ending pissed them off, and there are too many books in the world for me to read one that plays games. I followed my author friend's statuses, and she went from OMG this is a wonderful book. The prose is so gorgeous (my paraphrase) to I'm half way through and the character WHAT?! No WAY.

My author friend then upped the rant factor, saying people who read literary fiction must hate themselves if they enjoy being treated like crap by books like Gone Girl .

Or something.

She went on to say she'd stick with genre fiction, where people behave like people. And my comment on her thread was a big ol' AMEN.

Here's the thing. While I'm squarely in the genre fiction camp, like most people who read - and write - genre, especially romance, I'm an eensy bit apologetic about it. I mean, if anyone took a serious look at the titles on my kindle, I'd blush.

Just a little.
Okay, more than a little.

Why is that? Why does genre get treated like the shabby stepsister? For this - my first Relentless Writers post - I thought I'd take a look at three of the most obvious differences between genre and literary fiction, to see if I can stir up some debate. It's not hard to find good discussions of the differences - Jami Gold did a fine one a few months ago - but because the ideas have been bugging me this week, I thought I'd write about it. The three things I'm going to play with are prose, plot, and philosophy.

Prose

It's common knowledge that literary fiction is the place to go for beautiful language. I jumped over to the Oprah's Book Club website to grab this quote from Gone Girl, because I think it's cool...

"I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I'm obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I've basically turned into Liza Minella: I'm dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me."

I love the rhythm created by the repeats of charming, and I love the humor injected by the mention of Liza Minelli, tights, and sequins. It's such a great visual. I don't know where this comes in the context of the story, but I can see it's a fantastic illustration of character. Margie Lawson would LOVE this language.

I find the use of fancy language can be off-putting, however. My last serious attempt at reading literary fiction might have been the book C by Tom McCarthy. Publisher's Weekly gave it a starred review, and it got some press when it first came out in 2010. The premise, "WWI..radio operator...prison camp...mission to Cairo...Egyptian tomb", sounded interesting, so I gave it a try.

If I had read this review from the New York Times, I might not have. McCarthy, author of the ingenious 2006 novel “Remainder,” withstands the temptations of emotional plotting and holds out instead for something bigger, deeper, more universal and elemental. “C” is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in “Remainder”; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel.

All that intellectual provocation was just too much for me. The author's language was denser than the review, and I couldn't find anything to connect with on an emotional level, so  I gave up.

The thing is, I find lyrical writing in genre fiction, too. Authors like Alexis Hall, Tiffany Reisz, and Devon Monk write gorgeous stuff. They take me out of my own little head and make me think about the world around me. And they do it in the context of a plot I can comprehend.

Plot

It's easy to summarize the differences between genre and literary when it comes to plot. In literary, plot takes second place to process, but in genre, plot IS the story. As Jami Gold says regarding literary fiction,
The point of the story is for the character(s) to understand themselves better. This is achieved through episodic events that force understanding. However, characters aren't forced to internally change or to change their situations.

In genre fiction, the whole point of the exercise it for the characters to face external challenges that require them to grow and change to overcome them. They need to find the skills in themselves to solve the murder or slay the dragon or bring that badass biker dude to heel. Genre fiction generally follows a relatively predictable three-act structure, while in literary, they can meander along from episode to episode until the story is over. There's no expectation that the character has anything to overcome, because really, there's nothing to overcome, because that's how life is.

Philosophy

And that, Virginia, is my real bitch with literary fiction. I cannot deal with a story that tries to sell me on life sucks and then you die. If I want real world, pointless heartache, I'll go to work or watch the evening news. Maybe I'm a sucker at heart, but I firmly believe that people can overcome the challenges they face, and that they can change and grow.

That's me. The little engine that could.
I think I can. I think I can. I think...

My real life cup may not be half full, but my characters' damn well better be. Things aren't absolute, however. I've found pessimistic genre fiction, books I had to stack on the DNF file. Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt vampire novels are dark and violent, and I loved the first couple books in the series, but the later books got so grim I finally I had to give up. Maybe Joe eventually redeems himself, but I didn't hang around long enough to see it.

I've also read books that are considered literary fiction that were filled with joyful optimism. Mink River by Brian Doyle is a wonderful book, fun and beautiful and full of real life. The plot meanders a bit, but the language more than makes up for it. Finding just one quote from the novel to share with you here was tough, but this one's a favorite...

Rained gently last night, just enough to wash the town clean, and then today a clean crisp fat spring day, the air redolent, the kind of green minty succulent air you'd bottle if you could and snort greedily on bleak, wet January evenings when the streetlights hzzzt on at four in the afternoon and all existence seems hopeless and sad.

While there is some crossover, I think the difference is readers don't assume literary fiction will be optimistic, while a positive world view is built into most genre fic. You can find examples that cross over the philosophical divide, just like you can find beautiful language in novel from both camps. It seems to me the only differences have to do with expectations for prose, plot, and philosophy, so why do I feel second class for preferring my prose clean, my plot strong, and my philosophy optimistic?

Maybe I don't hate myself enough to read literary.
*winky face*

Thanks for reading along,
Liv

So what about you? Do you prefer genre or literary, or are you a swinger?
Also...I'll throw in a $5 gift card (Amazon, B&N, ARe, whichever) to one lucky winner if you follow this blog by 1/16/15 and leave me a comment to tell me you did.
;)