Stories Versus Series

How do you know if you have an idea for a book versus having an idea for a series?  And if you have an idea for a series, how do you determine where each story ends and the next one picks up?  Such is the dilemma of many writers.

Series where the author has a clear idea of each book and has planned it in advance are easy enough,  However, sometimes we writers get big ideas in our heads, and it’s only after we begin writing that we realize that our idea is too big for one book(unless we want it wo have the heft of Ulysses or War & Peace).  So the issue then becomes how we break it down into more logical pieces.

One of the first things we have to do is what we should’ve done in the first place – plan out the books in the series.  There are usually logical stopping points, and sometimes those have to be expanded or modified to accommodate a series.  Star Wars, for example(the original trilogy…not the abominations that followed – started out as a single story that George Lucas figured out was way too big to do in a single telling, so he changed parts of deliver the series.  As we figure out we’re writing a series, it behooves us to similarly step back and determine how that moves ahead.

Of course, that’s hard because what we really want to be doing is writing.  Delivering a series after starting on a single book requires that we stop writing for a little bit and retool our outline to accommodate a single book, which means we have to break the mindset we were in for our story and reorient, which creates an abrupt shift we have to deal with.  It can be done, but it takes a moment or three.

I view it as breaking up a larger idea into smaller ones that can stand alone while contributing to a greater whole.  Once you’re about 25,000 or so words into a book, you’ll know if you can wrap it up in a single novel, or if you require a series.  Listen to that voice, because it’s easier to do when you’ve written 25,000 words than to reconfigure it after 180,000.