I’ve been thinking about the dreaded S word. When I teach writing I treat Series like a curse word. I act as though the idea of having the second, third, and so on book in your head is a crime. It isn’t entirely. It is, however, putting the cart before the horse in the most basic sense of the term. When you are thinking about series you are thinking about a super-structure of books and not giving thought or attention to the primary structure of a series, which is how the initial book is formed and the expectation you set for both the reader and yourself with that initial successful story. Consider Harry Potter, The Maze Runner, and The Hunger Games–all series for a certain age and all series that build upon a structural expectation. What the reader keeps coming back to beyond the characters is the structure of the plot. Harry is advancing in school, but he still has that year to year structure with something new added every year and added risks and or something taken away due to the increasing age and increasing danger of the situation. The Maze Runner is even simpler. It is about running the maze–until it isn’t. The Hunger Games repeat the games until it becomes about the larger political game of changing the world. It is curse of genre in the way that isekai anime are all going to have a similar structure with a twist.
Books designed for more mature readers often repeat structures as well. You know what to expect from a Jack Ryan novel or any western or romance, because they hold to that familiar structure. All of that being said, the best writers are the ones who are able to turn this similarity of structure into a natural thing. Harry Potter works because the structural expectation is built into the story. Twilight fails because the structural similarity is entirely contrived.
I say this to ask you to consider the structure of your first story in you series, because how you start builds the expectation for what follows.
Some Thoughts:
- Kids are going to disappoint you. They will usually do it by doing exactly as you expect they will do, and you aren’t going to like it one bit. That is the problem with them being individuals. They act independently and generally in their best interest–even if it is to the detriment of your own.