Yzabel / August 30, 2005

Some time ago, I’ve realized that when it comes to novels, one of my projects simply can’t be done in one book only. There is too much to be told, and trying to cram everything into 400 pages (or 500, or 600…) would be very detrimental to the story itself. This said, there is one thing I can’t determine: in the case of a trilogy, or of any other kind of series in more than two volumes, what is the consensus, if there can ever be any, on how each book should stand? What do readers as a whole tend to prefer? (I’m talking of fantasy and science-fiction mostly, as they’re the genres I like to write in, but opinions about every other kind of story are welcome.)There’s the stand-alone book, for starters. I’m not sure that lots of readers like to be left with the feeling of “having to buy” the next volume, and building frustration over this isn’t a pleasant thing. Evidently, here the marketer in each of us may chime in and say “but we need to keep the readers hooked, else they won’t buy the next volumes!”. To which I think I can answer by “then let’s write so well that they’ll want to read the rest of the series just for our style and brilliant ideas”. A noble goal, though really easier said than done. As a reader, I normally don’t have a problem with such stories, although I think they’re more adapted to a series longer than just two or three books. It works well, for instance, with Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover world, but I wonder if it may not be a little weird for series with a “bigger picture” in tow.The second solution would be that of the progressive installment of the story. Every volume aims at introducing more and more elements pertaining to the major plot, until enough pieces of the puzzle are gathered and the series can be brought to a conclusion. Here, the reader in me has mixed feelings. While I like stories with a well-crafted, long and somewhat twisted plot, I’m not really at ease with a book that only delivers clues without any sense of completion. It’s not exactly easy to make such volumes interesting and useful to the big plot without looking like fillers, “randomly” thrown-in elements. (Sidenote: such books do exist, indeed.)Close to this second category, but a little different: the cliffhanger volumes. They may be standalone ones, but I’m not sure this word is appropriate here—if it ends on a cliffhanger, if it doesn’t answer to all the questions it opens, I don’t consider a book as “completed”. Personnally, I tend to appreciate such books, because I like being kept on the edge of my seat. When I write, I’m also much into cliffhanger-ending chapters, likely because of this taste of mine for starters. However, to come back briefly to my first point of this entry, readers can be left with a sense of coercion at the end of such books, rather than of eagerness to know what will follow. I’m not sure this is the kind of feeling I’d want to leave my readers with.My own take on this would be to try to reach a middle-ground: craft a standalone story, with a specific plot that will introduce the world and the main characters all the same, while leaving the readers with a few hooks regarding the next volume and the biggest picture, without these hooks to be too “coercive”. I’m not completely sure if this in itself is “the” solution, as I can also tell from the start some of the problems it can raise. For instance, with the need to unveil the real plot behind all of this, the last volume may end up being a filler, a rush toward the conclusion, rather than a story by itself. While it’s not a problem in a way since it’s “the last volume”, I fear that it may still seem a little odd compared to previous volumes.Moreover, in the case of trilogies and other similar kinds of series, is it really essential for the reader to be able to catch the train on the second or even third volume? Is it so detrimental if they can’t?So this is my question… Whether as readers or as writers, what would be your opinion on this matter? What kind of series do you prefer, those with standalone volumes? Those with cliffhanger endings? Those that unveil the big plot volume after volume without necessarily defined episodes in between?There are of course as many advices as they are readers in the world, yet I’m still interested in knowing at least a few of them!Y Tags: writing>