Planning a Series: Notes from a Fantasycon Panel

Andrew Knighton was furiously scribbling notes during Fantasycon sessions; here, he shares insights from the Planning a Series panel.

Series are big business in the world of scifi and fantasy, so the FantasyCon panel on planning a series was very well attended. The seats were packed, people were piled in at the back, there were probably folks out in the corridor listening for snippets of wisdom.

On the panel were Rob J. Hayes, Shona Kinsella, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Jen Williams, with Allen Stroud moderating. Any insight in this post is their work, and any misquoting is on me, as is all the stuff I missed out – I wasn’t quick enough to scribble everything down. 

With all of that out of the way, what did they have to say?

(Pictured: just some of the series the panellists are responsible for)

Going Long

The panellists started by discussing how to judge the length of a series.

For Adrian, the idea informs this – he gives his stories however much space they need to work through a concept. This means juggling the arc of an individual book with longer term considerations, as each volume needs its own payoff.

Rob expanded on this point, talking about the need to pace reveals across a series, providing something fresh in each book to keep readers interested. On a similar note, Jen talked about teasing the names of locations in early books, so that readers can anticipate their appearance later.

As a pantser rather than a plotter, Shona found that writing a series forced her out of her usual ways of writing. She had to work out the end goal of her series, foreshadow it, and set things up in earlier books, all while leaving herself enough space to make things up as she went along.

For those wondering about how to organise that structure, Jen emphasised the importance of pacing, dropping in bits of the big plot at regular intervals to keep the story moving along.

Escalation

The conversation moved on from there to how to maintain and even escalate the tension over a series.

Adrian described one approach as “stackable villains” – a hierarchy that creates an accelerating series of clashes while saving the big villain for the end. He and Allen discussed the need not to make things too harsh too fast, but to give yourself space to scale up the threat without it getting out of hand. If the later threats become too huge then the earlier ones risk looking irrelevant, because they were so much smaller.

There was some discussion of the different ways that you can scale up the threat – a larger territory, bigger stakes, a more powerful opponent. Rob suggested using this to add variety without necessarily scaling the stakes up, a way of avoiding the risks of escalation while keeping things interesting.

(Photo by JJ Shev on Unsplash)

But as Shona pointed out, there’s a very different way of approaching all this. A story’s tension comes from the gap between the protagonist and their goals. Instead of increasing the goals, you can weaken the protagonist, physically or mentally, to make things more difficult.

Rounding this part of the conversation out, Rob emphasised the need to make your approach match the subgenre you’re working in. For example, progression fantasy requires constant power-ups for heroes and villains – for that readership, escalation is half the point.

Book Two

Next up, Allen raised the challenge of keeping readers interested in the middle of a series, when you’re not introducing a new story or resolving it. How do you keep readers engaged in book two?

On this one, the panellists all had different approaches, with some overlap. For Jen, it was about raising character driven questions that need answers. For Rob, it was forging an emotional connection. Adrian relied on making sure readers enjoy time with the characters, while signposting where the plot is going. Shona suggested ending books at a satisfying place of rest, while leaving a hint of what’s to come. And Allen talked about providing elements that are familiar but provoking.

Getting further into specifics, Adrian talked about how book two needs some crisis of its own, something that can be resolved to leave readers satisfied. But this has to be important for the ending, as Jen pointed out – that way it feels relevant.

Then Shona brought the conversation back around to character. In book two of her series, she focused a lot on how the protagonist could became the person who could win. That way, something was achieved that fed into the bigger plot.

Cliffhangers and Payoffs

You can’t really talk about series without talking about cliffhangers, what works well and what doesn’t. For Adrian, cliffhangers that save one book’s resolution for another book just lead to frustration – the best cliffhangers come after that book’s plot has been resolved, adding a new wrinkle. Even when writing standalone stories, he tries to leave something that he could move on to next, if the book proves popular enough to justify a sequel.

But how do you give a book enough payoff of its own without undermining the payoff for the series?

(Photo by Leio McLaren on Unsplash)

Coming back to an earlier theme, Jen suggested giving the story a specific purpose whose resolution contributes to the resolution of the series. Adrian suggested a range of tools – stackable villains, discovering new information, and incremental gains. And Allen talked about presenting different characters’ stories within a single setting.

One last question rounded out the panel – how do you navigate using different subgenres within a single series? Shona pointed out that this can be challenging, as readers expect more of the same, so you need to signal from the start that things are going to change around.

Attachment to characters, satisfying payoffs, the right sort of variety, and earning readers’ trust – the panel on series ended up covering a lot of big themes and left plenty of hooks for a sequel. Maybe we’ll be back to this topic next convention?