Writing a series – pros and cons…
With the Middle East crises and the three stooges, Michele, Sarah, and Christine, the last few blog posts have been a little on the heavy side, so today let me sail into smooth seas and soft breezes to discuss a trivial thing that sometimes irks the hell out of me: series in fiction. It’s a criticism of my own writing profession—a self-criticism, in a way. We all have our favorite characters and we tend to look for sequels where they appear again and again. However, what I’m complaining about is when writers’ do it just for the almighty dollar.
Fictional characters become famous largely due to series, of course. Sherlock Holmes would not be as famous if Conan Doyle had only written one Holmes mystery. Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot would not be as famous if Christie had only written one of their mysteries. John Carter, nearly forgotten by now, I suppose, would not be as famous if Rice Burroughs had written only one Martian story—and probably Star Wars would never have been made for lack of all those names lifted from them. We readers love our series because we love the characters in them.
There is no doubt that this is good business. Familiarity breeds comfort—and when one is comfortable with a product, he or she continues to buy it. This is why advertisers use famous people in their ads. It’s also one reason writers write series. The blurb on the back of the new book usually starts out as “X is back in this new adventure…,” referring to the previous book, of course. Thus, in today’s thriller fiction, we have Alex Delaware, Harry Bosch, Oliver Stone (I’m talking Baldacci here), Alex Cross, Lincoln Rhyme, Jack Reacher, and others that bring readers back by the thousands. Give readers what they want and they will come.
Of course, this business model assumes two things: (1) readers like the old protagonist; and (2) the old protagonist has not become stale. A writer that revisits the same character over and over again can be seen as lazy—in fact, and partly due to the money angle, it’s easy to fall in the trap of liking your own characters too much. When I’m in my zone, it seems almost that characters write about themselves. The more familiar I am with my character, the easier it is to get into that zone with respect to the character. But writers run the danger of liking their own character far longer than the reading public.
In fact, a good writer, even if he is using the same protagonist, will not let that character become stale. Ab initio the character has to seem real, of course, and like any real person, that character must develop from page to page and book to book. It the writer doesn’t do this, staleness is bound to occur. To avoid this problem completely, of course, the writer can just avoid the repetition of characters. Ken Follett, perhaps due to his jumping from genre to genre, seems to do remarkably well at this, for example. Robert Heinlein did it well in the sci-fi genre—his only series character was Podkayne, if I remember correctly.
A series doesn’t have to be defined by a single character. Greg Benford in his Galactic Center series, a series about the coming singularity before the term was even invented, defined a sci-fi future history series (a common occurrence in sci-fi). My three sci-fi thrillers (the fourth is hog-tied in the editorial corral) is also future history, in a sense. The only common character is Vladimir Kalinin, a villain (however, he and other characters from Full Medical are in my serialized novel Evil Agenda—see this blog). Perhaps the most famous sci-fi series of all, Asimov’s Robot and Empire series, which starts out as two separate series, one beginning with the Caves of Steel and the other with Foundation, is also future history (The End of Eternity has to be included in this series also).
It is better to let a series grow non-linearly, something like a tree or a bush. I wrote Full Medical and liked some of the details that pointed towards the future, so I expanded on these themes and wrote Soldiers of God, a much more complex and disturbing work where Vladimir Kalinin becomes a true villain. Then I realized I wanted to expand on his early life so I wrote The Midas Bomb. Out of this latter novel came Castilblanco and Chen, two NYPD detectives, who are now appearing in short stories. They’re still growing on me.
This organic process of creating a series with a milieu (my dystopian view of our future, for example) and characters that are loved or hated is preferable over setting out to create a series from the get-go. This is so because it comes from the unconscious flow involved in the creative process and not a specific goal like “I’m going to create a series like the Harry Bosch series.”
A sci-fi series can also be defined by a milieu, a possible future setting, where all the action unfolds—it may not be just a historical progression. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Near Space books defines the Near Space milieu. Many of their books take place in this milieu, from Niven’s Integral Trees to the entire Man-Kzin series of stories. Mysteries and thrillers usually don’t create alternate universes, but fantasy certainly can (for example, the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings series).
Most of the above examples are special. First, I would give the authors the benefit of the doubt: I don’t believe their primary goal was to make money through repetition. It certainly wasn’t in my non-linear case. Second, in most of the cases, their series are not just examples of creative laziness. The series itself is often a product of the creative process—in the case of Rowling, Asimov, and Benford, in fact, it’s sheer brilliance. For Lee Child and his fellow thriller writers, it’s probably a desire to develop their main character more. As time goes on, for example, the reader learns more and more about Jack Reacher as a special human being, one capable of simple yet profound utterances like the one quoted in the banner to this website.
My conclusion, in fact, is that series are usually not just about making a buck. Sure, writing is a business, and if you can make a buck doing it, it’s all right, as long as it’s not your primary motivation. Yes, I know, this is contrary to most of the advice you’ll see in newsletters and blogs devoted to writing, but you have to be faithful to your muse. The story is all important, whether it be contained in just one book or multiple books in a series. However, there are certainly examples of crass commercialism. The old dime novels about western and space heroes, war and aliens, and so forth, are fine examples where even completely commercial ventures turned out to be classics. The bulk of Dickens’ work is a specific example of this. Rice Burroughs also comes to mind.
Crass commercialism also occurs when a famous writer passes and his estate continues pumping out the series he or she made famous. Ludlum and Parker come to mind. The estates make money—it’s not clear that the second-tier writer, the Mr. or Ms. X writing for Mr. famous Y, gets the financial reward they deserve, since they have to pay plenty to use Y’s famous name. It’s hard enough to get published—don’t you want it to happen using your own name? Sometimes this use of a famous writer’s name even happens before the writer passes, as in the case of James Patterson. In many ways, this is exploitation of readers—legal, of course, but not completely ethical.
The mystery and sci-fi magazines in the 1930s through 50s had a veritable potpourri of short stories and novellas running from junk to classics. This tradition still continues in Ellory Queen and Analog, for example. Who knows how they will be affected by the publishing revolution, the digital paradigm shift that is killing newspapers, magazines, and traditional bookstores? However, there is no doubt that historically these media have exploited writers and graphic artists alike. At one time I suppose writers could make a living doing this—I doubt whether it’s possible today, except for speed writers writing schlock.
Then there are the fads. One example comes to mind, but the shelves of our traditional bookstores are filled with series like this one. It’s the Chicken Soup series. I googled “Chicken Soup books” and the fifth item on the list was Amazon’s “The Top Thirty Most Popular ‘Chicken Soup’ Books.” Thirty! Sounds like Henry Ford hit the publishing industry. Series like this are replacing the exploitative magazines. Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC, has a well defined business model where they ask for submissions and choose what they like. Why is that different than any other kind of publishing? Because the submissions that are accepted bring for their writers very little profit or recognition for their publication—the Chicken company receives the lion’s share of both. This is crass commercial exploitation of writers and I recommend you stay away from it.
It’s also crass commercial exploitation of readers. The Chicken Soup books are supposed to be inspirational and motivational—New Age music in book form, I guess. Of course, short story collections are often suspect, but readers that buy into this marshmallow view of life’s problems should instead just find a nice church close by—they would get a lot more inspirational and motivational chicken soup out of the social interaction with their fellow churchgoers than trying to read about what Chicken LLC thinks is the right view of the world. We have enough problems in our society—we don’t need Chicken LLC’s faux prophets.
Writing a series or participating in one is a mixed bag. To use an expression that might be attributed to Mr. Yogi Berra, you have to jump in with both feet on the ground. Think of it as a minefield and negotiate it with care. To borrow the Star Trek motto, you can boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before if you’re careful about it (Star Trek is another example of crass commercialism…perhaps more so than Chicken LLC…sigh). Let your series be a non-linear outgrowth of your creative ideas. Go ahead and repeat characters, heroes or villains, if you can add to their essence. Reuse your milieu if it works and is not forced. But never, never, let making a series be the driver behind your writing.
