(Article written with assists from Katharine Kerr and Sherwood Smith, who contributed important ideas and thoughts on this theme during a discussion about the series novel on dm.net)

I'll start by defining what I mean by a series, and how by my definition different kinds of series create quite different problems in craftsmanship.

First I want to separate out what I'll call the "series" from standalone novels set in the same universe. The recent example of the latter would be Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Reading one will bring added resonance to the other, but they can be read entirely separately. Most media tie-in novels and Dragonlance-type novels fall into this category.

A classic series to me is Star Trek, or most mystery series: self contained plot in each volume, same milieu, recurring characters who may or may not change over the course of the series.

A second kind of series I call a "sequence": a set of novels set in the same universe in which each novel more or less stands alone but which contains an overarching plot arc that links together the entire series. Any given volume could be read as a self contained unit, but all of them read in sequence create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Examples include my own Jaran series and Dennis McKiernan's Mithgar books.

Contrast both of these with the "multivolume novel": this used to be known as a trilogy, such as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but these days it might be any single story told over the space of 3, 4, 5 or more volumes. It differs from a classic series because the story is ongoing, characters change, and the basic situation can alter drastically from the beginning to the end; it differs from the sequence because no narrative is complete within one volume. My Crown of Stars series is a multivolume novel, as is Robert Jordan's vast canvas, Katharine Kerr's Deverry series, George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and Otherland, and Robin Hobb's Assassin and Ship trilogies, to mention a few.

For the purposes of this talk, when I say Fat Fantasy Series (or FFS), I mean the multivolume novel. As I have discovered from personal experience, it's very different writing a multivolume novel in which the narrative is not complete in one volume than writing a sequence in which each novel has a distinct internal and complete narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end. It's no harder to do it –well– because doing it well in any genre, subgenre, field, or artistic endeavor is hard; I don't see the point in hierarchizing that process.

However, writing the multivolume novel can make you crazy in a way that, I think, writing standalones, the classic series, or a sequence does not.

The obvious first answer is: because they sell.

While this answer is certainly often true, the reality isn't that cut and dried because that answer fits in a kind of yin/yang way with the other answer: the story needs to be this long, or turns out to be this long even if the author did not originally expect to write so much.

This contradiction between art and commerce brings up two questions:

Why do series sell?

Why do they seem to keep expanding? Why does it seem easier for the author to add volumes than to compress them? Is it just greed, or is there some other element at work?

Continued...

Text Copyright © 2002 Kate Elliott