How to write a series

How to write a series---part one

When you start writing remembrances and stretching them into fiction, it's surprising how many stories you'll end up with. When I starting writing what would eventually become the Richard Series, I ended up with dozens of stories. Most of them were about two coming-of-age boys and their Tom Sawyer-like experiences. Not knowing any better, I tried to link them together with an almost nonexistent plot. The result was one whopping 550 page manuscript, weighted down by story after story, most of which didn’t have much to do with the final outcome of the novel. These stories didn’t even work as sub-plots. A couple of publishers read this hunk of a manuscript, and although they complimented it, they all said it was much too long, and noted there was only a weak overriding story line. They were right. It would have been better to have had two volumes of short stories that didn’t have anything to do with the each other, than to try and make one novel from this mound of stories.

That was a good lesson in both presentation and content. It also gave me the opportunity to learn from failure and to take constructive criticism. It would have been much easier to just toss the manuscript aside and do something else, but I didn’t. First, I high-graded it and kept the best of the lot. Then I realized I couldn’t have a story about a swimming hole and a record snow-fall all in a short time frame. Soon I was sorting and placing these stories into a sequence where they fit not only season-wise, but because they could be linked to become an integral part of the overriding story.

After I finished that little job, it became a pick and chose to which story premiss would get my first attention. I guess I’ve always had a desire to write a Christmas Story, and that’s why I picked The Red Scarf as the first of the series. However, as I wrote, I realized the novel, which ends on Christmas Eve, was going to be a lot more than a warm, satisfying Christmas read. Characters seemed to take on a life of their own and events that only weakly had anything to do with the Christmas season exploded into some of the best chapters in the novel. When I finished editing, and, after the novel was picked up by the only publisher I submitted it to, I took a few weeks to relish the idea of being a published author, and then I looked at all the material I still had available—and saved on my computer. You can’t let good work just sit there---can you? No, and that’s the blog I’ll write tomorrow.