Strategies for Plotting a Series

June 2024 AMA

What are the best practices for structuring a series?

Today, we’re breaking down the best practices for structuring a series in terms of character goals, antagonists, and stakes. The writing exercise at the end of this post has nine guiding questions that can help you make sure you have enough story to span an entire series.

Before we jump in, I recommend checking out this post on writing subplots if you haven’t already. This post talks about how Avatar: The Last Airbender is structured as a series. In general, a series—be it books or a TV show—is basically a lot of subplots knitted together with a “big bad” villain orchestrating all of the conflict. This subplot post introduces the concept of goal funnels and how they aid story structure. A lot of the takeaways in this post are transferable to structuring a series.

June 2024 AMA

What Are Best Practices for Structuring a Series?

While I’m excited to answer this question, I must do so with a caveat. Since series are extremely uncommon for my genre (literary fiction), I don’t have experience writing a series myself. But this is how I would structure a series given everything I’ve learned about craft as a game writer.

When it comes to outlining, it’s always easiest for me to start with the main problem that comes with my chosen genre. In my experience, a common problem for series writers is that there is a tendency to save plot points for later books. As a result, there can be a lot of filler writing in the first drafts of series books. Sometimes, an entire book in an early draft of a series can be filler.

Several years ago, I did a query packet consultation for the first book of a fantasy trilogy. As you may know, a query packet typically consists of a query letter, a synopsis, and the first 50 pages of the novel. My client had the entire series planned out. He had written the first two books and was deep into drafting the third book. He knew his story inside out, but there was very little plot or conflict in the first book of the series. He was committed to the concept of writing a trilogy, but the story just didn’t have enough conflict to span three 350-page books. As a whole, the first book was difficult to pitch (and in turn market to an agent) because it couldn’t concretely answer these three crucial questions about conflict: