Define Your Story With Four (More) Little Words
Possibly These Words Are More Interesting Than Last Time
Good morning, Shelf Life fam. We’re nearly at the end of August and September looms in the immediate future. I started Shelf Life in September. September is a good month, chilly but good. I wish it could stay summer forever but the pumpkin spice crowd’s witchcraft is too strong and they have ushered in the cooler, shorter days I loathe. It’s fine. If I wanted to live in eternal summer forever I guess I’d still be in Los Angeles.
Some time ago, I wrote an article on the four little words that can crush writer’s block when you’re stuck because you don’t know where to go next or how to get to what’s next in your manuscript. More recently, some writing/editing/publishing friends and I have been talking about another phrase that writers
Frequently misunderstand
Love to hate
Hear often but rarely absorb
And then the other night, thinking about it, I realized that this phrase also sums up an important fiction-writing principle in four words. That put me in mind of my previous offering so today we’re revisiting the concept with another four-word phrase that you can keep in your pocket to really help keep you on track when planning, plotting, and writing fiction projects.
Look I’m not going to tease you by dragging this out. These are the words I’m talking about:
Standalone
With
Series
Potential
Backtracking a bit: There’s two kinds of writers. Okay there’s actually 7.6 billion kinds of writers but I’m dividing us into two broad categories today. When one sits down with an idea and begins to write, it is very very rare to find that at the end of writing you have generated exactly the amount of content that is ideal for whatever the type of thing is that you’re writing. I know plenty of writers balk at the idea that there’s an “ideal” word count for different types of books—writers want to be free to write as much as they please, and indeed they are—but if you intend to sell a manuscript or find a sizable readership your best bet is to stick close to the established norms, which are based on what readers want.
Or do whatever you feel like, I don’t care.
Most of us, sitting down to write, will fall into one of these two categories:
The story idea ran out of plot long before it reached a novel-length word count; or
The story idea kept going, and going, and going like the pink bunny the eighties babies still have nightmares about.
For the folks who have a blazing hot story idea but the plot peters out somewhere in the middle of telling it a few pages in, I talked quite a while ago about how to ensure that you construct enough plot to carry your story all the way to the end. For those who always have more to say, their word cup always running over, I’ve given some advice here and there on why industry-standard word-count guidelines exist and why writers may want to aim for those word counts.
A manuscript that is too long is hard to sell to an agent or publisher, but you can always self-publish it. A book that is too long can be a hard sell to readers, too, especially for a first-time author without a waiting fanbase. This, too, can be surmounted. Unfortunately, I see a lightbulb go on for a lot of writers who then say—“Sweet, I can just split it in three and sell it as multiple books. It’s a trilogy!”
To be fair, I’ve said this too. And it’s not wrong, it’s just—incomplete. I have given incomplete advice and I have regrets.
You have a 300,000-word manuscript and you know you can only reasonably sell a manuscript of 100,000 words, so why not just do a JRR Tolkien and chop the thing in three and sell it as a trilogy? That’s what editors and agents want, right? They want to sign manuscripts that adhere to industry-standard word counts and they want to sign authors who have sequels up their sleeves ready to go—right?
Most of the time, people—in this case, I’m talking about customers and end users—don’t want to receive a partial story in exchange for their money. Customers want a complete story. It doesn’t have to be the whole entire story, but it should be complete.
Take Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (which title I’m sure I have here styled incorrectly)—This is a standalone story that is part of a trilogy. A New Hope doesn’t tell the whole story—neither the whole Star Wars universe story nor even the whole Skywalker saga story—but it tells a complete story. It begins with Leia hiding the Death Star plans and a plea for help in the memory banks of R2-D2 and jettisoning him from her ship shortly before her capture by Darth Vader. It concludes with the destruction of the Death Star, the rescue of Leia, and Han Solo and Luke Skywalker receiving awards for their service. It’s the story of the destruction of the Death Star, and the part those people played in it.
Now consider Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. This movie is less able to stand on its own, not because it follows Episode IV but because it precedes Episode VI. You can watch it without watching A New Hope first—you’ll miss out on some context but it’s easy enough to follow the story. It fails to stand fully alone, though, because several plot threads are left untied—notably, we don’t know what has become of Han Solo at the end. It relies on Episode VI for a satisfying conclusion.
Kill Bill Volume I, on the other hand, tells half a story. Taken together, both volumes of Kill Bill is a story about a woman on a revenge quest to take out the all the members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and their leader, but she only gets two out of five in the first movie and we don’t even understand the context. Each movie in that franchise has half of the information we need for a satisfying story. Neither film stands alone.
Finally, consider Alien and Aliens. Both movies stand completely alone, neither one relies on the other to tell a full story. They both happen to feature a character in common (Ellen Ripley)—and also a cat—and the alien species she encounters twice, but otherwise neither is dependent upon the other. Alien tells a full story with a satisfying conclusion that does not require a follow-up installment to tie up loose ends. Every question that Alien raised is answered in Alien.
Aliens, likewise, does not require you to have any knowledge of the movie Alien to get the full impact. Everything you need to know about Alien to fully understand Aliens is provided in Aliens and, by the way, not in a crawling narrative prologue scrawl but elegantly incorporated as an element of the plot.
Alien, then, is an example of a true piece of media that launched as a standalone product with series potential. It told a complete story, without leaving any loose ends untied to frustrate the audience, while leaving more stories in this setting, with this character, yet untold. And by “more stories” I mean one more story and then some related media like AVP, because Alien3 is garbage.
What I’m trying to demonstrate with this procession of popular movies is the difference between an initial standalone product that launches a series of products that do not standalone (Star Wars original trilogy); a series of products in which no piece can stand alone; and a series in which all pieces can stand alone.
It’s not unusual to encounter products in the market that follow the Star Wars model: Someone takes a gamble on that initial product and, if it is successful, more follow in the same series with less attention paid to telling a complete story in each installment, as we now know that later installments are likely to keep selling until the story is told.
There are fewer successful products like Kill Bill, and they tend to be the province of content creators who are already successful—someone whose name alone can move units. Whatever entity is staking the product’s costs has a good idea that this product will return the investment—most agents and publishers are wary of giving a new voice the opportunity to tell a complete story over three incomplete installments.
It might seem like a good bet for an agent or editor—put the first installment out there and readers left on a cliffhanger will be slavering for the release of the next piece. Unfortunately, if it takes too long to get that next piece to market, the readership may have moved on to something else—especially if your first installment didn’t contain a satisfying and complete story between its covers.
The product I keep hearing agents are wanting to see right now is the standalone title with series potential. Invest in one straight up and see how it goes, no commitment if the first one doesn’t find a market, no disappointed readers if the second installment never arrives. But delivering a standalone with series potential isn’t as simple as chopping your 300,000-word manuscript in three.
Conceiving a satisfying story with enough plot to drive it all the way to the end is hard. Conceiving a series with an overarching story and plot that is carried through multiple installments that each have a complete plot and story, that start clean and end with a satisfying conclusion, that’s the ideal product. Or at least it’s a product type that an ideal pitch right now for the budding author who has more than one book’s worth of continuing story to tell.
Books that are part of series may form a duology, trilogy, quadrilogy (aka tetralogy; although both words are widely used, along with quartet, I was recently scolded for using quadrilogy), or any number of planned installments, or they might contribute to an ongoing series that will end eventually but doesn’t begin with a set number of individual titles planned for it.
If you know that you have a really long and involved story to tell—an A Song of Ice and Fire– or Wheel of Time–level saga—you’re going to have to break your story up into installments. The best way to do this is to look at the story from a treetop view and choose where and how you will separate it. Not just where you’ll break off the first installment from the rest of the story, but how you’ll break the whole thing down into component novels.
GRRM was going along in the ASoIaF series pretty smoothly, telling the tale in roughly chronological order and ending each installment after a major battle or event. Then, with A Feast for Crows, he decided to split the next piece of the story up geographically instead of chronologically. This decision was poorly received by fans and critics—and their negative feedback coincided with the beginning of the end for that series, the writing pace tapering down and then eventually dying off. Incidental? Who knows.
Once you understand how many pieces your overarching story breaks down into, you can determine what you need to achieve in each book in order to eventually get there. An easy example to see how this is done is Harry Potter (as usual). Knowing that each installment begins with Harry’s birthday in July and ends when the school year lets out, JKR could easily plan to map the important characters’ development and growth journeys over seven installments. An overall throughline of the story establishes that elements from each installment will be built upon in the next. But each installment tells a complete story with a discrete beginning and a satisfying conclusion.
(Except for the garbage epilogue to book seven, which I would like to put on a rocket with Alien3 and fire into the sun.)
Once you’ve got your installments figured out and you know what the break-off point is for each one, look for the story arc within each installment. Each Harry Potter novel told the complete story of one school year. Each component novel of the Lord of the Rings told a complete story for each distinct set of characters (the character configurations change book to book). Find the complete story arc in each of your installments, with an inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.
This is harder, and it’s more work, than simply writing one long story without narrative pause and then chopping it into a number of equal-size blocks, but your work will be better and more memorable for it.
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