Preparing for an episodic series

[Yora]

I'm not a fan of big books and multi-volume series. But I very much enjoy seeing the same characters over and over and seeing new places and aspects of a great setting. So the idea of setting up my various story concepts as an episodic series is appealing very much to me. Stories that are connected, but don't build on each other and are complete works on their own with a beginning and end. Many sword and sorcery series have used this format very well.

However, this is complicated by the fact that I am actually more drawn to writing character driven stories than plot driven ones. And it is somewhat in the very nature of a strictly episodic format that things don't really change between stories so you can always start again from the same starting point.

Am I trying to eat my cake and have it too here? Does a character driven story necessarily require a continous arc?

 

[Insolent Lad]

The three volumes of my Mora series have a bit of a continuing story line but each stands very much on its own, with its own resolution. What helped me to work this out to my satisfaction and keep it 'fresh' was to use a different primary protagonist/narrator for each book, so I was exploring a new character each time. These were secondary or peripheral characters in the previous books and some carried over from the previous trilogy set in the same world.

There, however (in my Malvern series) I admittedly did use one main character throughout—and I think I pretty much used him up, although he makes somewhat brief appearances as a secondary in the following series.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I think I'm a little in between here. I split up my novel I wanted to write into a series of novellas. The overarching story is still the same in the original novel as in the series, but each novella is a completed story in its own right - more or less.

The stories are meant to be read in order though, and the character development happening throughout the series is meant to be significant. It will probably be difficult for a reader to pick up a story in the middle and fully enjoy it if they haven't read the previous ones first.

 

[Devor]

Think about TV's model of storytelling. There's episodes, but nowadays in a good TV series every episode still has a little bit of character development, bits and pieces that start to add up as time goes on.

In my opinion, you'd have trouble spending a lot of time with a character and not having them develop much nowadays. Even a modern crime series calls for some development. And, y'know, that's okay. People will read a series out of order and not object quite too much.

 

[Yora]

The main thing I want to avoid is getting an obligation to produce more stories because readers are waiting for a resolution. I want to be able to leave it open whether I will write another story when I have completed one.

The best example for such a series is probably Conan. I love it, but I always have a hard time understanding why it works. There's plenty of things about it that make me think it shouldn't work, but it still does.

Probably the best approach to such a series would be to treat it like a procedural. Those leave you with a clear resolution. Even when the task fails, it fails conclusively. One adventure procedural that comes to mind are the Indiana Jones movies. And one thing I noticed while analyzing their plots, is that the two great movies have a strong subplot about Indy repairing his relationships with Marion and his father. That he will find the artifact and keep it out of the hands of the Nazis is basically a given, also that he will survive. But what will happen to the broken relationships are the real stakes that are much more open. Temple of Doom and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull don't really have that, and they are widely regarded as mediocre and bad. Of course, such subplots can't be used inndefinitely. As Insolent Lad said, at some point the characters are used up. But a procedural isn't really tied to a single character and can be extended to a different character doing the same main plot stuff in the same setting.

 

[Yora]

One problem that I have discovered is with buildup and foreshadowing. There are a couple of creatures, factions, a d phenomena I have planned for the world, that I intend to be only rumors to most people and something that should be established as something to be feared before it is established.

But realistically speaking, even if I aim for only 100k words per story, how many am I likely to ever complete and release? Four or six perhaps. There's a possibility I turn out to be really good at this and I make it a career and write 30 stories, but this isn't something one could assume at the start.
If I want to use these things, I have to use them right from the start. There is also the other problem of what I could possibly write about if I were to keep all the really good ideas for later? Write about the ordinary and uninteresting things to get the readers in a state of familiar complacency? Who would want to read that, and how would that be fun to write?