Hey! So I've been writing a series for a very long time and it's grown so much that I have a lot of ideas for it. The problem is I can't get it right. Like, I start out with something and then I just always scrap it because it's either not what I see in my head or it doesn't have the feel of what I know a good story should have. I've structured it like a television series with seven seasons that has thirteen episodes each. There's a series conflict that ends up getting resolved, there's seven conflicts for each season that end up getting resolved and then in each episode there's another conflict. I want everything to be cohesive, one big story, and every scene to be part of the whole. Instead of writing it as a television series, though, and trying to get a pilot published, I'm just going to write everything out and publish it as seven books. Does anyone have advice for how to do this? I know it's been done with television millions of times but that's over years, with decisions being made by dozens of people, and having a writing team. I'm just one person. I'm buying scrivener so that I can be more outlined. I definitely want to have this story all thought out and pieced together before I begin writing. Please, don't just say, "just write!" because that doesn't work for me. There's just too much I would like to foreshadow and such and I feel if I pants it that I'm just going to end up vomiting everything I know in the first season like what J.K. Rowling did with her first draft for Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone. Right now, what I'm trying out is working backwards from the ending and summarizing each episode. While at first it was great, I'm getting down to the first episodes of the last season and getting to very unexciting territory as I'm running out of ideas. I think this is because I started with all the exciting stuff that happens at the end which is the climax and am now kind of in setup mode. So I guess it would be kind of normal to find all this beginning stuff boring? Please, any advice would be great! Thanks in advance.
Two thoughts: One, why seven season with thirteen episodes each if you feel like you're running out of interesting material? Don't stretch it out. Don't pad. Write the material you've actually got, not what you feel you need to fill. Two, why seven seasons with thirteen episodes each at all? That's not how novels work. Yeah, it's how tv shows work, but you're not making a tv show, and the pacing and content for a novel / series of novels is going to be different. If you break the events down outside of your frankly arbitrary format, you might find it easier to lay out as a series of novels. Give yourself more room to work, here.
Hey, thanks for taking the time in trying to help me! I'm doing seven seasons and thirteen episodes because I love the structure and pace of it and the time I can take to really develop the characters. I love that how with this episodic/serialized format I can explore many themes and scenarios with the same set of characters. I don't feel like I'm running out of interesting material. What I'm saying is that I'm starting from the end and working my way to the beginning and so because of what I'm writing right now happens prior to the events in the story, I feel it's less exciting and it totally is because it's setting up. I think that's just to be expected. As for the interesting material: I have a ton. I'm writing this series for an audience that is going to be reading it digitally and I think that requires its own structure like what I'm creating. I don't feel I have to restrict myself anymore to the publishing world and only writing one book to see if they'll buy my idea. I don't feel I have to have it be exactly 80k-100k words because I'm a new author and they have printing and marketing costs to consider. I think the idea of episodes for a series of novels is great. When people are sitting down to read it, they don't have to read a big book that they'll never have the satisfaction of completing, it can just be a small 10-15k word episode at a time. I don't know. Those are just my ideas. This is how I'm structuring the series and I feel it's the correct shape (I've tried many others and they were all too short). I'm looking here to see if anyone has any expert advice on how to tackle this sort of planning that goes into writing a series, because this kind of information on the internet doesn't really exist, except from tv shows and other book series that have done it.
Constancy with continuity, and a ton of plot ideas plus subplots. (Means lots of rereading your work to keep things straight)
I write light novels mostly which sounds more like your digs. I plan out everything pretty meticulously before I start writing so I already know what the series will do before I start writing. It's important to be organized and focused. You also want to scan thoroughly at every step for plot holes or story-lines that don't get tied up. Then start writing. In fact for a serial I'd say you don't need to finish it all at once. Just enough to get you ahead of your publishing schedule. I decided not to serialize because of convenience and a lack of good serialization platforms, but I'd say you could start publishing if you finish "Season one" so to speak.
Wish I had some decent advice. I'm at around 60k words in the novel I'm closing in on and had to rewrite the outline twice this week, because I didn't realize what the characters are about. I always start with an end in mind but, I think it's hard to get to the original ending.
Okay, thanks to everyone for replying, but none of you are getting to the meat of the question that I'm looking for. Since I guess I'm one of the writers who have been working on this type of format the longest (except for writers who have actually done this and were successful), I should shed some light on what I've discovered about it. Every story begins with a single idea, thought, or scene. No one sets out to write seven seasons with thirteen episodes each because that's absolutely crazy. In today's world, the only formats available for telling long-form stories (that people will actually care about) are either television or novels. One, as you may know, is way more easy to break into than the other. One is based off nepotism (who you know) and loads of experience and the other is based off just telling a good story (at least traditionally). One takes a lot more money to create than the other and thus way more risk. This is why I chose to write my series in a novel format instead of a television script format. It's just more smart, obvious, and logical to do so. What about as a film or a trilogy? No. My story is way too much of a slow-burn kind of story and I've tried writing it as these (as just outlines) and it doesn't work. The only thing that seems to work and that I keep coming back to is this long TV series format. So while some of you might think I'm being too obsessive or ambitious or just trying to be the next great thing, I want you to know that I didn't come to this decision likely and that I've tried many other formats. This 91-episode series is what fits. So if I know the shape and format that I want my story told in, why am I asking for advice then? Clearly, I must know what I'm doing. How my process works is I write out all 91 episodes and divide them into their seven seasons. I then try to envision the story as a whole: what the series goal is, what each of the goals of the seasons are, and then what possibly each of the episodes could be about. For years, this has been far the most difficult stage; just being able to write one sentence for what each of the answers to these questions could be. Two things I've recently learned about this format that I feel is revolutionary in my perspective of how to tell this kind of story and that I've witnessed in other series using this template (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men) is reverse outlining and the passage of time. Reverse outlining is very simple. You start with where your series ends (the resolution of the series conflict that drives every one of your main characters) and you begin creating a logical path for them from the end to the beginning so that everything flows perfectly and without a misstep. This is extremely helpful with episodic format and having a restriction on how much time you have in telling a story within a season (in this case, the last season). So you start with how the series conflict is solved by the main character and you just take the necessary steps backwards and setting up for them everything that they need to fulfill that purpose all the way until you get to the beginning of the last season (or in this case, the end of season six). It works and from my experience does not hinder your creativity one bit. Once you have your main character's path laid out, you can then start adding subplots and other characters' points of view to fill space within the episodes and such. And then there's the concept of passage of time, which I did not come to even fully realize was in a story until I discovered it while writing my own series and sensing something was wrong. When you're writing an episodic story, it's fun and easy to switch between your main characters and in a long-form story it's kind of expected for the reader and that the writer does this, so it can't be avoided. While I was writing out the treatment for the last season, I wrote every episode with the primary main character in the spotlight because I had to show how they would succeed in solving everything. But everything changed with season six because all of my main characters were in different places. So when I was outlining, it looked like this: Season 6 Episode 5 (all about character B) Episode 6 (all about character C) Episode 7 (all about character D) Which is a problem and I'll explain why. In these episodes and such, character A -- the main character of the series and who solves everything in the next season -- appears nowhere. Some of you might think this isn't a problem and if that's how the story goes, then that's how it should be. I didn't think it was a problem at first either, but it totally is. The problem is about the passage of time and the reader feeling that the characters are making progress towards the completion of whatever the story goal they're working on is. In your series (and this is what I've discovered), if you have episodes without your central character and then return back to them without them having made any changes since the last episode we saw them, the reader won't feel that time has passed within the actual story and that whatever episodes they just watched without the main character will feel like a waste or a filler. In The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, the title characters appear in every episode. This doesn't have to be so because of how many other characters they could showcase each week but they continue to show the main character every time, no matter how insignificant their portion of the story is at that time. When we have the same character to follow in each episode chronologically, we feel a passage of time is being made and that progress towards their problems are being worked. Two stories that are doing this really bad right now are The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Rick Grimes and Jon Snow? The show wants to pretend they're the main characters but they're not. These shows are trying to act like every one of their characters are the main characters, and their later seasons are paying for it with critics and audiences calling the writing terrible. This is because these two stories don't have a concise story goal and they're stalling; there's no main character we're following in each episode to suggest a passage of time. A whole episode about Eugene or Darryl? The story doesn't even know what it's doing. This is kind of what I'm working on right now and struggling with. This is the kind of complexity of storytelling that I want to have a discussion about.
Interesting ideas I read recently, maybe here, that series work best when there is a series, season, and episode threat. What if each character had a series, season, and episode goal? You might find overlap while you go, but you'd always have a goal post to lead you. A lot of times, what the characters are doing isn't even related, but you keep track of them and bring them all together for the season finale. To go further, you could give each of the characters an anchor in their backstory that draws them home. Some reason they are invested in staying wherever the story takes place.
This is it? Everyone else is just writing a standalone or a trilogy like those are the only kinds of stories that can exist? Where can I go for real help?
With all due respect, but I don't think these shows are suffering because of the 'lack of main character', I think it's more the fact that these shows either ran out of material to draw from or strayed so far from the original material that they could no longer use it. As a result, they literally have no where to go and the writers are trying to buy time so they can figure out a compelling and satisfying ending to the countless plot threads they've unraveled in order to draw viewers. The Game of Thrones novels had the same character structure. You'd follow around one character for a while in milieu until it threatened to get boring, then GRR Martin would shunt you off to another character for a while so you could get invested in them too. There really aren't any main character individuals, but the novels are a fascinating read. So my advice would be to start with a huge, series long story from start to finish making sure it has proper story and character arcs. Then break that story into seasons, again, making sure each season has it's own story and character arcs, then again break it into episodes, making sure that your episodes do the same. Then be careful about making any changes to the story as you work through it because those changes are the like bubbles under wallpaper or the screen protector for your phone. You have to keep pushing them out, but if you push them off to the side, you've got a dropped plot thread and that's just going to piss people off, so you just keep pushing them forward. The only problem is, when when you keep pushing them forward, they start joining forces and keep getting bigger and want to wander off into directions you know you can't go, because then your story will have no direction and you won't know how to finish it then you'll just keep writing episode after episode trying to buy time until you figure out how to finish this thing until it's too late and you run out of wallpaper, only it wasn't bubbles under the wallpaper, it was spiders and they're angry spiders because you kept pushing on them. And now you're covered with spiders. And it's dark. And you're crying. And the critics look at you and all you've created, and they go 'Meh.' For you have created Lost.
Thanks guys. Some things I've discovered recently while trying to work out this story: Flashbacks in the episodic format (when you're under time and word count restrictions) are like info-dumps and just take time away from the actual story. It ruins the pace. The scenes of the flashbacks can instead just be incorporated with hints and weaved throughout the series. This is recommended in all advanced storytelling techniques. What a character says means nothing. Always have them lying in some way. Being straight-forward, direct, and honest with your main character's dialogue is boring. Create skepticism and questions with your characters when their words don't equate with their actions. Have them admitting the truth be a huge revelation for the story that was hinted throughout. Ultimately, it's their actions and the actions of their past catching up to them that matter and that reveal the actual truth. You know this to be true. That is all.
