Sticky points
Warning. Post contains spoilers for several series. Including, David Weber's Honor Harrington series, Lois Bujold's Five Gods, C. E. Murphy's Walking Papers series, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, the Tails of the Moon series by Dave Freer and Eric Flint and Irene Radford's Dragon Nimbus. You are warned.
There are a lot of things that go into the creation of a good series. Some of them are immediately noticeable. Dialogue is one of the chief salient points of any novel. Poor dialogue can sink a book with ease. Characterization of the unsightly sort can make a reader conduct a book to a ceremonious impact with a wall. Suspension of disbelief is important in all fiction, but is critical to the science fiction - fantasy spectrum, without it, there is no saving the spiffy philosophical points, and no one will see the perfectly executed plot twists in the latter half of the book. Without the ability to suspend, and maintain suspension of disbelief they will likewise not see the exquisite resolution to all the sub-threads if they can't get over your premise. All three of these factors done to a modest level together will get you a nice readable and possibly forgettable book.
The thing a book or series needs most to succeed in my eyes is one or more sticky points. These being the things that stay in the mind of the reader and make them talk and then about them. Great series have them. Even good series have a few of them. In the Dresden files for several books we have the question of what is going to happen to the third Knight's sword that took up residence in Harry's doorside umbrella stand. This, and his relationship with his girlfriend turned abstaining blood sucker are things that lend the series emotional gravity. Lois Bujold structures her universe so that the gods have no ability to override the free will of anyone who chooses to exclude them. These gods also lack the ability to move anything in the physical world. Gods who do not act in the world humans dwell in is not a unique concept. Normally if a writer wants to have gods but not use them they let the reader know that it is too dangerous for them to act.
David Weber has managed to create a talking point for nearly every fan in his Honor Harrington series. In the political arena run from good guys through well-intentioned but misled to the truly disgusting and antisocial. He's got a nation that has a representative democracy that has changed leaders several times and has shown the flaws and strengths of all the leaderships. He has telepathy, and cats, and all scale of things that go boom. The Honor Harrington series as a whole pays homage not just to the writer's historical knowledge, but to his particular affection for the French Revolution and the age of sail. You can't turn more than a few pages without running across a tech application either. All of these are fodder for subsets of science fiction readers.
C.E. Murphy in The Walking Papers has the strongly denied love-hate relationship between Jo and her boss. The relationship with her boss is saved from being dreadfully clichéd by a healthy antagonism built into the relationship. Jo really isn't a very good cop, and her boss expects her to be and neither of the two is all that good at backing down, or tipping their hand. Murphy's use of various mythologies and the Seattle area to create a backdrop that makes the stories more about the worlds than the relationships. Dave Freer and Eric Flint have also taken the pantheons of a dozen regions and pureed them with wanton abandon to create a world reminiscent of the old Fractured Fairy Tales and used them to bring to life a world that makes you not notice the unlikely, but fun cast of characters brought together to carry the story. The social underpinnings of these two stories go almost unnoticed but they are there, and they make each of these worlds worth reading.
To be successful a series has to have a few unanswered questions or continuing themes that bind book two to book six and book four back to book one. This doesn't mean in planning your series you should leave every thread unresolved and simply pick an event to stop writing at. The emotional gravity of a series is due as much to anticipation of present plots, as it is to the satisfaction of past resolutions. One series that does this well creating a mythology of its own is the Dragon Nimbus by Irene Radford. It slowly spins out a series of myths based on what looks to have been the emergency landing of humans from outside this adventure fantasy world. Clearly the "Stargods" were influential, and are credited with numerous things, but they never dominate the story.
In none of these novels do the points I've addressed made take up the bulk of the text. Most are only well disguised footnotes and you could probably pull most of them out of each book and still have something an editor would buy. Without them though I doubt that these series would do as well as they have.
P.S. Thanks Kate.
There are a lot of things that go into the creation of a good series. Some of them are immediately noticeable. Dialogue is one of the chief salient points of any novel. Poor dialogue can sink a book with ease. Characterization of the unsightly sort can make a reader conduct a book to a ceremonious impact with a wall. Suspension of disbelief is important in all fiction, but is critical to the science fiction - fantasy spectrum, without it, there is no saving the spiffy philosophical points, and no one will see the perfectly executed plot twists in the latter half of the book. Without the ability to suspend, and maintain suspension of disbelief they will likewise not see the exquisite resolution to all the sub-threads if they can't get over your premise. All three of these factors done to a modest level together will get you a nice readable and possibly forgettable book.
The thing a book or series needs most to succeed in my eyes is one or more sticky points. These being the things that stay in the mind of the reader and make them talk and then about them. Great series have them. Even good series have a few of them. In the Dresden files for several books we have the question of what is going to happen to the third Knight's sword that took up residence in Harry's doorside umbrella stand. This, and his relationship with his girlfriend turned abstaining blood sucker are things that lend the series emotional gravity. Lois Bujold structures her universe so that the gods have no ability to override the free will of anyone who chooses to exclude them. These gods also lack the ability to move anything in the physical world. Gods who do not act in the world humans dwell in is not a unique concept. Normally if a writer wants to have gods but not use them they let the reader know that it is too dangerous for them to act.
David Weber has managed to create a talking point for nearly every fan in his Honor Harrington series. In the political arena run from good guys through well-intentioned but misled to the truly disgusting and antisocial. He's got a nation that has a representative democracy that has changed leaders several times and has shown the flaws and strengths of all the leaderships. He has telepathy, and cats, and all scale of things that go boom. The Honor Harrington series as a whole pays homage not just to the writer's historical knowledge, but to his particular affection for the French Revolution and the age of sail. You can't turn more than a few pages without running across a tech application either. All of these are fodder for subsets of science fiction readers.
C.E. Murphy in The Walking Papers has the strongly denied love-hate relationship between Jo and her boss. The relationship with her boss is saved from being dreadfully clichéd by a healthy antagonism built into the relationship. Jo really isn't a very good cop, and her boss expects her to be and neither of the two is all that good at backing down, or tipping their hand. Murphy's use of various mythologies and the Seattle area to create a backdrop that makes the stories more about the worlds than the relationships. Dave Freer and Eric Flint have also taken the pantheons of a dozen regions and pureed them with wanton abandon to create a world reminiscent of the old Fractured Fairy Tales and used them to bring to life a world that makes you not notice the unlikely, but fun cast of characters brought together to carry the story. The social underpinnings of these two stories go almost unnoticed but they are there, and they make each of these worlds worth reading.
To be successful a series has to have a few unanswered questions or continuing themes that bind book two to book six and book four back to book one. This doesn't mean in planning your series you should leave every thread unresolved and simply pick an event to stop writing at. The emotional gravity of a series is due as much to anticipation of present plots, as it is to the satisfaction of past resolutions. One series that does this well creating a mythology of its own is the Dragon Nimbus by Irene Radford. It slowly spins out a series of myths based on what looks to have been the emergency landing of humans from outside this adventure fantasy world. Clearly the "Stargods" were influential, and are credited with numerous things, but they never dominate the story.
In none of these novels do the points I've addressed made take up the bulk of the text. Most are only well disguised footnotes and you could probably pull most of them out of each book and still have something an editor would buy. Without them though I doubt that these series would do as well as they have.
P.S. Thanks Kate.