The trouble with book three of a series

[pbray]

is that books one and two exist.

After I finished my daily word count yesterday, I sketched a few notes for the next chapter. I'd come up with a brilliant plot twist that would further the narrative, and add depth to the conflicts between the central characters. I congratulated myself on my brilliant insight, and forced my critique partner to listen to this great idea and make the usual "Yes, yes, you're brilliant, now could you pass the chocolate" noises.

I made more notes on the idea and outlined the scene during last night's meeting of the local romance writer's group, where I'd shown up to lend support for the mass photo shoot.

Then I went home, and slept the sleep of the just. When I woke up this morning, I realized two things a) the alarm is incredibly annoying, and b) the plot twist won't work. Lady Ysobel can't discover ShockingRevelation(tm), since she already knows this from back in book one.

Grr. Argh. It was so perfect! So lovely! And now it was doomed.

Sadly I got up and showered. Later as I was caffeinating, I realized that the twist could still be salvaged. Lady Ysobel knows ShockingRevelation(tm), but she can't convince anyone else, since on the surface it is completely absurd. This will create tension between herself and her closest ally, as well as still letting me have the big reveal, only this time from another character's POV.

Twist salvaged. Sigh of relief heard. Now off to the day job.

Comments

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

Hah. You want to do something *hard*, write a prequel! :-)

But I'm glad you found a way to twist it so it still works. 'Cause it was a cool idea, and you are brilliant. (pass the chocolate)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Well salvaged! And you're absolutely right, it's a hell of a burden to have the earlier vols out there already. If publishers would only wait till the sequence is complete before they print the first, then we could go back and make changes, edit all through, so handy...

[pbray.livejournal.com]

So handy, and yet so deadly. I'd never get anything done if I could keep going back and revising the first book.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Congrats on salvaging the twist! That must have felt great :)

I read something somewhere last week about how you shouldn't try to sell the first book of a trilogy until you can write a synopsis of the whole thing, and thought, Great Googly-moogly -- what planet does that person live on!?

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Well I can't comment on this in general, but that's how it has worked for me. I wrote DEVLIN'S LUCK as a standalone, then realized I could make it the start of a trilogy, so wrote a a synopsis for the next two books which we included when my agent was shopping it around. I would have accepted an offer for a single title, but Bantam wanted the series, so I then toddled off to write the next two.

For the current series, I sold it based on three chapters of THE FIRST BETRAYAL and a lengthy outline of the entire series. As I recall the outline was forty pages long, starting with a one paragraph recap of each book, a timeline, descriptions of the setting and each of the main characters, and then a detailed synopsis for each book. The synopsis for the first book was significantly longer than the synopses for the second and third books, since I was already writing the first, but there was enough detail to convince the editor that I had a solid series.

I believe jpsorrow had a similar experience with his Throne series, where he had written the first book and was then encouraged to come up with a synopsis for the next two books so it could be sold as a trilogy.

Of course by the time you are writing book three, details will have changed, and it's not going to be a 100% match to your synopsis. But as long as it works, you can keep your editor happy.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm doomed, then. My outline for book one called for sixteen chapters (I wrote thirty-four), a radically different outcome for a certain pivotal event in the middle, and a completely different take on the relationship between the protagonists; I have only background notes on book two so far, and only the vaguest inklings of what book three might turn out to be about.

As was true back when I was writing term papers at university (my method basically was, read everything I could find about the topic; think vaguely about it for several weeks; then, the evening before the deadline, spread out all the books and photocopied journal articles on my rez-room floor, fire up my 286 laptop, brew a pot of strong tea, then sit down at my desk and write all night), outlines are a thing I am bad at. And this time I really, genuinely tried to do one, which has not always been true before.

I've got good titles, though :^P

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Well good titles are a start :-)

And I'm not saying that you can't sell a series without having outlines for all the books, just that it hasn't been my personal experience.

Another option would be to sell the completed book one, and then sell additional books in the series as you have them fleshed out.

There are even some writers who find working off an outline impossible.
Last year at Balticon tambowrites talked about how hard it was for her to write books that she had sold off of proposals, and how she'd made the decision that what worked best for her was to write an entire book first and then try to sell it. I've heard similar comments from other writers, though these tend to be writers who are working on standalone titles rather than the traditional high fantasy multi-volume series.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Yes, okay, perhaps I overreact ;^).

One of my critique partners calls me a "seat-of-the-pants writer", and I think she's right. My book started off as a scene in a garden, a fairly real-worldy England-in-the-early-thirties country-house garden, and then magic and gods elbowed their way in and it became fantasy, and the period shifted back a century and a bit and that changed everything from technologies to relationships, and it stopped being in England at all ... And that's not even to mention all the things I expected to happen that didn't, mostly because the characters stopped what they were doing, folded their arms, raised one eyebrow, and said, "Excuse me? You want us to do what?"

BTW, should I ever sell this book, conversations like this are going to figure largely in the Acknowledgements. You have no idea how validating it is to talk about this stuff with a real actual writer and not be laughed at!! (Well, maybe you do...)

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Hee! I'm an actual writer. *preens*

Your writing style sounds very much like my critique partner's. She once tried to convince me that she was writing the second book in a series, where the two books were set in the same fantasy "world" only hundreds of years apart and set on different continents, so not only were there no continuing characters, she wasn't even writing about the same countries or cultures. It had just sort of happened that way....

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Well ... that could still be a series ... perhaps not exactly a sequel, but ... ;^)