Yeah, about that long.
We love long series here at Mythcreants. Sometimes it takes more than one novel or season of TV to properly tell a story. There’s nothing like the feeling of satisfaction when an epic saga comes to its thrilling conclusion. Plus, the longer the series, the more time you get to spend with your favorite characters.
But there’s no denying that certain problems become more prevalent the longer a series is. Even great storytellers suffer from these issues, so we should all learn how to address them when they arise.
Spoiler Warning: Gentlemen Bastards, The Old Kingdom Trilogy, Old Man’s War, A Song of Ice and Fire, Teen Wolf, and Temeraire.
1. Disappointing Reveals
A long series means a storyteller has lots of time to build something up. This raises tension, which is usually good for a story, but it also raises audience expectations. When the reveal comes, it can be difficult for the story to live up to what the audience has imagined for themselves.
This is the case with Sabetha in the Gentleman Bastards series. She is the final member of protagonist Locke’s old gang, and she’s never actually shown on page for the first two books. She left before the books began, and whenever there’s a flashback to before her departure, she’s conveniently somewhere else. Despite her absence, the other characters talk her up a lot, going on about how she’s a great thief and con artist. Supposedly, she was the only one in their group as good as Locke.
All this build up creates an image of Sabetha as a larger-than-life figure who can talk the money right out of a mark’s pocket. But when she’s finally revealed as an antagonist in the third book, she’s a fairly average romantic foil. She’s a competent thief, but the story isn’t about her, so she never gets a good chance to show her stuff. Her personality is mostly focused on simultaneously enticing and rejecting Locke.
It’s really disappointing when a reveal doesn’t live up to expectations. Not only does it mean the story isn’t as good as the audience was expecting, but also the previous buildup now seems disingenuous in retrospect, like the storyteller was being dishonest. A small reveal might just be an annoyance, but a big one can ruin the story.
How to Fix It
When planning a reveal, the watch word is “subtle.” If the story doesn’t talk up its reveal too much, there’s less chance of disappointment. Deep Space Nine did this really well with the Dominion, an evil empire built on conquest. For the first two seasons, passing aliens would occasionally mention something called “the Dominion,” but none of them knew much about it. This established the idea of the Dominion in viewers’ minds, but it didn’t create any expectations the show couldn’t live up to.
Another option is to build up one set of expectations, then intentionally subvert them. This contrast usually creates new interest rather than disappointment, as the audience realizes things aren’t as they seemed. In Gentlemen Bastards, Sabetha could have been established early as just another former member of the gang, one of several who left. If she were shown to be nothing special, then revealing her as a dangerous foe in the third book would have piqued reader interest. Readers would want to know how she got so much more skilled, which would be a good avenue to explore her character.
2. Anti-Climactic Stakes
When crafting a sequel, most storytellers will try to top the previous installment in some way. This makes sense, because audiences usually aren’t interested in a story with lower stakes than what came before. But sometimes the scale of a story can get so large that it becomes meaningless.
In Sabriel, first book of the Old Kingdom series, the villain wants to turn everyone in the world into zombies enslaved to his will. Those are big stakes for a conflict, and they work well. Unfortunately, they don’t leave the sequel with anywhere to go. The author tried anyway, and in the second novel, the villain is trying to destroy the entire universe.
That’s technically a bigger scale than Sabriel, but it’s a meaningless increase. To people living on Earth,* being turned into a mindless zombie is effectively the same as being annihilated in a world-ending apocalypse. Everyone’s dead either way. There’s no indication of any aliens who might count as additional casualties in the second scenario.
A novel that’s hit its scale ceiling is at an impasse. If the storyteller tries to raise the stakes anyway, the results feel contrived or silly. Audiences can tell that there’s nothing more on the line this time than last time. If the storyteller doesn’t try to raise the stakes, then the next installment will be a letdown, because it hasn’t escalated the way audiences expect.
How to Fix It
When planning a series, it behooves a storyteller to leave room to grow. If the series is meant to go for three novels, save the end of all human life for the third book. Villains in the earlier books can be trying to conquer a single nation or maybe working to find the Macguffin needed to kill all humans.
But if you’re staring down the deadline for another novel in your series, it’s too late to go back and institute better planning. In that case, I recommend a change in the type of stakes. This way your story can maintain novelty for the audience without having to top itself. For example, if you have a story where the protagonists must save the world from supernatural evil, the next installment can focus on those same characters trying to govern the world they’ve saved. The story naturally transforms into a political drama, which means it doesn’t need to turn the scale up to eleven.
3. Meandering
A tight plot is essential in most stories. Nothing turns audiences away faster than boredom. But as a series goes on, the plot can lose crispness, meandering around as the storyteller tries to find a satisfying end.
The first two books of the Old Man’s War series are very well plotted. Stakes are clearly established, and events move at just the right pace to keep the audience hooked. The third book, Last Colony, is not so lucky. Most of the plot in this novel takes place off page while the protagonists deal with smaller problems – few of which provide any challenge. The novel feels like it’s running out the clock until events come to a head elsewhere.
Last Colony’s plot lacks any urgency because few of the characters’ actions have any effect on the big plot that’s brewing off page. The book is supposed to focus on their struggles for survival, but the dangers they face are minor at best. Oddly, the author wrote a second book, Zoe’s Tale, which covers the same events from another character’s point of view, and it doesn’t improve the matter. This parallel novel is just as meandering but with the added problem of knowing how everything will turn out.
A meandering story can occur in the middle of a series or at the end. When it happens in the middle, it’s usually a sign that the author is killing time until the real plot arrives. When the final installment in a series meanders, it’s a sign that the author has used up their setting’s reserve of story and is casting about for more. Either way, the result is boredom. Audiences may never get past a boring middle to see the end, and a boring ending to a long series is just disappointing.
How to Fix It
In most cases, a meandering story can be solved by cutting content. Just like how authors must trim the muddlesome middle from stand-alone novels, a series’ meandering installment will benefit from scaling down or outright removal. Storytellers usually overestimate how long they need to wait before introducing their coolest plot elements, and cutting out a slow middle will get the story going faster. If the problem is at the end of a series, that’s probably a sign the story is done. Either craft a new plot with better pacing, or put the series to bed.
Sometimes there’s a critical element buried in a meandering story that can’t be removed. Last Colony contains the finale to a story of galactic diplomacy that started back in book one. Cutting the novel entirely it would mean no resolution for that plot line. In this situation, storytellers should extract the critical element and refocus the story around it. If more of Last Colony had been about the wheeling and dealing of interstellar diplomats, it would have been a far more interesting book.
4. Unwelcome Additions
Attachment is a critical element in storytelling. Authors need their audiences to form attachments to characters and plots, or the story is doomed from the start. One reason long series have staying power is because audiences have such a long time to form attachments. Most people who’ve read five books in a series will read the sixth, because they want to know what happens to their favorite characters. Unfortunately, this can backfire when the author wants to introduce something new into the story.
A Song of Ice and Fire is particularly strong on the attachment front. Over the first four books, readers developed strong connections not only with characters but also with the noble houses themselves. The houses became characters in their own right, even when they had almost no members left.* This became a problem at the end of book four, when a new noble house burst onto the the scene: House Martell. Technically, Martell was around before, but it was so far in the background as to be easily forgotten.
Book five made Martell central to the plot, to the point where it crowded out some of the more established characters and factions. A huge section of the book was devoted to a Martell prince and his adventures, most of which barely feature any characters we’d met before. To make matters worse, the Martells are badly over-candied. The other houses all have one or two specialities, but Martell seems to do everything. They are terrifying warriors, cunning diplomats, and wealthy merchants. They’re even more egalitarian than the rest of Westeros, in case it wasn’t clear which house we were supposed to root for.
New additions like House Martell are annoying because they aren’t what the audience has become attached to. Readers pick up the fifth book in a series because they want to continue the adventures of their favorite characters, not learn a bunch of new ones. Sometimes, authors make these additions because they’re bored with a story’s existing elements, and sometimes it’s all part of the plan, but the result is the same: irritation at the interlopers.
How to Fix It
First, it’s important to stay interested in the story you already have. If you think the story needs something fresh to keep things interesting, that’s fine, but try using an existing element to do it. If you want your story of political intrigue to transform into a war thriller, you don’t need to conjure up an army from nowhere. One of your scheming politicians can decide they’ve had it with talking, and that they’ll get their way by force of arms.
If you decide a new addition is necessary, link it to something already in the story. One reason the Martells are so annoying is that they appear in the story with their own goals and plans, independent of existing characters. If they’d been more connected with a faction we already knew, either in opposition or support, they’d have fit better.
5. Character Overcrowding
As a series goes on, it often adds characters. Unlike unwelcome additions, these characters could be perfectly accepted by the audience, but if a series keeps adding them, the sheer number can become a problem.
Like many TV shows, Teen Wolf acquires more and more characters as it goes. After six seasons, that’s quite a lot. But Teen Wolf has an extra wrinkle. Each season has at least two villains, and those villains almost never die. The few who do always come back. Sometimes they join team good; other times they stick around as minor antagonists. So in addition to all the good guys, every season added two or three new villains to the cast.
Even after a number of actors left the show, you can see how this would create a problem. In the show’s sixth season,* there just wasn’t enough screen time to go around. By my count, the show has eight main cast members, three important supporting cast members, and two villains from previous seasons. That’s not even counting the new villains they introduced for the season. With only ten episodes, it’s no surprise that no one got a satisfactory resolution to their arc.
This problem is bad enough in TV shows, where each new character means paying for a new actor. It can get a lot worse in books, where only the author’s good sense limits the cast. This is often referred to as “series bloat,” and it has two possible consequences. First, as happened with Teen Wolf, characters don’t get a proper resolution. Second, the story’s length balloons so there can be time for every character to have their moment.
While there’s no maximum length on stories, making a work longer must be justified, and providing closure for an out-of-control cast doesn’t make the cut. Even if each character is entertaining on their own, having too many slows the story down until it’s just dull.
How to Fix It
This solution requires a bit of self-discipline. After the first installment of a story, only add a character after you’ve removed one. They could be removed through death, retirement, or going to colonize an alien planet, but they must be inactive in the story. Now you can add another character. This way your cast list stays constant, with the same number of characters that worked the first time. Any extra additions had better be critical to the story.
As in the previous section, if you feel the need for a new character, see if an existing character can fill the role instead. Let’s say that for the next novel in your series, you want a character chosen to wield a god’s weapon. Instead of adding that character from scratch, arrange for an existing character to visit one of the god’s temples at just the right astronomical alignment to receive a divine blessing.
6. Bizarre Plots
When a series exhausts the stories that are easy to tell in its setting, it sometimes turns meandering. Other times, the series becomes truly bizarre, as the storyteller grasps for anything they haven’t done before.
Temeraire is one of my favorite book series ever, but it does have a predictable formula. Temeraire the dragon and his favorite human Laurence go to a new country, learn about the dragons in that country, and probably get into a scrap with the French. By the eighth book, the author must have felt that formula was getting stale, because she decided to shake it up by giving Laurence a severe attack of amnesia.
That sounds like a joke because amnesia is so cliche, but it’s actually what happens. Laurence forgets everything that’s happened in the entire series, effectively reverting back to who he was when the books started. Not only does this feel hokey but also it’s mostly wasted time, as most of the book is spent with Laurence relearning everything we watched him learn over seven previous books.
When a series starts reaching for the truly bizarre options in order to keep going, it’s a signal to quit. Temeraire’s author managed to right things in time for a decent finale in book nine, but most series won’t be so lucky. Once things start unraveling, they’ll usually get worse, as the storyteller digs ever deeper for content.
How to Fix It
If you find yourself coming up with increasingly strange plots to keep your series going, it’s probably time to draw that series to a close. Time to start fresh and write something else. If you can’t or don’t want to end the series* consider a major shake-up to your story’s premise. If your series is about a knight who rides across the land entering tournaments, have the next kingdom they arrive in ban knighthood entirely. From there, the story can change to one of resisting a tyrannical ruler. Big changes like that might lose a few audience members, but they’re essential to find new material.
A long series is a major commitment for anyone, be they a single novelist or a television production staff. Something that takes so much work is worth doing right, so look out for these problems and others that are likely to pop up. Few things are more disappointing to an audience than investing years in a series only to see it crash and burn.
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I actually liked book 3 of that Scalzi series. I thought that the less threatening obstacles were made more of a problem because the protagonist was back in a human body and not in his souped-up military one. I found Zoe’s Tale to be atrocious. Not only does it cover the same material pretty much, it does it from a point of view of a less interesting character. And when there’s something for her to do to save everyone, it feels so contrived.
I had the same feeling about the Martell’s too. What was worse was that guy courting Dany. The whole last book is spending dozens and dozens of pages on this guy and ultimately all he does is let the dragons loose. They could’ve accomplished the same thing by just letting them break loose…more or less like the show did.
I thought the part with the prince was funny. Such a long set up for a looney tunes style ending. Cracked me right up it did. He had everything planned, but forgot about the fact he can’t actually control dragons. Hilarious.
Spectacle creep is one that irritates me. It’s probably one thing that keeps me from going into superhero comics, as opposed to their appearances in other media.
“No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to find itself in peril, again. Sometimes, I feel like the maid, ‘I just cleaned up in here! Can’t we just keep it clean for five minutes?'” -Mr. Incredible.
Power balance is another issue I’ve seen with long series. You want the characters to develop their strengths over time, but for some series they get so ridiculously powerful it seems like nothing can touch them. There’s no tension in the later stories.
I watched a video not long ago, “Shonen Anime’s Biggest Problem” about the issue of escalation in that I think applies to many of the issues brought up in point 2. In that video he talks about how it is not always necessary for the stakes to get bigger or more epic.
Part of the main thesis of the video seems to be about using de-escalation (which I think can be equated here to the idea of changing the nature of the stakes), but more importantly it’s about how stakes that are more personal to your cast of heroes do more to engage readers than stakes with bigger numbers but less personal investment.
The video’s only about 10 minutes long, and if you have any interest in shonen anime (and even if you don’t) I think it might be worth a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLIbI1FI6N4
Yes, since most shonen animes are build around constant confrontation and competition, they usually run into #2 sooner or later. At some point, there is simply no more tension, because you know they’ll somehow match the new enemy and move on. I admit to only reading my way through 40 volumes of Dragonball (manga, not anime, but I’ve also seen the anime series), because it was still slighty funny (and I love Piccolo). The tension of ‘how will they defeat this one?’ was long gone by then.
It’s that tricky balancing act, isn’t it? Trying to raise the stakes of the story to a certain point while at the same time having the characters grow with their personal investment. It reminds me that it’s generally best to have the conflict start small and then grow it from there.
I think there’s something that turns audiences away faster than boredom: sesquipedalian sentences. Just thinking about them makes my head hurt.
Long series also tend to break their own canon rules for the sake of pulling in more characters and more powers. Take Once Upon a Time.
Seasons one and two established that traveling between realms required a rare item, powerful magic, or both. If someone is in a land without magic – like earth – it’s almost impossible to open a portal. While the viewer initially thinks that Regina is the evil mastermind who took away happy endings by transporting everyone to earth, we later find out that Rumpelstiltskin let Regina think it was her idea, but he put all the pieces in place. His master plan took over 200 years to implement, because traveling to a realm without magic was THAT difficult.
But later seasons wanted to pull in more characters from other worlds (to go through the entire Disney roster). At first, the rules stayed in place with rare exceptions (i.e. mermaids can travel between realms since the sea is everywhere and timeless, Killian had the golden fleece as the sail of his ship, we used flashbacks to see characters before they became dimension-ally separated.) BUT THEN it was so easy to dimension jump and open portals that it made Rumpelstiltskin’s initial plan unnecessarily slow and incompetent. Why take 200 years for the right people to be born and the relationships play out to ultimately bait Regina into casting her evil spell, when Rumple could’ve just had Ursula wear a magic shell and touch her tentacle to the surface of the ocean? Or summon a magic tornado to blow him to Oz so he can steal the ruby slippers which allow dimension jumping, too?
The later seasons wipe out the cleverness of the original season, where magic required training and great sacrifice, and when magical artifacts were rare. It sucked that the show began to change the realm every half-season with Neverland, Oz, Arendell, Camelot, and the freaking Underworld.
On the topic of Old Man’s War, I can’t be the only one who was absolutely not okay with a romance between the protagonist and a six-year-old consciousness born into the body of his dead wife.
So I think the reason most people don’t have an issue with it is that age difference gets pretty fuzzy in spec fic stories. In most cases, when people find an age difference troubling, it’s more about a power differential than the actual age.
For example, people object to Bela and Edward, but not usually Buffy and Angel, even though in both cases, the vampire is much older than their partner. The reason seems to be that Bela has little to know power in her relationship with Edward. Not only is he an order of magnitude stronger than she is, he has over a century of experience while she’s a teenager.
Meanwhile, Buffy is on fairly even footing with Angel. She’s actually stronger than he is, and despite being much younger, she’s seen some shit, so the audience is assured that she’s not being taken advantage of.
In the books, Perry and Sagan don’t get together unto Sagan is well aware of who she is and what she wants, plus she’s a super soldier. In that context, their age difference isn’t the same as it would be in real life.
Of course, this can also play into the super gross excuse people make for sexual predators in real life, where girls are said to be “more mature” than their age and that makes it okay for older men to pray on them. So it’s something to be handled with care.
I didn’t know Edward was with Bela Lugosi (or punk musician Bela B?) before he got into a relationship with Bella :D
I think you’re right about Bella/Edward vs. Buffy/Angel (or Spike). Buffy simply is much deeper into the whole ‘world behind our world’ thing and she has too much of an agenda to ever become someone like Bella. She is on much more even footing with the Vampire in her life (and even during their darkest times, Spike or Angel/Angelus aren’t half as creepy as Edward during his best times).
Agenda of the younger (and usually female) partner in a relationship might actually play a big role. If, like Bella, they don’t seem to have any real agenda apart from reacting to their lover, they are seen as less mature and thus the influence of the older (and usually male) partner is seen as more damaging or endangering.
There’s also a difference between getting into a relationship and preying on someone. A relationship should have more of a balance, should make the partners equals.
That’s a fair point. Sagan is indeed proven to be very capable in this novel, though she still has the emotional maturity of a child.
I may be a little bit biased because I didn’t like the book as a whole, but my main problem with this romance is that Perry seemed to be cool with it. There’s some wavering while he takes in the fact that the woman he’s seeing is not really his wife, but a new, completely different person. But after that, he doesn’t even question it. He doesn’t show much of an emotion towards the army for using his wife’s body like that, which is what one would normally expect. Sagan’s obsessive questioning about Perry’s wife doesn’t help.
I’ll still argue that this romance is inappropriate because Sagan doesn’t have the maturity to understand what’s going on, but I’ll agree with you when it comes to the power level dynamic. I hadn’t analyzed this romance under this light before. And yes, Edward and Bella’s relationship is just terrible. There’s little to be salvaged there.
Late to the party here, but in my eyes, although Angel and Buffy is far LESS creepy than Bella and Edward, it still came off as iffy, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. True, they’re more evenly balanced and that HELPS, but Buffy is still very much a kid: The way she talks, thinks, behaves etc makes it obvious that she IS sixteen, not an adult, whereas Angel isn’t just an adult man, but an old one at that (even though he looks young).
Actually, me and some friends discussed the other day how if there were super old or immortal beings in real life, it might be really hard for such a being and a regular adult to have a healthy relationship. Maybe the super old one’s extremely long life experience would always give them the upper hand in every single discussion, for instance, and so the relationship would end up really lopsided, even if the super old one wasn’t exactly abusive. But it’s hard to say, since we don’t have beings like that in real life.
In any case, I’d suggest against having really young people in relationships with adults, at least unless it’s OBVIOUS that the person who’s really young in years still has the personality of an adult (for some reason: Maybe they’re some kind of android that was programmed to have full maturity from day one, if that even makes sense, or something like that.)
Wow. Nearly every word of that bit about House Martell is wrong. Oberyn Martell was a pretty important character in book 3, so let’s not go around saying that the family appeared out of nowhere in book 4. That “huge section” of book 5 dedicated to his nephew, the prince, consisted of 4 chapters, in a book with more than 70! There was one more chapter that dealt with the other Martells in that book. Meanwhile, in book 4, there were 4 chapters about the Martells out of 46. Of those 9 chapters, 3 were from the point of view of an external observer of the Martells.
I have no idea where the idea comes from that other houses have one or two specialites but the Martells do everything. Every family has medieval nobles, all of whom are trained to be politicians, diplomats and administrators, with varying degrees of success. The Starks do it, the Lannisters do it, the Tullys and Arryns and Baratheons and Tyrells do it. They all more or less fight the same way, with armies built around heavy armored cavalry with supporting infantry and archers.
Not a single Martell is a wealthy merchant. One character, the one who was ONLY in book 3, so clearly not the subject of this diatribe, might possibly be seen as a terrifying warrior or cunning diplomat. Except he loses the only fight in which he engages and his version of diplomacy seemed to be consist of trying to pick fights with a kingdom that has ten times the numbers his own family can bring to bear. The Martells who suddenly show up late in the game are a wheelchair-bound man in his fifties, who is not a warrior and practices no diplomacy. He is intelligent, but his plans fall apart because he is too cautious & keeps too many secrets. There is a female character who is neither warrior nor merchant, and might be a competent diplomat, but mostly only persuades a group of friends to join her in a disastrous plot that fails because she didn’t know her people as well as she thought she did, and doesn’t understand the reality of her position. The prince whose four chapters of adventure were so lengthy is specifically played up as a very ordinary man, but for his birth status. He is just a regular guy on a mission over his head. And fails. Those are our brilliant Martells, with too much candy. A group of mediocrities whose plans fail even when they don’t die horribly.
The egalitarianism of the Martells is largely an informed attribute. In the setting, their culture practices absolute primogeniture, rather than male-favored. Which means that on paper, the eldest child inherits, regardless of gender. And a significant point in the Martell story is that the eldest child believes her father is trying to pass her over in succession for her younger brother and marry her off to a powerful ally instead of letting her inherit his position and rule the family domain. The big reveal is that he DOES intend to let her inherit, but only because he has given up on that plan as the potential groom is dead. Their region also has less restrictive sexual mores, which means that though they still consider children born to unmarried parents to be bastards, and still made to use a general bastard surname instead of their parents’ names, but they are NOT treated like utter shit and allowed to have relationships with their families. Of course, when a bastard asks to marry his Martell lover, her father forbids it because he’s not of high enough rank. So, yeah. Super egalitarian.
Another problem, which is related to points 3, 4 and 6, but which I think is rather different, is when the author has obviously got bored of the central conceit which originally inspired the series, or has developed a new interest (often political or religious) which they decide they’re going to shoehorn in, which the result that the style, theme or content of the series abruptly changes.
Numbers two and six seem to have similar fixes for their respective problems. I believe that both of them are talking about the best places to draw a series to a close in different ways. Number two talks about how high we could logically raise the stakes for failure while number six talks about having plots that make sense.