Writing a Novel Series for Kids, Part 3
18 books in Wendelin Van Draanen’s MG mystery series! (I haven’t read them all yet.)
Different Approaches to Series Fiction
I’ve been thinking about novels in series quite a lot lately because I’m writing one and several of my clients are too. It occurred to me as I was watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (a prequel to the original Star Trek) that some novel series are more like episodic television. Each book stands alone, like an individual episode of the original Star Trek—the story is complete in 50 minutes and comprehensible by itself. You learn more about the characters and their world by watching the series in order.
This is true for novel series too. You can read the books out of order and still have an enjoyable experience, but reading a series in order will often give the reader more insight into characters and their evolution over time.
Character evolution
Mystery series often take this approach. Wendelin Van Draanen wrote 18 books in her Sammy Keyes mystery series for middle grade readers. In her quick guide to the series, she writes, “To get the most out of character growth it’s ideal to read the series sequentially, but Books #1-15 work fine as individual titles.”
Her series is set during Sammy’s 7th- and 8th-grade years, and “there is an overarching storyline,” Van Draanen writes. The first book in the series, Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief, was published in 1999 and won the Edgar for best juvenile mystery.
The series is narrated in first person by Sammy, a feisty white girl who lives on the sly with her grandmother in a retirement community that doesn’t allow kids.
Van Draanen wrote the first three books in the series before she found a publisher. I think it’s safe to say that she didn’t plan for an 18-book series. But she set up her main character so that Sammy could grow and change in ways that attracted readers and made them want more.
Plot and character arc
Other series, however, need to be carefully planned from the beginning. You couldn’t pants your way through a series as intricate as Harry Potter. Author J. K. Rowling knew “from the start … there would be seven books and … had the whole story plotted out early on.”
Her plots are intricate. Each novel has a clear and compelling story arc that also informs the overall series arc. Rowling needed to know an incredible amount of detail about the overall arc in order to plant clues throughout and to have the series wrap up so well.
Character evolution with a twist
Another approach to series fiction is to continue the characters but to rotate the primary point-of-view character. Jeanne Birdsall does this in her Penderwicks series.
In the first book of the series, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (a National Book Award winner), the omniscient narrator covers the sisters fairly equally. The sisters are 12, 11, 10, and 4.
As the series continues over about 15 years, the kids grow older, and the focus shifts to the youngest siblings, including a stepbrother and a new little sister. This allows Birdsall to accommodate the characters’ growth while staying firmly in a mindset for middle grade readers.
If you haven’t read Birdsall’s books, or read them in order, I highly recommend them. The character evolutions are delightful and so are her uses of omniscient narration and humor.
Series potential
If you’re working on a fiction series and you’re not yet agented or published, then you’ll probably want to make sure the first book in your series can both stand alone and offer series potential. It’s a tricky balancing act, for sure.
And it may be something you don’t know yet.
For my middle grade zoo mystery, I’m planting seeds for character growth, but I don’t have a clear end point in mind yet for the series. Do I want to cover a specific number of years, like Van Draanen does with Sammy Keyes? If so, how many books should I plan for?
These are a few of the questions I’m mulling over. What about you?