Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [87]
It’s important, if you do embark on a series, that you not presuppose the reader’s acquaintance with any previous books. Your second novel—indeed, each of your series novels—ought to be complete in and of itself. You’re writing a second book about a particular character, not Volume Two of a trilogy; the reader shouldn’t have to have read your first book in order to appreciate your second.
At the same time, there shouldn’t be so much duplication in the second book that someone who has read the first will be bored. Don’t worry overmuch about this last, however. It’s been my observation that the sort of reader who likes series books doesn’t mind being reminded of certain things. The sense of the familiar evidently appeals to him; he gets the feeling that he’s an insider, already acquainted with characters who must be described for noninsiders.
One problem with a series is that you have to remember who’s who and what’s what. The same readers who most enjoy series novels are most insistent that the writer avoid inconsistencies. It may be no particular problem remembering that your lead has blue eyes, but what color are his girlfriend’s? And where did I mention the names and ages of Scudder’s kids?
Arthur Maling has a particular dilemma along these lines, and one that serves to illustrate just how complicated the business of series novels can be:
The Price, Potter and Petacque books have given me particular problems. Instead of having just one series character, I have a cast of fifteen or sixteen major and minor characters that move from book to book—Brock Potter and everyone in the company—and I have a hell of a time remembering the color of everyone’s eyes, the names and ages of everyone’s kids, etc. A fellow mystery writer and friend of mine, James McClure, made a chart for me, listing all the Price, Potter and Petacque characters and their relationships, and it’s been helpful; but I keep forgetting to enter the pertinent details, which means that I frequently have to dig through several finished books or a couple of hundred pages of manuscript to find what I said about one or another of the characters a year or two or four previously.
A problem with a series, albeit one you’re not terribly likely to face in the second book, is boredom. Most series writers run into this sooner or later. Dorothy Sayers is supposed to have told Agatha Christie how sick and tired she was of writing about Lord Peter Wimsey; Christie in turn confessed to a deep-seated desire to kill off Hercule Poirot, and proved it by doing precisely that in the “final” Poirot novel, written in the forties and not published until after the author’s own death.
I stopped writing the Tanner series not because I grew tired of the character but because the books themselves seemed to have a deadening sameness about them. It seemed to me that Tanner kept going to the same kinds of places, meeting the same sorts of people, having the same kinds of conversations, and dealing with the same kinds of plot problems. I’ve since come to realize that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. My awareness of this sameness was inevitably more acute than a reader’s would be, since I was spending a couple of months writing something he would read in as many hours. Besides, readers want a series book to be pretty much like the last one; if they hadn’t liked the last one in the first place they wouldn’t have bought the second, or the third, or the fortieth.
The fact that you’ve created a strong character doesn’t mean you should write a second book about him. It seems as though some writers are geared to write series books and others are not. Sometimes success will tend to force a series upon a writer. That sort of thing has been happening ever