Leave it open

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. If you’ve picked up your copy of Anialych, I really hope you’re enjoying it—and if you haven’t, then I’ll pester you yet again and tell you to head over to www.rad-writing.com/store to order yours! You can also get it in digital on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo… but you’re better off getting it from RAD. Honestly. I’m not just saying that because I work there. If you get the digital copy at RAD, you’re getting a much better deal.

I’ve digressed.

All month long, we’ve been talking about writing a series of standalone novels. It’s a process, and a long and hard one. It’s not generally written (or released, for that matter) in chronological order—which makes it even more difficult to keep everything straight. Which is why I wanted to take a month to talk about it.

If you haven’t been around this month, I’d highly recommend scrolling through the posts from March and seeing everything we’ve discussed thus far. For the rest of you, let’s get right into it.

Don’t “finish” every story

Really, this is a pretty good general rule of thumb, no matter what kind of story you’re writing. Why? Because if you tie a neat little bow on the end of your story, you’ve prevented your reader from imagining how they think the story ends. Reading is about experiencing through imagination, so it’s best to allow your readers that chance at imagination—but that’s really not what we’re talking about today.

No, see, I want you to leave some loose ends in your books so they can be tied up in other books in the series.

Not big loose ends, mind you. Just little ones, questions that your readers might be wondering about along the way. Little things that maybe don’t quite make sense, additional characters who feel like they don’t need to be there (but will maybe play a larger role in another book down the line, perhaps).

These are all things that you, as a writer, should be thinking about in any case. You should be thinking of ways to connect your stories to one another. Endings are a great way to do that. Leave a little loose end in book one, and have the answer revealed offhandedly in book four. I’ve actually done this with a few things in the Druid Novels, many of them so subtle that casual readers might miss them, but I inserted them for the avid readers, those who like to piece everything together.

And that’s who I want you to cater for, when you do this.

It’s about the little things, the itty-bitty details that only your avid fans will really see. It’s about finding a way to connect those fans with the story as a whole. Give them little words and phrases here and there that connect the stories and tie up loose ends from other books. Mention what happened to characters in book two, with the characters in book five.

My one warning, when you’re doing this? Don’t do it in pure exposition. It can be a character thinking, or two characters talking, but if you're in book seven and you insert in pure exposition what really happened to Franklin at the end of book four in your series, you’re just coddling your audience. It’s okay to make them work for it, to let them use their imagination.

Besides, if it’s your characters tying those loose ends, it comes out much more naturally, from a reader’s perspective. 

[love]

{Rani Divine}