Research = Fun

Hi guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. All month long, as you’ll know if you’ve stopped in since Tuesday, is all about writing a series of standalone novels. It’s what I’ve done with the Druid Novels, and I know just how complicated it can be—even though there’s no direct tie-in from one book to the next, no characters that slip across from one book to the next.

If you haven’t read it yet, be sure to check out Tuesday’s post and get your foundations set up before we dive into the nitty-gritty.

Worlds vs. Landscapes

Using the Druid Novels as our primary example, the world would be that of Paradise, in which every druid story takes place. The landscapes are the particular areas where each story takes place (i.e. Coetir takes place in an island landscape, Cedwig in a jungle, but both are in the same world).

Before you start your series, you’ll want to have a pretty good idea of both your world and your landscapes.

Sure, you might not know right away, where your story is taking place. Sure, you might not have realized there was more to your precious standalone novel until you’d finished it (Coetir, anyone?), but that doesn’t change the fact. You need to understand your world, and you need to have a clear definition of your landscapes. (if you need help in creating a well-detailed map, check out Artifexian on YouTube). It takes a lot of time, a lot of attention to detail, but these are things you need to know—especially before you start book two.

In the case of the Druid Novels, I didn’t know it was a series at all, until a few months after I’d finished Coetir. No idea. I didn’t want it to be a series. But once I realized what it was, I knew I needed to get my world figured out before I went any further. I needed to know what my landscapes were, before I could write them.

Even if all you do is make a quick sketch on a napkin, of what your world looks like or what landscapes end where, you’ll be on the right track. These things can be refined during editing—but if you don’t at least have the basis in your head when you start book two, you’ll find yourself in a deep hole when you get to the editing phase.

See, what I always recommend when writing a standalone series, is similar to what I did with the druids. It’s a big, big world with lots of details and lots of information that can be seeped into the story from landscape to landscape—but each individual story will focus on one specific landscape, and how the characters there are faring with the change of the status quo (because if the status quo doesn’t change, you don’t really have a story, do you?). In particular, I'm thinking of the nature of evil in the world I've created. In Coetir, the people only really know of the Diafol. But in other stories, we discover Esforos, cythraul, and even tylwith-teg. That's all information that exists in the world as a whole, but could only be revealed in one landscape at a time—so that when we reach the end, you know exactly what's at stake. 

But if you didn’t do your homework, if you don’t have an idea of what the different lands are and who lives in them (just a basic idea, of course), your characters won’t be able to refer to them. This worked for the Druid Novels, in the case of Coetir. The islands are so separated from the rest of the world that the people there never thought about the plains, the cities they’d come from. But when it came to Cedwig, Dwr, Mynidd, and Anialych, the plains had to be mentioned. In fact, each of these four had to have some way of relating to each other. 

Your story will be no different—which is why you need to do your homework now, and get the big details out of the way before you get too far into the writing part.

Research is fun, remember?

[love]

{Rani Divine}