Are you ready to write series fiction?

By Holly Lisle

People have been waiting for my expansion of my How to Write A Series class to come back. Until now, it wasn’t back because in its previous version, I went way down the rabbit hole of too much information, and I had to figure out what to keep and what to dump.

I also had to get rid of all the damn video. The lessons this time through will not be me talking. They will be you reading. Writers read. It’s how we got to be writers in the first place.

The objective of a class on how to write a series is, in fact, to get the damn series written and published, on time and on budget.

This morning I dug out all the questions folks asked me about series fiction (that I could find, anyway).

And I laid out my plan for the class. You can see a thumbnail of the diagram below — if you click it, you can see the big version, which is pretty big (if you’re on a cell phone or tablet, it may still be unreadable. If so, I apologize.

THE QUESTIONS SO FAR:
MONTH 1
How do I come up with series ideas?
How do I pre-plan episodes?
How do I start Episode 1?
What do I have to get right in Episode 1?

MONTH 2
What do I keep track of while I’m writing the first episode?
What’s special about a first-episode ending?
What’s the difference between Story Plotting and Series Planning?
How do I maintain series continuity?

MONTH 3
What preparation do I do to set up the second episode?
What workflow do I need to produce middle episodes regularly?
How do I add, change, or kill off important characters without breaking the series?
What do I do when the series goes in a direction that I didn’t plan…but I like it?

MONTH 4
What do I do when I realize — AFTER an episode is published — that I’ve made a massive mistake?
How do I write the final episode?
SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I pick up writing a series after a long absence?
SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I build a series out of a story I’d planned as a stand-alone?

MONTH 5
SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I finish someone else’s series?
SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I FIX someone else’s series?
SPECIAL PROBLEM: How do I write a series to an exacting word count?
Final lesson will be the one most requested by the current class students

So if you’re interested in writing series fiction, and you have a question that you don’t see answered (or addressed) in my diagram, please ask in the comments below.

ADDED LATER:

And this is why I ask. I’m now in the process of sorting the questions, and figuring out what extra lessons I’ll need to add, and where in the process they’ll fit.

I’ll put up a revised Class Diagram once I have this done. THANK YOU for the wonderful questions!

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