Fitting the pieces together

Since I had the mad idea that I should write a novella series, I’ve been thinking about plot points a lot. The style I want to write in means there is an over-arcing story generally, but each book will have its own major, semi-disconnected event.

That sounds pretty simple. Decide on the end point to the series, and just throw other exciting ideas at the individual stories. But I realised that each event in the novellas will need to lead to the character development. If I want Character A fall in love with Character B, can that happen in book 1, or will that cut off all the possibilities through the other books?

So I need to map out a general idea for the WHOLE series before I even really start writing. I mean, I can always hold over scenes and put them in later, but it needs to flow together smoothly, from start to finish.

There are few things worse than reading a series and seeing exactly where the author decided half-way through “HEY THIS IS A GREAT IDEA”, and ret-conned everything just to fit in the new plans. You know when they did it, and you know they scrapped their original ideas to implement the new ones, and now there will be unresolved issues, because all the loose ends can’t be wrapped up nicely in the new scenario.

The enormity of this kind of planning is both frightening and invigorating. I’m kind of excited at taking on a big challenge like this. I already have so many interesting sub-plots I want to work in. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out where they go chronologically!

~A