'Rules' Of A Trilogy??

[The Curious Orange]

The best advice I can give is to try and ensure that Book 1 has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Yes, it may not have a definitive end, but it should contain some plotline that is wrapped up, even if that resolution in turn leads to a cliffhanger, or there are other plotlines left hanging.

Robin Hobb is a good author to read to see how she handles a trilogy. Fool's Errand is a good example. The book is about how the main character, Fitz, ends his hermit-like lifestyle and returns to the castle, and courtly society, where he lived 15 years earlier, to take up the job of tutor to the young Prince Dutiful (who may or may not be his son). The book is concerned with setting up the characters and situations needed for the longer trilogy - it's all "Beginning". But Hobb then tacks on a brief kidnapping-and-rescue plot that gives the first volume a sense of conclusion, while leaving all the major plot threads hanging. Diplomacy of Wolves by Holly Lisle does a similar thing in a very different way.

I would suggest that if you are splitting up a longer tale into 3 books, you do need to ensure that Book 1 stands up as a book in its own right.

[Anne Lyle]

Originally Posted by The Curious Orange

I would suggest that if you are splitting up a longer tale into 3 books, you do need to ensure that Book 1 stands up as a book in its own right.

Seconded.

Remember that LotR was first published sixty years ago, and publishing has changed a great deal in that time. A few authors still get away with what are basically multi-volume novels (I believe the Wheel of Time is more like this, though I haven't read it), but mostly what publishers want is a series of linked novels - whether that's three, four, seven or whatever. Think Harry Potter, or the even more recent "Gentleman Bastards" series by Scott Lynch. There's an overall story arc that builds from book to book, but each novel has a self-contained plot as well.

You might get lucky and be able to sell a 400k multi-volume story, but a standalone plus sequels is the safer strategy. It's certainly the approach I'm taking

[Teresa Edgerton]

Originally Posted by Anne Lyle

You might get lucky and be able to sell a 400k multi-volume story, but a standalone plus sequels is the safer strategy. It's certainly the approach I'm taking

But Josh (who asked the question in the first place) has already written his prospective trilogy. It's a bit late to turn it into three separate but related stories, if that's not what it is already.

I find that if you give it enough time and effort a story will reach its own best natural length. It may then be necessary to divide it up into many volumes, it may not. If not, there may still be minor characters who have their own stories to tell. There may be consequences that develop for the main character much further down the road. The adventure of the first novel may set the stage for things that happen in another time or another place or to other people. These things may call for sequels. Or the backstory may turn out to be interesting enough that you realize you want to tell that. That may call for a prequel.

Or you may set out in the beginning with the idea of writing three otherwise unrelated stories in the same setting, and involving some of the same characters, or with some over-arching theme.

The story, if you listen to it long enough, will tell you what it wants to be. Then you work very hard to make it the best of it's kind, whatever that is.

[lin robinson]

Well, like I said, a fine hair to split. With hundreds of head-scratchers to classify.

As far as I'm concerned a series of three books is a trilogy. I asked where the idea came from that it wouldn't be, but am still wondering.

Doesn't matter though.

[Teresa Edgerton]

Originally Posted by lin robinson

I asked where the idea came from that it wouldn't be, but am still wondering.

I thought I answered your question. Perhaps I was obscure.

Try this:

trilogy n. a series or group of three plays, novels, operas, etc., that, although individually complete, are closely related in theme, sequence, or the like.

The Random House College Dictionary

Without each book being individually complete, you don't have a trilogy in the strict sense of the word. Without a closely related theme or sequence, you still wouldn't have a trilogy; you would simply have a series that happened to end at three books.

In ordinary conversation, it would be hair-splitting -- in discussing the structuring and division of a three book series, extremely relevant.

Perhaps you can add something to the discussion by relating some of your own experiences planning or writing a three book series.

[The Curious Orange]

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

But Josh (who asked the question in the first place) has already written his prospective trilogy. It's a bit late to turn it into three separate but related stories, if that's not what it is already.

Exactly. This is totally what I was saying. When I started writing the novel I'm currently working on, it hit me very early on that in order to tell the story properly, at the speed and with the level of detail I wanted, I would have to split it into two or three.
Fool's Errand was one of the books I looked at when I made this decision, which was why I mentioned it. I took the first third of the story, and added a self-contained sub-plot that I could tie up in one story. So I would suggest that that is what Josh should do. Is there a sub-plot that you can drag forwards and resolve at the end of book one? If not, can you write one?

The first few Wheel of Time books are far more self-contained than the latter ones. They have a definite plot that is resolved. Book One is a good example - Rand finds the Eye of the World and uses it to channel the male half of the power. It's a totally self contained story, but leaves the longer plot-lines hanging. Even the supporting characters finish the book with a partial resolution to their tales.

Same with A Game Of Thrones. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It looks and feels like nothing but the first installment in a longer tale (which it is), but in fact it's still a self-contained story in it's own right. Read it again if you don't believe me. Each of the main characters arrives at a conclusion. The main plot points are answered. (Ned finds out what Jon Arryn discovered, and who the traitors in Robert's court are, Jon is accepted into the Night's Watch and defeats an attack by the Others, Dany is freed from the useless men who make promises thay can't deliver (Viserys, then Drogo), and finds what she need to reclaim her birthright (the dragons)). Yes, those answers raise a whole new bunch of questions for future books to answer, but that's by-the-by.

I cannot think of a single first book in a trilogy or longer series (excluding those that are merely split into 2 for paperback release) that does not stand up as a complete, properly structured book in it's own right, with a beginning, a middle, and an ending of sorts.

[Lith]

The first book of a "trilogy" usually stands alone better than the later ones, because the publishers are never sure if they will get around to publishing the sequels.

I've never paid much attention to the finer points of the world trilogy, but it's good to hear that the three-part sorta-trilogy that I'm planning is actually a trilogy, and not just three "completely separate but thematically related" stories. It's much easier on the tongue.

[Teresa Edgerton]

Originally Posted by The Curious Orange

I cannot think of a single first book in a trilogy or longer series (excluding those that are merely split into 2 for paperback release) that does not stand up as a complete, properly structured book in it's own right, with a beginning, a middle, and an ending of sorts.

I could name dozens, but one should be sufficient, since it's a story so many people are familiar with: The Lord of the Rings

But then, it probably depends on what you consider "an ending of sorts." That's a pretty subjective term.

Same with A Game Of Thrones. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It looks and feels like nothing but the first installment in a longer tale (which it is), but in fact it's still a self-contained story in it's own right. Read it again if you don't believe me.

I think I'd rather take your word for it on that one. I never quite made it to the end despite two attempts, and I think a third effort would be the end of me.

[lin robinson]

Perhaps you can add something to the discussion by relating some of your own experiences planning or writing a three book series.

Now, now.
But I'll take you up on that.

First of all, I guess part of my mis-understanding here is not realizing there are three-volume novels running around out there. Seems odd.
But I would still call a three volume novel a trilogy, and I think most people would. And I'm not sure the distinction has much to do with the question of the thread.

Actually, it's four volume sets that are on my mind these days. By a bizarre co-incidence the last two works I finished were both Part One of Four Part Series thingies. I finished both, then went back to the first one which I'd laid aside for the two months it took me to write the second one. I am no marketing the first one while poring over the second.

(Lest it sound like I'm bragging, the first MS is taken from a TV series I wrote. It's in development and I'm sick of waiting for somebody to buy the damn thing. So I had a few hours of script to work from, not to mention a very highly developed vision of where the story was going and far beyond...I had six episodes written and a map of the thing all the way through two seasons. Makes for quicker writing, lemme tell you. Also makes for writing where you suddenly notice there is no description. )

I see this as fitting nicely into four books, with a plot arc that works out right at that length. Kind of like taking a couple of years of Sopranos and making novels out of them.

The series, and books, and the current book, Mary of Angels, are set at the California/Mexico border...an area as alien, peculiar, violent, funny, and lawless as anywhere I've been. And I've been in some crazy places. I would compare it, in that respect, to Deadwood. A community set in an in-between place where there is no body to go to for help. And most of the people are pretty rough around the edges. Most of the main characters would be described as tough. aggressive women who rise to power from degraded circumstances.

The latter book is comtemporary science fiction. I was attempting to finish a screenplay about it for a competition, but just couldn't pull it off. It was too damn big. As soon as I quit trying to break it down into 120 pages, it took off and grew. I am aware of what happens to these people over the next forty years. The main characters are mostly teenagers to start out with. Young Mexican kids from the streets. Who end up bunglining into interplanetary transport: thus allowing them to pretty much expand their activities of smuggling drugs and illegal aliens.

But it's really a series about "origin of the species". Where we came from, where did THOSE people come from? Chariots of the Godfathers.

I had already decided it would make three movie length scripts when I ditched that approach. Which was good, it responds much better to a novelistic style.


So...problems. One big one I had with the screenplay that tried to sneak over to the book version was that a really entertaining character appears later in the story. There just wasn't room to get her into the first film, but I hated it without her: she's about as cinmatic as they come.

I managed to work things around so she fits well in the first book of the Sky Seeds series. Wedging her in helped re-arrange things so that the book ends at a very different place than I had invisioned.

Significant because I ended up shaking things down into three distinct schemas. In the first book, the MC is mainly in a struggle with his father (outer space guy who shows back up when he's thirteen and tells him he has to help him rebuild the earth's infrastructure). He ends up taking Dad down and sending him to judgement.

Second book the struggle is taking his father's side against the Evil Empire.

Third book the MC is pretty much Lord of Creation...whereupon starts to struggle with himself.

Fourth book is a sort of Sons Of Those Guys thing that moves beyond that.

Which I mention because it indicates the importance in these things of finding the end points and working around so there is a definite shape of a novel and end of the story. And how fretting around with that can change the overall shape. It's worth doing a lot of staring at, unless you're lucky enough to already have a nice three sausages on a string format going for you.


Getting back to the first book, it is composed of several threads of different characters who bump into each other from time to place. One of them is a dog, actually.

I ended up cutting out one of the threads because I thought it was going to be overlong. Now I'm realizing it needs to be longer and I will re-insert the material I took out.

Which I mention because the part I took out was different from the others. Which mostly take place on the Mexican side of the border and involve third world type people. And an American scumbag journalist. (It's partly autobiographical.)

So I thought....great, it's shorter and I get a thematic closure. Upon realizing that 65000 words is a little light, I started fussing around with sticking Omar back in there and suddenly started realizing that I wanted him there for several reasons, including the evocation of normal US lifestyle that his story brings, and a nice sweet , obviously unlikely romance between Mexican athlete and US cheerleader babe. It helps set up some other things for the next book.

Which a lot of this stuff does. There are minor characters in this one who become main characters in later ones. I have had to be careful with that, keeping them dimensional, but watching out for tipping their hand.

All that said, there are some threads left hanging. They are all in the minor character who grows bigger in later volumes cateqory, but it's taken some thinking and finessing. One plot line, involving a powerful political figure who will arch across all four books and provide the centerpiece for the denouement they are heading towards, is not tied off at all. You see the guy, you realize he's rotten. That he's coming on. But he doesn't resolve out. Tricky thing. I have no idea if an editor will have problems with that.

Or with the last section of the book, which is in titled sections: Yesterday, Mary Of Angels, Last Night, Last Crossing, Today, and Tomorrow.
Tomorrow being pretty much a short section that makes it really clear that there will be a second book and hints at what will happen to these characters in that second book. But in such a way that:
a) stays within a realm of, oh he'll regret that rather than "he's going to get shot by narcos"
and
b) does use "will happen" construction, but dances around it through misdirection. Fun to do that sort of thing.

Again, I would have a hard time believe that an editor would have some sort of fit over doing that. That's okay: I've made my living breaking editors' balls for decades. I could also see them thinking it's a cool, innovative thing. God knows how their minds work.

We'll see how it goes.

But anyway, it's been an interesting exercise in taking a big story and sawing it up into equal-sized pieces, each of which is it's own organic entity, but each one supporting the other.

[The Curious Orange]

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

I could name dozens, but one should be sufficient, since it's a story so many people are familiar with: The Lord of the Rings

But then, it probably depends on what you consider "an ending of sorts." That's a pretty subjective term.

LOTR is either one book or six, but even so each part of it has a very definite narrative cycle.

Book 1 ends with the immediate story goal - to get the ring to Rivendell - being completed. Book 2 concerns the Fellowship, and ends with its dissolution - the story of the Fellowship is at an end.

The immediate story goals are complete. The wider story goals are left unresolved.

I can think of loads of series where book one ends on a cliffhanger, or similar. Diplomacy of Wolves is one I've already mentioned. A cliffhanger ending is an ending of sorts - but even so the immediate story goals need to have been resolved either before, or by the cliffhanger. If the book just tells the first third of a longer tale and then just stops, no publisher will touch it.

[Dean F. Wilson]

Although LOTR is technically a three-volume novel comprising six books, most people still know it as a trilogy, and the recent films certainly drill that perception in further. Within the confines of the fantasy genre, a "trilogy" is, in essence, a copy of the book-structure of LOTR: i.e. three volumes. It is technically incorrect, since LOTR isn't really a trilogy (as most of us are aware of [though we will often refer to it as such for convenience's sake]), and thus most of the other three-volume novels aren't either.

LOTR is actually a perfect example of the incomplete narrative that Teresa was referring to. Each volume has, for example, two parts to its title - such as "Lord of the Rings" and then "Fellowship of the Ring". The former is the title of the overall novel, with the latter being the title of the individual volume. Thus, we can say that in the first volume, the storyline about the Fellowship is resolved, as they split up and go their separate ways. But the wider story of the Lord of the Rings (Sauron and/or Frodo) is not complete, and it doesn't pretend to be. Indeed, it stops right in the middle of the action, as it were, if we take it from this point of view. Then we also have the separate books. In "Return of the King", for example, there is "The War of the Ring" and "The End of the Third Age", and these deal with, for the most part, two different sides of the story - everyone except Frodo and Sam, and then Frodo and Sam (this is even more glaringly apparent in "The Two Towers"). Thus, even within one of the volumes, there are two books which contain a sense of "completeness" each, though they do not resolve the story of the volume, which, in turn, does not resolve the story of the entire multi-part novel.

I think the point that Teresa was making here is that, technically-speaking, a trilogy should have three connected novels that completely resolve the story. Could we, perhaps, consider The Hobbit and LOTR as a duology? They tell separate (completely resolved) stories, but involve similar characters and the same world, etc. Indeed, can we include The Silmarillion and make it a trilogy? I think it's more along this line than the one story about the One Ring over three volumes that Teresa was referring to (though feel free to correct me on that one!)

As for the original topic, there aren't any distinct rules I go by when writing a trilogy (or three-volume novel). I like there to be some sense of resolution in each book, but then that's just a general "rule" of writing books, not specific to trilogies.

-D

[Teresa Edgerton]

Thank you, lin. That was actually quite helpful to the discussion.

(As a side-note, and simply because the idea still bemuses you, the three-volume novel was quite common in the nineteenth century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume_novel

Not that I consider the wikipedia the most reliable source in the world, but this particular article does explain the subject quite well.)

My own experience writing three-volume works began when the single book I had planned to write kept expanding and expanding, until I knew it would have to be divided into three parts. It was, in essence, a mistake, although one that turned out well, since I sold all three books to Ace, and they went on to buy five more.

It's hard to say at this late remove whether I would have structured the story any differently had I the least idea what I was doing when I began -- or for some years afterwards. Looking back, I think that the structure that evolved was really quite elegant, but you have to read all the way to the end to see how the pattern finally comes together.

I've since written a two-part work and a three-part work, both of which were planned that way from the beginning. The individual volumes do have more of a sense of resolution because of that, but I never had any other intention in either case than to tell a continuous story.

With The Rune of Unmaking -- of which I am now working on the third and final volume -- I seem to have returned to my old ways. Volumes one and two end with minor resolutions, but I can't deny that I'm back in cliffhanger territory as regards the main plot.

Writing for me is an organic process. I do a lot of planning, before and during, but sometimes ... the tree grows as it will and I very much fear that over-pruning would kill it.

[j. d. worthington]

Well, three= (and even four-) volume novels date back to the novels of Richardson, Smollett, & Co., in the eighteenth century; though most of these are now published in single volumes. The Gothics were, by and large, three volume novels (often colloquially called "triple-deckers"); and any such examples make quite obvious the differences between a three-volume novel and a trilogy. Again, this particular genre has adapted a word without paying attention to its original meaning, confusing one thing for another -- a rather common occurrence when it comes to generic writing in general, I'm afraid.

Incidentally, a set of four books which are interrelated (but not a four-volume novel) and tell a larger tale (complete in itself) would be a tetralogy....

[lin robinson]

You mean like the "Alexandria Quartet"?

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by lin robinson

You mean like the "Alexandria Quartet"?

Yes, the Alexandria Quartet is one of the more famous recent examples, and "quartet" is also sometimes used, though much less frequently. In Durrell's case, he gave that to the set as a title, but the type is most often called a tetralogy -- the origin of the term being as far back as the festival of Dionysus, where it was used for the set of plays (three tragedies and a satyr play) presented consecutively. In modern terms, it dates as a classification of plays, fictional pieces, operas, etc., to 1650-60.

While "quartet" can be used for such in general, it is less precise as a literary term; whereas tetralogy -- like a trilogy, until LotR acquired that (mistaken, as JRRT himself noted) appellation -- referred to distinct works which were connected, but not necessarily in series, or dealing with the same characters, story-line, or even milieu (they could be related thematically, for instance, as with Hodgson's books given above). Hence, tetralogy is a more precise term, just as trilogy is a more precise term when dealing with three distinct works, and multi-volume novel is more precise when dealing with a single story which takes up several volumes. The other terms would be pentalogy, heptalogy, etc., though trilogy and tetralogy are the best-known. (Duology as such a description is quite new, having come in as recently as the 1980s, if I remember correctly....)