6 Tips for Staying Organized While Writing a Series

Writing a series is not as simple as just writing several books in a row. Nor is it as easy as taking one long story and breaking it into several parts. There are a lot of nuances to writing a series that many writers just do not think about until they’re smack in the middle of it, and by that time its either too late OR you’ve just created a mountain of work for yourself that you might have avoided.

 Maybe, just maybe, I can help you avoid some of that work.

 There’s a number of ways a series can get disorganized.  Perhaps you’ve planned out the main story but didn’t document and track some of the smaller details or story threads. Maybe you haven’t outlined beyond the first story, and are taking things as you go. Or you could be like me and maybe you didn’t even KNOW the book was going to turn into a series, and then you really have an organizational mess on your hands.

 If you follow my blog, you’ve likely heard the story of how my single book turned into series: St. Charles at Dusk was meant to be a standalone book, but anytime I sat down to write something new, the Deschanels and Sullivans were still at the front of my mind. They had more stories to tell, and all authors know who wears the pants in the author/character relationship.

 With each story I wrote, the greater world of these families grew significantly in complexity. I added different elements (such as the “Deschanel Curse” and the special abilities some members have), as well as connections between the families and rich histories. All fantastic things, of course…but all things that also caused me some grief around consistency. Although I’ve shored up a lot of it (it helped that I dragged my feet a bit on publishing book 2, which gave me some time to go back and grandfather in some of the changes), it’s been no small task at all. 

 Not knowing some of these things ahead of time has also limited me on how I can use them, and how I can use characters that have already been published.  As an example: The idea of the Deschanel abilities came after Dusk was published. Since Adrienne and her family had no mentioned abilities in Dusk, I had to make it so that her branch of the family doesn’t have them at all. Had I figured this all out ahead of time, maybe Adrienne could have levitated some shit across the room or something. Who knows.

 Through all this meandering and blundering, I’ve discovered a few tips that have helped my organization going quite a bit. Some of these are things I should have done on day one, but even employing them mid-series has provided me with some great assistance.

 

 6 Organizational Tips

 

Timelines- Create a timeline of anything important that happens, even if you only have four items on it to start. Seriously. I would add things beyond just the events in your book, as well. I would add birthdates and things of that nature. You might need to match up character ages from ten years ago, or reference a past event that needs to make sense in the context of time and space. Creating timelines will also be a tremendous help if you jump around at all in your story. There are a number of tools you can use to create your timeline. Excel has some templates, or sometimes even a simple list format in Word/Notepad is sufficient. You can also use MS Project if you’re familiar with it.

 

Character Bios- Pantsers are cringing right now, so let me quickly caveat this one: I am not suggesting you write full bios on each character. One or two sentences might suffice. Mostly you just need to make sure it covers anything critical about them and anything you’ve mentioned in the story (so you can keep your story straight!). As you create more characters, its so easy for the smaller ones to get away from you. I’ve accidentally used multiple names for the same characters a few times.

 

Relationship Matrix– You might think you know exactly how every character in your books feel about every other character in your books. But you’d likely be wrong. Relationships expand beyond just a love affair…friendships, partnerships, familial ties, and other things need to be considered. Even brief notes like “Sam used to hate Lisa, but they became friends after Lisa helped him out of a situation,” will make life simpler down the road. It also serves as “change control” for big events, so you can track the history of how people have interacted with each other.

 

Family Trees- This isn’t just for family sagas. Family trees can also be used to represent other kinds of relationships. They can also track your bios and relevant dates and facts, if you want to keep it all in one place. The one I use is a website (rather than an installed app) called familyecho.com. I like it because it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that a lot of the apps have (which are mostly useless to you in a fictional world).

 

Outlines– Another four-letter word for pantsers. I’m not necessarily talking about full-blown chapter-by-chapter outlines here. Even something as simple as a sequence of events will be useful to you. That said…once something IS written, you SHOULD go back and do a formal outline of what you’ve written, so you can easily reference it in short form when you’re writing further in the series.

 

Encyclopedia (A to Z)– Keep a list of every single character, place, street, animal, event, etc that occurs in your book so you can easily reference it. Can’t remember the name of the street Jack lives on? Don’t recall Lynn’s dog’s name? Where Vanessa goes drinking? Or, in the case of my series, many of the Deschanels each have a unique ability and sometimes I forget exactly who has what. Well, now its as simple as looking at a list, rather than poring back through the text.

 

 

There are many other topics around writing a series- such as how and when to recap earlier books, how open-ended your endings should or shouldn’t be, etc- but the first step is getting organized and making sure that the details are easy for you to reference so you can focus on the writing.

 Any other tips for staying organized while writing a series?