Keeping Your Series on Track

by Michele Chiappetta

By now, if you’ve been following along in our series arc articles (here’s part 1 and here’s part 2), you’ve thought about the big picture. You’ve mapped your overall series arc and planned out how each installment can build on the ones that came before it. You’ve thought not only about plot but about character arcs so readers can stay engaged with the people you’re writing about.

Yay! Now you can dig into the actual writing process. How do you do this without losing your mind? Aha—that’s what every series author asks at some point. But that’s part of writing a series. You can do this!

Be Committed to Tracking Details and Planning

Creating a series that feels cohesive and engrossing doesn’t happen by accident. You can’t just pants every book and be done. Each book has to tie together. That means you’ll want to do a bit more work to manage the many different threads that are getting woven across your different installments.

Yes, you’ve got a single story in front of you—a book that’s going to have 300-400 pages in it, right? And it’s fun to get creative in the process. You totally should! But also, your series as a whole is going to be 1000, 1500, 2000 pages or more. Readers want that all to feel like it fits together.

Get comfortable with being responsible about this. You’ll need to keep track the things you’ve already written, foresee how those threads can go other places, and tie up as many lose ends as you can so readers feel satisfied.

To do this, you’ll want to adopt a few helpful techniques that may take time upfront to tackle, but will make your life SO MUCH EASIER as you get into the writing of your series.

Build a Story Bible and Update It as Needed

You mean, make notes? Yes. Make notes. Track details because after 2-3 books, you’re likely to forget the little details, like what color eyes you gave that minor character who’s become suddenly a new protagonist in book 4. And let’s be real, it’s going to take you forever to track down that detail if you have to read books 1, 2, and 3 to find it.

It’s so much simpler to track details like this in some form of a story bible where these key details are well organized. You can do this however you like, which can include:

· Character sheets based on the same template for easy scanning

· Excel spreadsheets that track key plot events

· Timelines, drawn by hand or created with software

· Tools like Storysnap from Plottr that makes it easy to create your book bibles

· Notion, Scrivener, or other apps/software that allows you to customize your notes

· Anything else that gives you pleasure or helps your brain be at ease – Post-It notes, 3×5 cards, videos to yourself on a private YouTube channel, whatever floats your boat

In other words, you do you with the tools you use. But track things!

What Should You Track?

Well, everything that you know you’ll need to keep consistent from book to book. Details that are not always easy to remember offhand.

Like, you know your bad guy is really the hero’s father. (Thanks, Darth Vader!) You won’t forget that. But maybe you’d forget the name of the town your hero used to visit when hanging out with his friends as a teenager. But maybe you’ll decide to mention that town much later, so you want to know its name.

Plan to somewhere write down for easy finding later:

• Character names, relationships, ages, eye colors, quirks, habits, speaking tics

• Historical events or backstory milestones

• Timelines that record when story events happen in relation to other story events

• Worldbuilding elements, like rules of magic, politics, or technology

• Important setting locations and what they look like

• Maps that show where places are in relation to each other and how far apart they are

• Key emotional beats or themes introduced in earlier books

• Anything else you sense you’ll want to keep track of

Give Yourself Permission to Geek Out—But Don’t Force It on Your Readers

As you work through this process of tracking character traits, describing historical events, figuring out rules of magic and technology, and researching the ins and outs of settings and other details, remember this.

Let’s emphasize it. REMEMBER THIS:

Your reader doesn’t actually need to know everything you know. Yes, of course YOU need to know the rules of how your characters are named in the Realm of Midgard. And yes, YOU need to know all about the 21^st Battalion of the Main and their tour through Egypt in World War 4. YOU need to know how the streets are laid out in Washington, D.C. in 2025 for your contemporary US Senate romance.

But maybe your readers don’t need to know it all. You’re figuring all these things out and recording them for future reference, so you can pull them out when you need them. But don’t tell it all to your readers. ONLY tell your readers as much as they need to know to understand the plot and characters. Add a little bit of color here and there. But don’t overdo it.

Balance Your Love of Your Story World and Your Readers’ Desire to Keep Reading

Strive for balance, and know that you can either pull stuff from your story bible into future books when appropriate. Or, you can create extras for your geeky readers who want more. You can use research or deep worldbuilding to create interesting insights into your writing process for your Substack or newsletter to give readers a behind-the-scenes view of how the sauce is made.

As you create a flow that keeps the plot moving forward, you’ll invite readers to turn pages, get to the end, and order the next book in the series. That’s the goal. And you can make it happen!

Looking for help with your series? We do series arc reviews and developmental edits that can help keep your stories on track, book after book.