Back to the Future
Writing a series is hard. Really hard.
There's a lot to keep track of, arcs to plan out, time to commit, lots and lots and lots of words to put down on the page, and the ever-present fear that you could f*ck it all up at any point.
But one of the great benefits is being able to go back into previous books when you get stuck. Or when your motivation flees you and can't be tracked down. There's inspiration waiting in virtually every scene, seeing how far your characters have come knowing how far they still have to go. You want them to get there, but they never will unless you do it yourself.
And not just character development, you can go back and find things to call back to or pay off that help make the world feel coherent and lived in, which is always fun as both a writer and a reader.
I know where the series is going, so going back can also make it easier to connect the dots from here to there. It's a lot less daunting, because you're not making something out of whole cloth, you're evolving something that already exists. The firmer a grasp you have on where you're going, the more it feels like your filling in an empty patch rather than building out some endless pathway into infinity.
As I go back through the old books, I've been keeping notes on what I find. Things I can use, callbacks, references, and most of all, stuff I just straight-up forgot about. The arc of one character in particular has been helped immensely by going back and re-reading some of her sections, answering a question I'd been sweating over for a few days. I won't say who or why, obviously, but it was a forehead-slapping "Of course!" realization that comes with the territory of having such a volume of stuff to keep track of.
For these last two books, I'm writing everything down. I simply can't keep everything straight in my head anymore (the series is at right about half-a-million words right now!), and hopefully they will be better, and all the more satisfying, because of it.
Where we're going, we do need roads. Ones that go in both directions.
There's a lot to keep track of, arcs to plan out, time to commit, lots and lots and lots of words to put down on the page, and the ever-present fear that you could f*ck it all up at any point.
But one of the great benefits is being able to go back into previous books when you get stuck. Or when your motivation flees you and can't be tracked down. There's inspiration waiting in virtually every scene, seeing how far your characters have come knowing how far they still have to go. You want them to get there, but they never will unless you do it yourself.
And not just character development, you can go back and find things to call back to or pay off that help make the world feel coherent and lived in, which is always fun as both a writer and a reader.
I know where the series is going, so going back can also make it easier to connect the dots from here to there. It's a lot less daunting, because you're not making something out of whole cloth, you're evolving something that already exists. The firmer a grasp you have on where you're going, the more it feels like your filling in an empty patch rather than building out some endless pathway into infinity.
As I go back through the old books, I've been keeping notes on what I find. Things I can use, callbacks, references, and most of all, stuff I just straight-up forgot about. The arc of one character in particular has been helped immensely by going back and re-reading some of her sections, answering a question I'd been sweating over for a few days. I won't say who or why, obviously, but it was a forehead-slapping "Of course!" realization that comes with the territory of having such a volume of stuff to keep track of.
For these last two books, I'm writing everything down. I simply can't keep everything straight in my head anymore (the series is at right about half-a-million words right now!), and hopefully they will be better, and all the more satisfying, because of it.
Where we're going, we do need roads. Ones that go in both directions.
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