Callbacks vs. Payoffs
So last week I talked about going back through the other books in the series searching for inspiration and things to draw on in the new one, and I want to elaborate on that a bit.
When writing a series, the early books have events, dialogue, scenarios, etc. that are set-ups that are fully intended to pay off down the road. They're deliberate, and openly hint at things to come or leave the door wide open for them, things you the reader might be able to guess at. Victoria getting her acceptance letter at the end of book 3 is paid off by having Doctor Ravenwood step onto the scene in book 4.
Then you have foreshadowing, which can set the tone for the rest of the story, or give hints as to where it's going, so it doesn't feel like the writer just pulled a solution/the ending out of thin air. In book 4, an early scene has Millie looking at a picture of Elise, then immediately arguing with Niamh, setting up her choice towards the end about what to do about her future.
Then there are callbacks. Callbacks are basically references to things that happened before, and can help knit the (story) universe together by providing a sense of continuity above and beyond the events and character arcs. In book 3, Victoria wears Collette's bridal gauntlets to the witch Council in France. Those gauntlets are only mentioned once, offhand, at the beginning of book 1! But they come back.
Now that I'm on the final books, I'm having fun laying down the end points for all three of these types of table-setting (Did you think we would see Elise's apple pin from the very first scene of Remember, November again? What else might we see again?), but I am trying to be very careful of being too self-referential. I see this a lot as series wind down, and it gets annoying. These last books are their own thing, and should stand on their own without needing to be draped in the costumes of the old ones to be interesting.
Still, it can be fun, and satisfying, especially on re-reads, to discover things that are only obvious the second time around, or for them to take on new importance when you know what they mean for the future.
Book 5 has some of all three already, and my notebooks are full to bursting. Once the books are done, they're done, and I won't get the chance again, so I have to make them count.
When writing a series, the early books have events, dialogue, scenarios, etc. that are set-ups that are fully intended to pay off down the road. They're deliberate, and openly hint at things to come or leave the door wide open for them, things you the reader might be able to guess at. Victoria getting her acceptance letter at the end of book 3 is paid off by having Doctor Ravenwood step onto the scene in book 4.
Then you have foreshadowing, which can set the tone for the rest of the story, or give hints as to where it's going, so it doesn't feel like the writer just pulled a solution/the ending out of thin air. In book 4, an early scene has Millie looking at a picture of Elise, then immediately arguing with Niamh, setting up her choice towards the end about what to do about her future.
Then there are callbacks. Callbacks are basically references to things that happened before, and can help knit the (story) universe together by providing a sense of continuity above and beyond the events and character arcs. In book 3, Victoria wears Collette's bridal gauntlets to the witch Council in France. Those gauntlets are only mentioned once, offhand, at the beginning of book 1! But they come back.
Now that I'm on the final books, I'm having fun laying down the end points for all three of these types of table-setting (Did you think we would see Elise's apple pin from the very first scene of Remember, November again? What else might we see again?), but I am trying to be very careful of being too self-referential. I see this a lot as series wind down, and it gets annoying. These last books are their own thing, and should stand on their own without needing to be draped in the costumes of the old ones to be interesting.
Still, it can be fun, and satisfying, especially on re-reads, to discover things that are only obvious the second time around, or for them to take on new importance when you know what they mean for the future.
Book 5 has some of all three already, and my notebooks are full to bursting. Once the books are done, they're done, and I won't get the chance again, so I have to make them count.
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