Developing a Framework for a Gay Romance Series

Developing a Framework for a Gay Romance Series

I have to confess I’m a geek about theoretical frameworks. My second year in college, just admitted to the nursing program, and we take a course on theoretical models of practice. I was over the moon! The rest of the class was so bored they were asleep or threatening to quit. Mucho complaints- teach us how to give shots! But I loved the theory. It was the bones of the thing, the why behind the what.

I still love theoretical models, and have recently started working on developing a model for a book series. Like the rest of the world, I love to read series. I’ve been studying some of my favorite series, because for the first time, I have characters that I want to continue with, and before I start, I want to develop a model for how I will write their stories. So I looked at some of my favorites to analyze what I liked and why, and what I didn’t particularly like.

Favorites: Elizabeth Peters, Amelia Peabody and Vickie Bliss; JD Robb, Eve Dallas; Janet Evanavich Stephanie Plum; Suzanne Brockmann, Troubleshooters, and Josh Lanyon’s Adrian English series.

First problem and most significant point to decide: Who is the point of view character? The series are about evenly divided between maintaining a single POV character from story to story, and having different books in the series be about different characters, with different POVs. Brockmann has books in her SEAL Troubleshooter series with a different POV character from a core related group, and each book is both an action/adventure and a romance to be solved. The primary romantic lead is the POV character. The next book in the group is about a different person in the core group.

Amelia Peabody, and the Egyptian mysteries, uses a different model- the core group of characters solves a mystery each book, with the setting somewhere in Egypt, but relationships change, characters age and grow, each book is a different sequential year. JD Robb uses this same model in the Eve Dallas mysteries- each book centers around a crime that needs to be solved, but the core group of characters remains and their relationships mature and change over time. She has some degree of rotating POVs between Eve and the divine Roarke. Her books tend to start a matter of days or weeks after the last one ended, so the time line is fairly continuous. Elizabeth Peters also bent finally and gave the son, Ramses, some POV chapters because he was the age of going off and getting in trouble without his mother.

My problem with Brockmann’s model of a different POV character with each book is I get really invested in the characters and I don’t want to leave them at the end of the books. I was faintly irritated to find a loving couple had gone off and gotten pregnant and I was the last one to know, because we were on to a different guy’s story! I did like that her POV characters were tough guys, who have a really different perspective, and the badass language they use is fairly accurate for the guys I’ve always known. This model is very popular in our genre, because then each romantic guy gets his own story.

My preference, both as a reader and a writer, is to follow a single POV character over time. This works when the characters live through interesting times, when there is a great deal of both external conflict and nice juicy internal conflict. It allows the writer to dig down deep, get into the heart and bones, motivations, secrets, passions, fears. The real stuff. And you have to get to know somebody over time to dig down deep like that. That’s what I think now, but we’ll see if I maintain this belief over a series of books. If the guys start to annoy me, we will have to part ways.

Problem 2: But how do you maintain a strong conflict between romantic partners over a series of books, and still have a HEA?

Josh Lanyon gave us great sexual tension between his characters that lasted through a number of books. You just knew they were going to end up together or go up in a spontaneous fireball, and either would have been fun to read! Eve Dallas got her man, but, being clueless, kept screwing up and almost losing him. This is a great model that seems very real, a protag with limited romantic experience but with a great deal of other skills/knowledge.

Amelia and Emerson, being strong personalities, kept getting into physical trouble that put one or the other in danger, so there were times they thought they had lost one another, and then there would be an exciting rescue. Also, they tended to fight a lot, quite fun to watch. Vickie Bliss spent a lot of time being highly suspicious of the treacherous character she had fallen in love with, rightly so, since he was not to be trusted in anything except love. Most excellent character, Sir John Smythe.

I really like when characters nearly lose everything because they screw up. Reminds me of my own life. For me, a story of the evil overlords or some other external conflict keeping the characters apart is exciting, but less interesting in the long run. I’m talking Henry James, not Kafka.

I think the model Janet Evanavich uses with Stephanie Plum is less successful than the others mentioned regarding the romantic conundrum, being pulled between Ranger and Moretti. It’s a fairly simple either/or and doesn’t require any significant character development. She’s the same girl, they’re the same bad boys, as in the first story.

Third question: How do characters grow and develop over a series of stories? I think the model of characters within a family is one that forces character change and growth, as well as how the time line is handled. When Amelia had children, her behavior and relationships (but not mood) had to change. She also confronted her own prejudices as she became closer to her Egyptian family. As she got older, the changing times, the historical events played a part in the changes to her character. Significant life events, marriages, deaths, babies, all played a role in changing people, as they do in real life.

Eve Dallas had changing relationships with Roarke, Summerset, Peabody, Mavis as they worked together. They form a nontraditional family, and threats from inside and out move between them from story to story. The model here is they all work together, each bringing their particular skill, to solve the crime. It takes everyone working together. I’ve also seen the model in some stories where a particular member of the core group comes under threat, or attack, and the others band together to help or protect.

For me, the critical piece to enjoying a long running series is I have to see a character change and grow. That’s the whole point of the story for me, to see what’s going to happen next and what happens to someone I’ve become emotionally invested in. So I do not like every plot point or conflict solved. I want some issues left dangling for the next story. Because important issues are really going to take some work! And some things are never resolved.

I like the unchanging structure of plot from book to book, either a mystery to be solved, Adrian has to call Jake for help, or Amelia and Emerson arrive in Egypt for the new archeological season, or there is trouble in the world and the Seals get called in. But I sort of expect that the POV character will have changed from the beginning to the end of the story, and maybe some of their supporting family. Evanovich has some great comic characters, but they have remained fairly static over the course of the books.

I’ve wondered if three books should be the max for a series, because so much change and growth can happen in that amount of time, but then the major conflicts are all resolved. I usually love the first three books in a new series the most, and find the ones after that to be less interesting. William Gibson writes modern sci-fi novels, not really sci fi but that’s how he was pegged early on, but he writes books in groups of three, which seem to have a lovely symmetry. Or maybe at three books, the POV character changes. But some of my favs have been very long running.

Notes on the conflict: this has been a sticky wicket for me. To really have tension and narrative drive, something has to be at stake. The threat has to mean something, has to pose a danger. The typical mystery is a murder and the culprit needs to be found before he does it again. In suspense, there could be a nuclear armament gone missing, or a terrorist threat, of some upswelling of hate that threatens peace in the universe.

The threat needs to be credible or who could keep going? My problem writing to this model is the number of clichés in mysteries and murder stories and the emotional difficulty of spending any amount of time in the head of a crazy person. And the angst is frankly hard to take some days. I wonder if there isn’t another model we could consider.

Resolution to this type of conflict is justice. Balance is returned to the universe. Bad is punished. What if we used a more subtle approach, and let the resolution be that people were better than they were when we started? We don’t want to be Lord Peter Whimsey, in bed with the covers over his head while they’re building the gallows for the creep who deserves to hang. We want the world to be a better place when we’re done. This is going to be the challenge I set myself, to work on developing these types of conflicts/resolutions.

So this is what I like, and what I’m thinking about with my new General and the Horse-Lord series. I’m wondering what other people think about what makes for the elements of a good series? What is the perfect model?