It’s a common writing challenge: how to escalate a series. How do you create a bigger ‘bang’ for books two, three, four and more?
The challenge of the series lies in how you escalate the stakes. The stakes are what matter, they determine why we should care about the characters at the heart of the story. It’s why so many series run over the edge of the cliff. All too often the stakes are life and death. What to do? Escalate so it’s more lives and more deaths? This way, each installment gets bigger and bigger. That’s why big screen franchises become laughable. Fast and Furious began with illegal street racing; cars drifting at speed with the camera mounted two inches above the tarmac. Now it has nuclear submarines, satellites, and camera angles so wide they cover half of Siberia. Mission Impossible has to find things that are more impossible. The Daft Quotient™ just keeps going up.
Go Large or Go Home?
This is the trapdoor Marvel Studios fell through after Avengers Endgame. The climax of 21 movies over twelve years, the biggest team-up in comic-book history; the best villain trying to wipe out half of all life. They killed off two main characters and retired another.
Where do you go from there? Ant Man Quantumania? The Marvels? Madame Web? I don’t think so. Everything after Endgame is an anti-climax.
There are only so many times you can save the world, the galaxy, the universe before it becomes empty spectacle. Smash, bash and crash. Who cares? Loki tried its best but failed to engage us by saving all of time. Time is way too abstract a thing for most audiences to care about.
Go Large or Go Home? Go Home. Please.
Small Town Murders
Meanwhile the murder mystery genre keeps things small and personal. The challenge lies in the mystery puzzle. It’s the sense of injustice, the cost to a handful of individuals, the emotional investment of the sleuth.
For as long as each installment becomes more personal, more relatable, or revolves around a more fiendishly difficult puzzle. Note, difficult, not daft. Glass Onion is just daft. An intellectual exercise, nobody cares about any of the characters. The deformed offspring of pantomime and melodrama, it might as well be Mission Impossible 12.
The Uncredibles
The problem with ongoing series? They:
- Run out of credible antagonists.
- Run out of credible plots.
How many times can James Bond save the world from psychopathic ego-maniac billionaires? In the books, he doesn’t. Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale returned to the source material, small in scale, centred on personal betrayal. In No Time to Die – you can tell by the stupid Pierce Brosnan-era title – the franchise veered off into a bizarre remake of Dr. No. Featuring a nonsense Dr. Evil villain whose name translates as ‘Lucifer Satan,’ it turned up the Daft Quotient to eleven. Craig’s ‘redemption arc’ of surprise-family pushed a trope into a cliché.
Book to book
Wary of the Daft Quotient, I have to negotiate how to escalate a series of my own:
- Ghost – Jo has to find Varla, survive the Vipers, beat Radek and the Tracker
- Seer – Jo has to defend her found-family, end the hunt, beat Straka and the last of the Vipers.
- City – Jo has to bring down the Empire, kill the Emperor, survive the Sisters, the Coterie, and the Brotherhood.
In terms of character arc, Jo is the central figure and undergoes distinct changes through each story:
- Ghost – from powerlessness to empowerment. Her misbelief: fate is certain.
- Seer – from isolation to family. Her misbelief: that her mother was betrayed by family.
- City – become a leader, embrace sacrifice. Her misbelief: resistance will surely end in death.
There are finite story and character arcs in my series. Later stories follow new protagonists. If I decide to go further with the original cast, the stakes need to change. What will be the new antagonistic force? Can I successfully navigate the Daft Quotient? You can bet I won’t spend $200m to find out.