Episodes
Tuesday Apr 27, 2021
Episode 59 - Is it a duology? You don't know!
Tuesday Apr 27, 2021
Tuesday Apr 27, 2021
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Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz)
[Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music]
This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books.
Kaelyn: Did you get your second shot yet?
Rekka: We get it on Saturday.
K [mumbling]: Okay.
R: ‘Cause cool people get the vaccination.
K: You hear that kids? Be cool, get vaccinated.
R: Be Extremely cool. Be cool like me. [laughing] I don't know if that’s selling it but-
K: [laughing]
R: -that’s what i’m gonna go with.
K: I get mine May second. I got the moderna one so I had to wait four weeks and -
R: Mhm. Yeah, I get two weeks between mine [loudly] it depends on your publisher.
K: [laughing]
K: Speaking of things that come in part two-
R: Yep, speaking of duologies-
K: The covid duology, oh there we go.
R [overlapping]: Yes, well the vaccine duology, not the covid itself-
K [overlapping]: Yeah.
R: Because you don't wanna get covid and then long covid, that’s one duology. The duology I’m all about is the mRNA duology, let’s do that one.
K: We’ve got shots part two coming up here.
R: Mhm.
K: And you know, in many ways the vaccine is kind of similar to a duology. The first one’s the build up, the first one’s to get you a little bit of a taste there, get your immune system going like “hey, what is this? What's going on? What's happening?” and then the second one, that’s BAM, you know? like-
R: That’s when it all happens
K: - fully immune. Yeah and that’s [laughing] that’s why everyone’s getting sick from the second one.
R: Ugh yeah, I don’t think this metaphor’s gonna last us too much longer. But, we are talking today about duologies.
K: As promised.
R: Yes, we are following through on the promise, the commitment we made, to follow last episode’s trilogy discussion with a discussion of duologies, and why they are harder than the thing we made sound really hard.
K: Yeah, so. You know, last episode we talked about trilogies, and how trilogies can be really challenging, and one of the things we touched on was: if you’re really having a hard time with this, maybe you don’t have a trilogy. Maybe you have a duology. So, a duology, obviously, is a series of two books rather than a trilogy being three, although quadrilogies are becoming a thing now. Four books is getting super common. So, just to clarify some things here. If you’re going “I did not hear the word duology ever, until about a year ago, or so,” you’re right, you didn’t. [laughing] This wasn’t really a very common thing.
R: This wasn’t a thing, there was a book and a sequel but there wasn't a thing called a duology.
K: Yeah and by the way, let’s clarify this real quickly here, the difference between a book and a sequel, and a duology. A duology is a story split up into two books. A book and a sequel is, presumably, one complete story and then another complete story.
R: In the same world, usually featuring the same characters, spun off somehow.
K: Yes.
K: Contractual finite book series are kind of a relatively recent thing. You know, for those of you who have been reading science fiction and fantasy for a long time - especially, you know, when it first started, you know, the trade paperbacks and the pulp and everything was really popular - will know that series, especially genre series - and not just science fiction and fantasy: mystery, murder, thrillers, spy novels, war novels -
R: Mhm.
K: - they tended to go on infinitely. Each book would be a standalone story, sometimes encompassing a bigger arc. Fantasy, this was very common, I mean, look at the Wheel of Time -
R: You could start a series, see success, and the publisher would just keep printing it because they felt like they were printing money.
K: Yeah, and a lot of times what they would do is: you’d get a book published, and you’d establish a, typically a main character or a world, or - maybe something like an overarching story plot -
R : or a concept at least.
K: Yeah, in fantasy that was a lot more common in this sort of epic quest that was just gonna keep going and going. Lord of the Rings is actually kind of unique, in that it was a specific trilogy published at that time. That wasn’t very common.
R: Right.
K: You know, these epic fantasies tended to just, they just kept writing and writing, and that's why so many of them have such complicated character family histories, a lot of world building, a lot of different races and imagined and created history in them. But anyway. Then you have some of these other series that, each book was its own individual story, and they just keep going.
R: Mhm.
K: That is not a trilogy or even a duology, even if it ended up being only two books. Trilogies and duologies have an overarching story that it’s gonna take three, two, four, however many books to tell. But with a duology - there’s a reason there aren’t a lot of these: they’re really hard to write. A lot of times when you have a duology on your hands, you’re deciding either: do I have a standalone, single book, or do I have a duology, OR, do I have this whole trilogy, or do I have a duology.
R: How much of this ends up being up to the author, and how much of it ends up being a way to market the story? Like, trilogy in general, I would imagine that an author comes in thinking: okay, I have this story and then I can see where it’s going from there and I can wrap it up in three, versus I have this story, is it too big for a book?
K: You kind of hit on something interesting there and something we talked about in the trilogies episodes, is: I have this story, is it three books? Remember what we said in the trilogies episodes, a lot of them - a lot of contracts are: “we’re buying the first book of your trilogy, and then the next two are contingent on sales.”
R: Mhm.
K: So the first book, typically, is somewhat a self contained story. It’s enticing you to the second and third books, but if that’s it, it's a satisfactory ending.
R: Mhm.
K: That does not happen with a duology. Duology -
R: You will not have a satisfying ending, got it. [giggles]
K: You are not gonna have a satisfying ending in the middle of a duology. There is an appeal in marketing for duologyies. Some people don’t want to commit years to waiting for the next book to come out. They just want two books to be done and come out and, by the way, that tends to happen with duologies. Because it’s one big story, you probably get it out faster. Duologies, when someone sits down to write them, you tend to write the entire thing, or at least do really good draft work on the entire story, because at some point you gotta decide where to stop the first book.
R: Can’t you just, like, divide the page number in half?
K: What I would do usually is drop it on the floor, pick up one page, and that was the end of the first book. [pause] Sometimes it was the fifth page into the book, it was really awkward. [laughing] but you know-
R [overlapping]: I was gonna say like, if I just picked up a stack of papers of a printed manuscript and dropped it on the floor, I think the cover page would be the first one I pick up.
K: Well, you have to throw it down the stairs so that it gets a nice -
R: Oh, you have to be specific about your method -
K: Yeah, yeah I’m sorry, you’re right.
R: - we’re supposed to be providing usable advice.
K: Stand at the top of the stairs, face backwards with the stair behind you. You take the unbound pages, throw them over your head, walk halfway down the stairs and pick up a page from the middle stair. And then that’s the end of the first book.
R: What if nothing settles on the middle stair?
K: You gotta get all the pages and do it again.
[both laughing]
R: But you have to put them back in order first-
K [laughing]: Yeah, exactly.
R: - because otherwise it’s not authentic. Okay but joking aside, I think you were about to give us very good advice on how you do choose that moment.
K: Okay so, this goes to why duologies are so difficult to write because stories, traditionally, have a beginning, middle, and end. Anything that you’re telling somebody, be it what you ordered for lunch, or your epic road trip doing the Cannonball Run, is going to have a beginning, middle, and end. Granted, in one of them you end up in Los Angeles, exhausted and smelling funny, and in the other, maybe you have a disappointing sandwich from Subway.
K: But there is - so, in a duology, you’re not breaking this up into three pieces, you're taking something that is three segments and doing it in two. This is why they’re hard to write, because where does the “middle” of the story go? There’s some different schools of thought on this. One of the less popular, if you will, is that the first book of a duology is actually setting up the main story of the second. I don’t buy this. [chuckles] I don’t go along with that because -
R: Yeah, ‘cause that’s what you were sort of saying the trilogy does.
K: Exactly, yes. But also because it’s only two books, you've gotta get going here a little bit. You can’t make the reader think that they just read however many hundred pages of world building. The middle of a duology, in my estimation, should be at the of the first book. This is where everything should really pick up, and the plot and the stakes should be clear. If you finish the first book in a duology and do not have clear, compelling stakes, motivation, and reasoning behind the characters and what they were doing, that’s probably not a good place to end the duology. And if you’re going “well I don't get to that until this point,” maybe you don’t have a duology. Maybe you have a single book and it’s really long and you’ve gotta trim some stuff down.
R [laughing]: I thought you were gonna say “maybe you have a trilogy” and I was like wait a minute!
K [laughing]: No, no.
R: I feel like I’m stuck in an infinite loop!
K: No, but at that point, you may have a single book. And this is hard to - it’s hard to make that distinction of: “Is this a standalone single book or is this a duology?” So, what might make something a duology, why might you want to write a duology rather than a single book?
R: This is sort of what you're describing to me is that I’ve got like a 225,000 word story -
K: Mhm.
R: - and there are, as you described, as a failpoint in choosing where to split them, that there’s a lot of world building.
K: Yes.
R: So what you seem to be describing to me is a book where the author really takes their time developing a world and developing concepts and digging deep into whatever the story elements are.
K: Yes, nailed it.
R: So where I break that is, I assume, where a smaller plot point that maybe had some big stakes is resolved but the overall story is not resolved.
K: I’ll give you the opposite of that, what about a point at which it’s escalated?
R: Well, of course by solving a thing, you’ve fucked up and made it worse.
K: [laughing]
K: Of course, of course.
R: Of course, so that’s - that’s the solve point, is that you didn't solve anything by completing the action you thought was going to solve things.
K: Yeah, so duologies have this weird balancing act where you can't backload the end of the first book and you can't front load the beginning of the second. The way these kind of work, and you have to remember that coming at this from the perspective of a reader, there are absolutely very successful books that the next in a series picks up and it’s just chaos and you get thrown right back into it. But frequently you've gotta build the story up again, you’ve gotta ease the reader back into what was going on, remind them of what was happening here, and then, typically reassess and recenter your story and characters. Because at the end of the first book, something should have happened that’s gonna require that they do that.
K: So, duologies are really great for when authors wanna take their time and give a lot of attention and detail to characters, to worldbuilding, to story arcs, to history. It’s taking a long story and breaking it up into two. And so if you’re wondering: well how come there's like 700 page books in the world, why -
R [chuckling]: Right.
K: Yeah, “why isn’t everything just one really long book?” There’s a few answers for that. One is that some publishers are going: “No one is going to just pick up your 700 page book and read this. We need to break this up into two books.” But the other is that in some cases, those giant 700 page books, they’re really just one story. And even though I keep saying a duology is one story, you’re telling it in two parts. So they each have to have their own story elements to them.
R: So there’s an intermission, the curtain drops, you feel like that could have been a mini play but it’s not over yet, you know, let’s come back to see where that cliffhanger leads us.
K: An intermission’s actually a really good way to describe it. You know, think of most plays that you’ve seen or even old movies like Gone With the Wind where there was an intermission. The intermissions are not typically dead smack in the middle of the story.
R: No, when you come back the story has changed -
K: Yes.
R: - something has shifted. I think an example of this that everyone is probably fairly familiar with, at least from Spotify, is Act I vs. Act II of Hamilton.
K: Yes.
R: Very very different experiences. Act I is energy, it’s building up, it’s all this hope, and then Act II is all this grief, and all this loss, and all this settling, and rediscovering hope. It’s very -
K [overlapping]: I was gonna say the Phantom of the Opera.
R: Yeah.
K: Act I is very mysterious and almost enchanting and like wow, you know, look at this.
R: Mhm.
K: Act II of Phantom of the Opera, you come back and you’re like, oh this Phantom is dangerous.
R: Yeah.
K: The tone of everything has shifted to this sort of fanciful “oh yes haha the opera ghost, oh this is such a funny, silly little inconvenience” to “this guy’s gonna kill all of us.”
R: Yeah.
K: So there’s renewed sense of urgency, the stakes are much more clear -
R: Mhm.
K: - and there’s -
R: There’s an immediate action that needs to happen in order to save someone’s life.
K [overlapping]: Yes. Exactly, yes, that’s what I was trying to articulate there.
[both laughing]
K: So that is another good component of a duology is, by the second part of the story, something should have shifted.
R: And you gotta act right away, there’s no time to open up your world and introduce characters and all that kind of stuff, you have to get going.
K: The best duologies I’ve read have such a distinct difference between the first and second book, with what I think of the characters and how they’re behaving. If you Google “duology” right now, the first thing that’s gonna come up is The Six of Crows.
R: Mhm.
K: Part of the reason for that is because the Netflix series Shadow and Bone is being released two days after we’re recording this, and they’re incorporating elements from the duology into the trilogy. So, search engine algorithms being what they are... but I read the books; I thoroughly enjoyed them. The first one is very much a heist book. The second one is as well, but the stakes of it have been escalated to the point that it’s “oh, it’s not just that we’re stealing this thing that we want, we are now having to get stuff to save, not only ourselves, but a lot of other people from suffering a terrible fate.”
R: Yeah. You said it was hard though, but then you said it was just “picking a good spot in your book to split it,” so why is that specifically hard?
K: I think, where that becomes hard, is if you don’t know what you have on your hands. If you have -
R [overlapping]: So it’s more in the determination of whether you should split it, or -
K: Yes.
R: - extend it or just publish as is.
K: Well, so there’s two components of this. First is identifying: do I have a duology vs a standalone book or a trilogy.
R: Mhm.
K: If you have a standalone book, and you’re like “well this is just gonna be long and that’s just how it’s gonna go,” then you write the book and that’s what it is. If you’re looking at this and going “I have a duology,” there’s something in there that is indicating to you that this is a duology rather than a standalone book. A lot of times that is that breaking point, so, sometimes finding the part where the first story should stop and the second should start isn’t that hard, but then actually digging down into it and making sure that you’re telling a compelling, engaging story in both parts, can be very difficult. Because you may say “oh this is the perfect part, the door has burst open, everybody’s gasped and we’re cutting it off there.” Is that the best place to end your story? Or do you go to the Pirates of the Caribbean route and reveal that it’s Captain Barbossa coming down the stairs at the end.
R: Mhm.
K: And intrigue the heck out of everybody else.
R: I feel like we could do a whole episode on reveals, so maybe we’ll -
K [laughing]: Yeah, maybe we will.
R: - just put a pin in that one ‘cause I wanna talk about that but let’s do that in another episode. Okay, so is that a matter of how much satisfaction you are willing to give your reader at the end of book one, versus just lopping it off where it is the most convenient between what is essentially the midpoint of an arc that can feel like a partial arc or a semi completed arc.
K: So I think with duologies, there’s a lot more leeway to, I don't wanna say mess with, but to play with -
R: [giggles] Be honest, we are messing with our readers. We are always messing with our readers.
K: [giggles] - to play with reader expectation because people who are reading a duology presumably understand that what they’re reading is part one of a story that’s gonna be told in two parts.
R: Do we know when we have a duology though? Is it made very clear when the first book is released? ‘Cause I don't feel like it is.
K: I think that’s a matter of advertising and publishing. Most duologies that I’ve come across, and by the way, this is very common now in publishing because they plan much farther ahead than they used to. The series are finite, you’re contracted for this much, so typically, before a trilogy or duology is actually released, the series already has a name, the books might say, you know, definitely in their description and Amazon and Barnes and Noble, if not on the book itself, book one of however many in the series or book one of the such and such duology, book two of the such and such trilogy.
R: I would say that there are as many new books on my shelf that do not indicate how big the series is going to be as there are that do.
K: Mmkay. But in Amazon -
R: In fact - well maybe in Amazon but you can only create series on Amazon when you have more than one book in it. You know what I mean?
K [overlapping]: Yes, yes.
R: So -
K: But in the description a lot of times it will say that, the cover copy could say that. Publishers sort of expect at this point that anybody who really enjoys a book or even things that they’re thinking of reading, they’re gonna go research it, and, if nothing else, the publisher will likely have something on their website or some description about how long the series is going to be.
R: You give the reader a lot of credit for researching a book.
K: When you go to pick up a book, and it’s clear that it’s a series, you don’t go and see how many books it’s gonna -
R: [overlapping] You think it’s clear that it’s a series, that’s the part I’m debating. I cannot tell you how many books I’ve picked up only to find out - I’ve got one right around here somewhere - I picked up this book -
K: [speech garbled through laughter]
R: Endgame by Anne Aguirre.
K: Yep.
R: “A Sirantha Jax novel” is all it said on the cover. To me, that did not indicate that this was the last book in a six book series. I read the last book first.
K: [laughing]
R: And I read it anyway even though I figured out within a few chapters that it was the last book in a series. But I have done this my entire life. You’d think that, after a few, I would learn. So what is it that does not indicate anywhere on here, that this is a long running series, this is book six in a series? I picked it up because of the cover art. That is always what I do.
K: [laughing]
R: And there was nothing on this to indicate it was book six out of six. That - it was called Endgame and I did not understand that it was endgame of the series.
K [laughing, overlapping]: Yeah, I’m starting - I’m starting to think that -
R: So you may be doubting me, but I’m just saying, I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, I would like to think.
K: [laughing]
R: But on a bookstore shelf, this was the only one there, the bookstore didn’t put out the other books next to it, you know? So why was I supposed to know that this was from a series? There’s literally nothing on here that says “by the way, you picked up a book that’s part of a series, you might wanna go check out book one.”
K: Well, I will say that’s bad marketing and bad work on the publisher’s part.
R: But I wasn’t exposed to the marketing, other than the cover. I was not exposed to the marketing, this was before I started writing and publishing. So -
K: But the cover is marketing.
R: No, I understand that. The cover is product design and marketing, just like the box for a microwave would be. So yes, this was supposed to be marked as book six. If I had seen “book six,” I might have looked for book one. But Ace Science Fiction, an imprint of Penguin, did not deign to make any sort of indication on the outside, presumably because they thought it was pretty clear because of course you’ve heard of Anne Aguirre and of course you have heard of the Sirantha Jax novels by then. But I hadn’t, so I picked up book six in a series and I read it without any backstory, and I really did feel rather dumped into a world that other people knew about.
K: How was it?
R: Um. It was fine.
K: So, here’s what -
R [overlapping]: Some things were not my mode but that’s okay.
K: [laughing]
R: It’s still in my shelf so it can’t be that bad.
K [laughing]: Okay, fair. Yeah, listen, the - how do you know that something is a duology, a trilogy, a what have you?
R: And is your publisher making the conscious choice to not indicate that?
K [overlapping]: That’s very possible-
R: - do they think they are indicating that, you might wanna run it by your grandma or -
K: Rekka.
R: - somebody who hasn’t -
K: [laughing]
R: picked up a book off a shelf apparently without ever failing to pick up the third book in a series.
K: You did tend to to do that quite a lot.
R: I did it a lot as a kid, I think - I picked up The Babysitter’s Club at book number twenty-four and I guarantee you that bookstore had all of them.
K: Wasn’t that all like, standalone stories, kind of, though?
R: Well they were procedural in that every book started with the main character’s POV introducing all of the babysitters in the club, and giving them some tidbit to characterize them that was also a little bit of backstory from one of the other episodes, and - I mean they really were episodes, they were not so much sequels as episodes - and then you’d go into the meat of the story, and everything would return to normal, there might be small developments and like, there was continuity through the books but the characters got older, they added new babysitters to the club, some left, you know, stuff happened and then it didn’t unhappen at the end of the book. But even though, yes, any book would have been an entry point in the series, I guarantee you I just picked up a book from the middle of the long, very uniform looking line of Babysitter’s Club books, and this one was about a cat, so -
K: Aw, kitty. [giggles]
R: - I got that one. ‘cause Tigger ran away and was missing -
K: Aw :(
R: - so that was the first book I read out of that series! And then I read them a lot, this was my first experience with sequels, so it’s no wonder that I have no problem imagining that you would stick with a world forever and ever and ever and never write anything else. But I also read the rest out of order.
K: Yeah.
R: Like I had no respect for the concept of “oh! I should go back to the beginning and read forward,” that - I read number ten and then I’d read number eighteen, then I’d read number two; I just didn’t care. So it’s interesting to me, like, yes that was me at age twelve -
K: Well, also -
R: - that was very different from an adult reader, but as an adult reader obviously I have continued this. The Chanur saga, I think I read book two before I read book one, I didn’t care. Plus, if the book’s written well enough, you get introduced to it and you don’t lose anything for not reading the first one first in a series, an intentional series, but here we come back to the idea of duology; if you pick up book two in a duology, you have missed some shit.
K: Yeah, and I completely disagree with you, and this may just be -
R: [laughing] Of course you do.
K: No, this may be just a compulsive thing on my end: I can’t not read a series from the beginning.
R: No, see, I am completely all about my organizational tics, but for whatever reason, growing up, reading books in order was not a big deal to me. And I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was not aware that if I asked the bookseller to get me book one because I was picking up book two and I wanted to start from the beginning, that I would have it pretty soon. Like, in my head, that would be -
K: Yeah.
R: - weeks and weeks and weeks of waiting. Plus, in my head, it probably cost more. Like I thought I would have to pay for shipping, I thought I would have to pay for a book that would, like he’d charge me twice as much just because I wanted it.
K: And see that’s just -
R: And also I would have to speak to a human and ask for something which I was very much not all in for, so.
K: And this just goes to show how funny and different we were as kids, because I remember there were book series that, I would go to the library and I would - this is, I’m about to demonstrate something about myself that I have kept secret - I’ve read all of the Wizard of Oz books.
R: Oh, cool! I always meant to.
K: And - they’re interesting. [chuckles] and my library didn’t have book seven, out of, like I think there’s like ten or twelve of them in the series, and I had to get it from my county’s huge central library, and my mom was like “well, just get book eight!” and I was like I can’t, I can’t do that, I will wait two weeks for that book to get here -
[both laughing]
K: But something like - okay, well, getting back on track [chuckles] here, something like The Babysitter’s Club, as you said, each book - the reason the POV character is introducing everyone is there’s a lot of books in this series. The Boxcar Children was like that; the first one is about a group of relatively young children running away from some abusive family member and deciding to live in an abandoned boxcar in the forest, and then eventually their wealthy grandfather finds them, and then every other book is about them solving mysteries [laughing].
R: Oh! Okay.
K: The first book is like a weird survivalist book and then every other one is just them [through laughter] travelling with their grandfather and solving mysteries.
R: At least the continuity is intact.
K: But with duologies, we’re gonna assume that this is a known duology - and I couldn't find any example of this, I swear I did look - a duology that started out intentionally a duology but then became a trilogy after book one was published. I couldn’t find any examples of it, I’m sure it’s happened but, in theory, especially in publishing and especially with contracts being what they are now, you’re going to have - especially for a duology - a contractual set of the books that are going to be in it, the two books. You may even have some specifics in there about book one: this stuff has to happen, book two: this stuff has to happen. Publishers are a lot more hands on with these kinda things now, because before it was just like “cool, you got another one? cool, you got another one? Alright, let’s get the next tale of the otherworldly alien investigator who came to Earth to find the stolen gem of her people but solves mysteries along the way.”
K: So, with a duology, and with where the middle of this is, and what you can play with with reader expectations. I would say you absolutely have a little more leeway. “What if they don’t know it’s a duology?” Well, that's on the reader. I don’t - there’s no good answer -
R: Or is it on the publisher and their marketing department? [laughing]
K: Or that. The thing is that you could stick right on the cover: Book One of the, you know, We Make Books Duology. Maybe someone doesn’t read it, there’s no way to make everyone understand what this series is going to look like. I never buy a book before I know, you know - is it a trilogy that I’m getting myself into here, is it a duology, is this just gonna keep going on and on forever? I understand not everyone’s like that, most people are far less - what’s the word I’m looking for here - less fussy than I am. [laughter] Some people are just pure chaos like Rekka, who walk into bookstores, pull something off the shelf, and just go “look’s good!” [laughter]
R: I’m here for a good time!
[both laughing]
R: Look, I’ve found a lot of books I liked that way.
K: Yeah! No, that’s great.
R: Mhm.
K: But I remember going to Barnes and Noble back when I was in high school and college and we used to hang out there, and they would always have the table of the $5 books -
R: Mhm.
K: If they didn’t have books one and two and this was just book three, I wasn’t gonna pick it up and read it because I needed to know how it got there [laughing]. I think with duologies, you definitely have a little bit more room to play with that because the understanding is that this is more like a first and second act. And the reader should understand that: “you’re being presented half of a story, the second half is coming.” And there’s a difference between having halves of a story versus having to present a whole coherent story like you have to when you get into trilogy mode. Because if you’re breaking up a story into three parts, the first part is going to be really dry if you’re just telling one long, giant story.
R: Yeah ‘cause that’s set up still, that’s just pure set up.
K: Yeah. Find a 700 page book. Go to page - what would it be? - 233 and, in that area, decide if you think that’s about a good place to end a first book that seems like a good story has been told. Now conversely, I would say that picking up a 700 page book and going in the middle could go either way. Depending how the story’s structured, maybe that is an interesting middle-halfway-stopping point. There’s a good chance that it’s not because standalone stories tend to be backloaded.
R: Right.
K: Most of the action, adventure, and intrigue, happens in the last third of the book.
R: I would even say -
K: Last quarter?
R: Last quarter of the book, yeah.
K: How do you know if you have a duology vs a trilogy vs a standalone book?
R: Someone tells you.
K: [laughing] You know what? Honestly, that might be the answer.
[both laughing]
K: That really might be the answer.
R: Please, someone tell me!
K: [laughing]
K: An agent, a publisher, a good friend who reads your stuff might say: “This isn’t a standalone story, this is two books.” You know, with a trilogy it’s a little easier. Are you having trouble filling the middle book? Are you having trouble figuring out what’s gonna happen in book two, and are you just coming up with stuff because you need to create -
R: A third book, yeah.
K: - about 300 pages of content so that you can get to the third book? That’s a good indication that maybe you don’t have a trilogy, maybe you have a duology. For a standalone book, it gets a little harder. One is length. There aren’t a lot of 700 page books published anymore and, depending on the genre you’re writing in, there might be none of them. Fantasy tends to have a little bit more tolerance for that kind of length -
R: We wouldn’t have the phrase “doorstopper” in our current lingo if they weren’t really happening anymore. I think they are still happening. Like you have Jenn Lyons.
K: Yep.
R: Jenn Lyons writes some big books and there’s like, five of them [giggles] in a single series.
K: But you brought up a very interesting point: why we have those doorstopper books. Because, for a publisher - first of all, a duology however many years ago, even a decade ago, that was not a very common thing.
R: Mhm.
K: But if you had a long story, and especially if the publisher was uncertain about it, it was cheaper and less of a risk for them to just do a giant run of one big book, rather than two smaller or three smaller ones.
R: Okay. Because you lose readers as you go further down the series.
K: Well you lose readers, but there’s also overhead.
R: Right.
K: It’s cheaper to publish one giant book than it is to publish two smaller ones.
R: Right because you need cover artists, you pay the printer for each one of those sets, you print a minimum quantity for each of those, yeah. No, I’m not arguing that with you, I’m just saying like -
K: Yeah.
R: - one of the considerations is also to be: how will you be able to earn that back if you lose 20% of the readers each sequel down the line.
K: Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of factors in why publishers might say, “nope, this is just gonna be one giant book.”
R: No, there’s one factor: it’s money.
[both laughing]
K: There’s a lot of factors that go into the money factor. [laughing]
R: The accountant is taking many things into consideration.
K: Yeah [laughing]. Touché, Rekka.
R: Mhm.
K: But, if you’re writing this story and there is a lot of stuff happening in the first half of the book that is then still not resolved when you’re getting towards the end, you might have a duology on your hands. Now granted, you may be like: “Oh well it’s only 180,000 words.” Well, yeah, maybe you gotta write a little more and flesh this out a bit. The times that I see books where I tell myself this should have been a duology - or authors that I’ve spoken to - are when I'm having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going on because you’re packing too much into this. The best case for a duology is when the reader is feeling like they’re being bombarded with information without proper time to absorb it and apply it to the story.
R: So are you squeezing everything into one side or the other of the fold which is the tear that becomes the intermission in your duology.
[both laughing]
K: Yes, exactly.
R: That’s the official term for it.
K: Yeah, and look, there’s - thankfully in publishing, there’s no standards, there’s no ‘we always do it this way’, ‘if you have this then it’s this,’ no one is going to go: “Sorry Random House, you’re not allowed to publish a 700 page book.” They can publish whatever they want, so if they -
R: I mean there is a point at which the book is structurally unsound because it’s more spine than cover.
K: [laughing] Yes, alright, fair, fair.
K: You have leeway, and publishers have leeway for this, and really, there is no correct answer except: what serves the story best? How is this best told? How are you best engaging the reader? In some cases - I’ll use The Six of Crows as an example. I don't think that book works if you take the two halves of that, smoosh it together, do a little creative bridging in the middle, and just present it as one giant book. It doesn’t work. The tone shift between the two is so important that there’s intermission and that you come back and you’re like: “Oh boy, what’s gonna happen now?”
R: Okay, so is that - do you think that’s a critical part of it? Do you have to do that, or you think it just happens naturally because you’re taking a break from one story and coming back with the second piece?
K: I think it tends to happen naturally but, at the same time, this is kind of going into what we were talking about last episode with book two of a trilogy which is: you can’t tell the same story all over again. So presumably at the end of book one, enough has happened to the characters and the story arc where things have changed. So, by virtue of that alone, book two is going to be different.
R: Right.
K: I’ll make the argument, in a trilogy the same thing’s gonna happen. The tones of the books as the progress should be getting more urgent or darker or more mysterious, hopeful, whatever you’re building towards -
R [overlapping]: Sort of like an adventurous story to a, like the fate of the world -
K: Yeah.
R: - literally the fate of the souls of the world are at stake.
K: The stakes should be being escalated, the characters should be very clear in their motivations. The plot should be very clear cut at that point and there should be a clear point to which the characters, the objects, the McGuffins, the story is moving towards at that point. The end of book one, the reader should have a very good idea of what the objectives are of book two. Now if they work out that way or not, that’s up to the reader, you know, maybe throw a twist or a loop in there or something, and the plan never goes according to plan because plans shouldn’t go according to plans in books -
R: Right. Right.
K: But the reader should have an idea of what they’re in store for in book two. Even if it’s not how that ends up going, the characters should be telling them: “Okay, we've gotta do this.”
R: Mhm. Aaaaaand cut.
[both laughing]
R: “We’ve gotta do this, and we’ll see ya in a year.”
K: Well, you know, duologies tend to come out a little closer together because, as I mentioned, the overall story is frequently written at the same time. And then maybe - okay you’ve done a lot of work on the first book to get it published and now it’s time to do that, but a lot of times it’s written already, it exists -
R: Whereas they really throw writers out and to the wolves for their trilogy like, yeah, we’ve signed you up for a trilogy, how’s that coming? “Uhhh, I don’t really know how it’s gonna end? But it’s great?”
K: You also get all of these contradicting things of: don’t tell them you’ve written all three books already; no, tell them so they know that they’re done; okay, but we just really want book one to have a nice conclusive ending, so I’m gonna need you to rewrite the end of that and then retool the beginning of the first two and figure how that’s gonna fit into the third.
R: And you better hope that the first two sell well, or you don't get to see the third.
K: Writing’s hard.
R: Yeah, so that’s a big part of it though, I never considered that when you sign a duology, you might have already talked to the publisher about where the pair of books is going to go.
K: Yeah, nobody writes a duology with the understanding of: “You need to have a nice neat ending for book one. [laughing] We’ll see how that -” I shouldn't say no one, I’m sure it’s happened. But I would argue in that case that that’s not really a true duology; that’s more of a couple standalone books.
R: So a short sequel run -
K: Yes.
R: - of a single world.
K: Yeah, exactly.
R: So, going back to your definitions then.
[happy go lucky ukelele music]
Rekka: [sing-song] Definitions!
Rekka: And listeners, Kaelyn doesn’t know what I did with that, so don’t tell her. So I think we need to reset our definition because you were defining it earlier in the episode and, to a degree, it felt like you were defining it as a single story divided in two pieces, and then later you said it was not a duology if it’s not a single story, but then, kind of maybe it is? I’m a little confused, so start over.
Kaelyn: SO definitions of duologies and trilogies. The actual definition of them is: “however many stories - two, three, four - of related work in a group.” So this might be the same story, the same world, the same characters. What they typically do is they say: “If you’ve written three books, they’re all about an alien investigator but they’re all individual stories” - Alien Investigator Trilogy. Duology, same thing. Technically any three books or any two books or four books, or whatever you wanna call it, is a “that.” Now, at a certain point - and I don’t know where this point is - I think you stop applying the duo- tri- quad- etc. to it and it just becomes a series. Now, from my side, what really defines a duology or a trilogy is the intent of the overarching story plot. That you didn’t just write three books because you had three stories in you so it ended up being a trilogy. You didn’t just come up with two stories and now it’s a duology.
K: There’s some - I won’t say argument about this, but I think it’s something that we see more in publishing now, that if you're contracted for a trilogy, the presumption is going to be that the trilogy is three books explaining a single story. It’s a single story arc. It may take a long time to get there, but -
R: Mhm.
K: - if they’re signing you up for three books that’s in the same world but not in the same story arc, that’s a three book contract, that’s not a trilogy contract.
R: Okay, fair.
K: So that’s the distinction I would make. That said, by broad definition, duologies - trilogies, we’re just obsessed with the number three?
R: It’s a nice balanced number, you know?
K: Yeah. Three and seven. But I think this goes back to the ease of the beginning, middle and end. And that’s where I think trilogies and duologies really shine through is this intentional story of : It’s gonna take me this long to do it versus just writing books and however many you end up with, adding that number label to it. I would say, something like a duology contract vs a two book contract, and I don’t know that I’ve ever really heard of two book contracts unless [laughing] it’s a duology.
R: But I have seen a lot of contract announcements, book sale announcements lately that said: “So-and-So’s Title plus an unnamed future book.”
K: Yes, but those would likely be standalone books.
R: Right, but it’s still a two book contract.
K: Okay, fair.
R: As opposed to just saying future works -
K: Yes. [laughing]
R: You know what I mean?
K: Yeah. And so by the way, what we’re talking about here - and I know we’ve touched on this in previous episodes, specifically the contract ones - a lot of times if you sign on with, sometimes an agent, usually a publishing house and they really like what you have and think you have the potential to grow a fanbase, they’re gonna try to lock you down. So they’re gonna say: “Cool, you’re gonna write a trilogy and three books to be named later.” It’s like signing athletes to multi-year contracts, a lot of times you have to take a chance on somebody after college or, sometimes in the NBA, right out of high school. You don’t know how they’re gonna perform, they’re gonna need training, they’re gonna need help. So you have to put the time and investment into them and you wanna make sure that if they turn out to be really good they’re not just gonna go “Hey thanks but I’m gonna go to New York because they’re gonna pay me twice as much as you did.”
R: Right, right, now that you’ve proven yourself. Now it’s good if you get a multi book contract from a single publisher and maybe your debut launch isn’t as strong as you hoped, and it takes two books to kinda gain some traction. That’s good for the author but -
K: Yep.
R: Like we said, if the other team would have paid you twice as much, now you’re stuck selling your book for debut prices. Which, okay yes, we’ve all heard about the debut windfalls, but debut authors don’t typically make a whole lot of money.
K: [overlapping] Yeah, there’s a reason you hear about them, it’s because they’re a big deal.
R: Yeah, it’s ‘cause they’re outliers -
K: [laughing]
R: - much like all things we make a big fuss over, ‘cause we love a rags to riches story.
K: Yeah, so that’s why my clunky - and this is personal, sort of clunky definition of this - but I would say that that is certainly the trend of where you’re seeing these definitions in publishing is: if you’re signed on for a trilogy, the understanding is that it’s going to be a three book story arc, if it’s a duology, it’s gonna be two.
K: When Rekka and I are finished here, I’m going to go sit down, pour myself a glass of wine, and finally try to finish the fourth book of The Ember and the Ashes quadrilogy. That’s one that I really thought was a trilogy, and I don’t know what happened there, I don’t know if it changed and they were like -
R: Aha!
K: - “ah we’ve got more story to tell here” -
R: They got you, too. [giggles]
K: Yeah, they did get me on that one and I had to wait for quite a while for that book to come out and I just, I need to sit down and get into it, you know? [laughing]
R: Alright, well let’s wrap it up. What the heck are we talking about when we say it’s harder? Did we give concrete advice on how to tell? And you can say, like, yes, I feel like I did.
K: I feel like I did and I think I didn’t because sometimes, as you mentioned, someone else is gonna have to tell you. I think it’s easier to tell if you’re working on a trilogy that, maybe it’s a duology. Because I think when you’re hitting a wall with the trilogy, trying to come up with ways to fill the middle, that’s a good indication that you actually have a duology.
R: And now that’s gonna be harder to write because you said so.
K: [laughing] Yes.
R: Congratulations, you just leveled up.
[both laughing]
R: You had a hard time filling a middle book, now you’re gonna somehow make it worse by trying to fit everything across the divide of an intermission between two books.
K: [laughing] Yeah and, to go back to what I said -
R: So you’re welcome.
[both laughing]
K: To go back to what I said about the standalone, I think a good indication there that you may have a duology on your hands, is if you feel like you’re sprinting through information, and you’re feeling like you’re having to take things out to stay within whatever you consider to be a reasonable word count. If you feel like there’s more story there - and writers, I know you always feel like there’s more story there - if you feel like you can’t tell the story and that it’s going to be confusing, or that it’s going to lack context or information or character development or anything, that’s a good indication that you might have a duology. Because what that’s indicating is that you have a lot to show the reader, and duologies give you great room to do that.
R: So here's a thought I just had.
K: Uh oh.
R: You mentioned word count.
K: Yeah.
R: So if you’re drafting, you don't know how many words you’re gonna end up with necessarily. Is this a decision you make during revisions?
K: Listen, there’s no definitive “this is a duology” time.
R: [giggles]
K: No one’s gonna bring you into a room, put the Sorting Hat on you and go: “Duology!” [laughing]
R: So it’s not going to suddenly smack you in the head.
K: Some people absolutely set out to write duologies. They say: “I have a story that I am gonna tell in two parts.” Some people draft the whole story and go: “This is too long for a single story, or this is too short for a trilogy, maybe I have a duology.” I feel like with duologies, unless you set out to intentionally write one, you're going to have to figure it out organically somewhere along the writing process.
R: Here’s another thought.
K: You’re just full of these today.
R: Yeah, sorry about that. I will stop, next time I won't have a single one, I promise. We’ve been mentioning word count a lot as the moment where you realize you might have too much or too little, but could it also be story elements?
K: Absolutely.
R: In that, I could wrap up some of these plot elements in one book, but not the whole thing, and that there’s an equal, if not mathematically equal, number of plot elements that could wrap up if I kept going in a second book. I mean, basically, it’s all magic, right?
K: Yeah, absolutely. There’s no definitive answers here unfortunately, like so much of this. I hope if you’ve been listening to this podcast this whole time and you have come here for somebody telling you: this is how it always is, you figured out a while ago that you’re in the wrong spot.
[both laughing]
R: Or that you still have to trust our word. Just grab a big glass of wine and go read a book. It may or may not be the last in the series, we don’t know. Nobody knows!
K: We don’t know, nobody - what is even time by now? [laughing]
R: Alright, so duologies are hard, trilogies are also hard, standalone books are hard. Have I covered it?
K: Everything’s hard.
R: [overlapping] Got it. Okay, cool. We did it.
K: But they’re all hard for different reasons. [laughing]
R: Oh, now I get it. Okay.
K: Yeah. Yeah.
R: Now I get it, alright. So the point is: you write the story. Hopefully, either you know how many books you’re supposed to end up with and you can calculate out from there how you’re gonna write the story. Or you write the story and you break it up into the number of books it demands that it should be.
K: Exactly.
R: Or that your publisher demands that it should be. [chuckling]
K: My advice to people always is: write the story. Just write it. Then take a step back and see what you have.
R: [overlapping] Then do the math.
K: There’s no formula for this, there’s no ‘this must happen at this time.’ If I had astounding amount of money to just throw away at whatever, I swear I think I would hire people to select books from different genres and map out common elements of them and put them into some sort of excel spreadsheet where I could make a nice pivot table, and see where these common element points occur, and I guarantee you almost none of them would line up.
R: Okay, I know there’re people who would disagree, but we’ll have to have a debate episode sometime.
K: [laughing] Excellent, excellent.
R: So, wrapping it up, write a damn story. It’s gonna be hard enough to get it published anyway, don’t worry about it.
K: It’s gonna be hard enough just to write the thing!
[both laughing]
K: So just write it and then work from there!
R: [overlapping] Okay-
K: Tell the story you want to tell.
R: - so with that sage advice, I probably shouldn’t tell you that you can find us on twitter and Instagram @WMBCast and on Patreon.com/wmbcast, which you are definitely not gonna want to support after listening to this one.
K: [laughing]
R: But it would be helpful if you could leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and remember to subscribe using whatever podcast app you like. And we will see you in two weeks with another poorly formed episode discussion. Thanks everyone.
K [laughing]: Thanks everyone.
Tuesday Apr 13, 2021
Episode 58 - Book Two Jitters
Tuesday Apr 13, 2021
Tuesday Apr 13, 2021
We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, and concerns for us to address in future episodes.
We hope you enjoy We Make Books!
Twitter: @WMBCast | @KindofKaelyn | @BittyBittyZap
Episode Transcript
Rekka (00:00):
This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books.
Kaelyn (00:26):
Y'know, it's funny because in movie trilogies, I always think it's the third movie that kind of slumps.
Rekka (00:33):
Okay. So maybe this is a poorly conceived episode. I don't know. Um, but the impression I have from the person asking us the topic... They did say "writing Book Two in a series of three or more." Assuming that you come out of the gate strong on Book One, you are heading toward some final book, and we'll assume trilogy for the purpose of this conversation.
Kaelyn (01:01):
Yeah, I was going to say, because writing Book Two in a planned trilogy is very different than writing Book Two in a, "Oh, we'll see how this goes."
Rekka (01:08):
Exactly. Uh, which is my experience of writing Book Twos, both times, even though they're now both trilogies. But anyway, so assuming that it's going to end in the following book, how do you tell a chunk of your story, keep the reader interested by—one supposes that you are ramping up action, and tension and danger and all these? Oop. I've already said something wrong.
Kaelyn (01:40):
No, no. I was going to say, I understand the question that they're trying to ask now and whatever they're trying to write should probably be a duology.
Rekka (01:49):
Oh no! Okay. That's a separate episode. We already figured that out before we started recording. Assuming that we are going to end this in the following book.
Kaelyn (02:00):
Well, that's fine. If we, if we start recording and we talk about this, I can explain what my thinking—
Rekka (02:05):
Oh, no, we're recording, and this is the episode now. Cause I phrased it very well and I felt very eloquent. So now we're going to go with it.
Kaelyn (02:10):
Oh goodness. Okay. Yeah. So, um, you know, we're talking about second books in trilogies and um, I think that for a lot of authors, this is going to be either the easiest thing they ever write or the hardest thing they ever write. It really depends on how, how your story's going. So if you're asking this question, "I feel like I'm trying to come up with stuff to fill the time in between the beginning and end of my story."
Rekka (02:34):
Okay. That's one way to interpret it. I have a second interpretation, but let's talk about that one first.
Kaelyn (02:38):
Well, wait, I want to hear your interpretation.
Rekka (02:39):
No no no. No, we're gonna go with that.
Kaelyn (02:43):
Okay. Um, there there's two reasons writing the second book in a trilogy can be, um, very difficult. One is that what I just said. You're, you feel like you're just trying to come up with, you know, stuff to happen so that you can get to the end of it. And that's what I was— the point I was making that, if that's the case, maybe you shouldn't be writing a trilogy. Maybe you should be writing a duology. Your story is your story. Um, unless you have a contract for a trilogy and they're like, you must generate this. And by the way, I would hope that before you signed that contract, you had discussed, um...
Rekka (03:15):
Where the trilogy was going.
Kaelyn (03:18):
Yeah, some outlines and some, uh, some story points there. Um, the other reason is you have a beginning and you have an end and sorting through everything to get to that end in a satisfying, fulfilling way is overwhelming. Um, so sometimes it's that you have too much and sometimes it's that you don't have enough.
Rekka (03:38):
Isn't that every book though? I mean... The misery of the writer is that every book has to have a beginning and an end and you have to get there without losing everybody on the way.
Kaelyn (03:50):
I'll make it worse for you. A lot of them also have middles.
Rekka (03:53):
No! No, this is a lie.
Kaelyn (03:56):
And uh, and the middle, the middle is what takes up most of the series.
Rekka (04:01):
Okay. So—
Kaelyn (04:03):
What was your interpretation of that?
Rekka (04:05):
"How do you structure a book that doesn't begin and end your story?"
New Speaker (04:13):
Okay.
New Speaker (04:13):
You see what I'm saying?
New Speaker (04:15):
Yes.
New Speaker (04:15):
You have this—
New Speaker (04:16):
It's the middle.
New Speaker (04:17):
It's the middle, but it's also not the middle-middle it's part of the middle, because the middle is actually going to expand into the end of the first book and the beginning of the third, book it— by the 25% arc, you know, act structures. The middle is the middle 50%. So in this case, it's bigger.
Kaelyn (04:39):
And this, by the way is why I have trouble with authors who are pantsers.
Rekka (04:46):
Okay. Since you're targeting, probably like 80% of our audience, please explain yourself.
Kaelyn (04:53):
Nope. Um, I shouldn't say trouble. I'm a planner. Like in every aspect of my life, especially when it comes to writing though, because you have, I, I kind of think that if you're writing a story, you should at least have an idea of where it's going.
Rekka (05:08):
What is the structure of Book Two, when Book Two falls in the middle of a larger story arc?
Kaelyn (05:15):
Things that typically happen in Book Twos. And in this case, we'll also throw some movies in there because I have a lot of, uh, a lot of examples I like to use there.
Rekka (05:23):
Let's just say that movies are not a substitute for books. Everyone knows the book was better, but, um, movies are a quicker consumption item that if you haven't seen for some reason, then you can go and see what we mean without investing 18 hours in reading a book. So that's why we keep popping back to movies. Not because movies do it best or do it right, even.
Kaelyn (05:47):
Yeah. And let's clarify here. Movies are frequently written by committee. Um, I want you as the author to imagine writing a book, polishing it, having some other people look at it, then handing it to an editor and the editor gets to do whatever they want with it. Without consulting you, because that's frequently how a lot of movies go.
Rekka (06:06):
And then the producers come in and say, "we want giant mechanical spiders."
Kaelyn (06:09):
Beware the giant mechanical spiders.
Rekka (06:11):
So we are using movies. Not because they are the perfect examples, but because they are easily grokked.
Kaelyn (06:17):
Yeah. I'm assuming most people listen to this have seen Star Wars. If you look at famous trilogies and you know, I had mentioned Star Wars, I'll throw the Godfather in there. Spiderman. Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, something a lot of these have in common is everyone seems to like the second movie of the trilogy best. Why is this? Well, there's two different—
Rekka (06:39):
You stopped before we got to one of the best trilogies ever.
Kaelyn (06:42):
Which was?
Rekka (06:44):
Back to the Future.
Kaelyn (06:45):
Oh yes, obviously. Yes. And I would argue back to the future or back to the future too. Is that what it's called? What's the second part called?
Rekka (06:55):
Yeah it was Back to the Future II.
Kaelyn (06:57):
Two, okay. I couldn't remember if they started doing funny things with the names.
Rekka (07:01):
Like Forward to the Future, Back to the Past?
Kaelyn (07:04):
Yeah, exactly.
Rekka (07:04):
Oh, we also forgot the Matrix.
Kaelyn (07:06):
You're highlighting a good point here. Um, both when writing for books and movies, but especially books, there's a big difference between writing something that is a standalone and you know, ends on a conclusive note, ends with resolution and, you know, satisfaction versus writing something that is planned to be a trilogy the entire time. You know, in movie-making as in publishing, um, producing these things is expensive. So a lot of times what happens is you have a contract in which you're contracted for Book One with option for Book Two and three, should they be successful.
Rekka (07:43):
That option may not even be for more books in the series. They may just say, you know, we want your future works and you don't even know if they want more of this story or if they just want more.
Kaelyn (07:53):
Yeah. This is why in so many trilogies, you'll kind of feel like the end of Book One was a complete story. Good writers always find ways to leave the story open for more to happen. They may even tease you with ideas or open-ended scenarios where it's like, okay, well I understand that like right now they're safe, but what's going to happen when the wizard realizes they took his medallion? Because eventually he's going to come looking for them and surprise, guess what happens in Book Two? Um, this is a lot of times, as I said, why you see sort of a wrap-up if you will, in the end of Book One. If that's the end of the story, that could theoretically be a satisfying end of the story. Not all trilogies are structured like that because sometimes somebody goes in with such a amazing pitch that they say, "yep, three book deal right off the bat. You're going to write all of these." One is not necessarily better than the other. Um, it's I mean, obviously everyone like to say like, "yeah, they took all three books right away. That's how great they think my book is."
Rekka (09:00):
However, if you go in and you expect to write a trilogy, but then the trilogy is cut short because of poor sales or something, but you still have fans that liked the first book, you've left them with a cliffhanger or an unsatisfying ending. So just because you know you're going to get to do the trilogy, maybe, maybe starting the first book off with a satisfying ending would not be the worst thing.
Kaelyn (09:27):
Yeah. So when you're writing a trilogy where you're not sure if or how you're going to write the rest of the trilogy, it can be tricky because you're actually doing two stories. You've got the bigger story and then you've got the story that fits within the bigger story. And then books two and three are another slightly larger story that also fit within the bigger story.
Rekka (09:48):
So would you say books two and three, by your recommendation, would be a duology in the same world as Book One?
Kaelyn (09:54):
Not in, not by those definitions. No. Um, I understand what you're saying there. That, yes, you're kind of doing a standalone and then a duology, but all together, they're all one sort of story. And you know, for those of you paying close attention, what you're noticing is that I'm saying that well, Book One is usually its own encapsulated story and then Book Two usually ends on a cliffhanger and yes, that's the case. Um, think back to any trilogy you have read or watched, you will see that over and over and over again. And there's a reason for that. And this feeds into my reason for why I think so many times, the second book or the second movie is usually a fan favorite. It's because after we see success from the characters, after we see them, you know, make progress, achieve some measurable amount of victory, or even just settle to the point that they can feel safe and peaceful, that is completely upended in Book Two. This is where we usually see characters fail, or we see their plans fall through. Where we see that they weren't the smartest, the fastest, the strongest here.
Rekka (11:04):
This is where we prove that their adversary is insurmountable.
Kaelyn (11:10):
Yes. And Book Three then is where they have to regroup. Um, one of the other things we were talking about before we recorded was I think what is interesting going into a lot of Book Twos and you know what let's talk about Book Twos and what to put in them. And some things you should keep in mind while working on them.
Rekka (11:31):
Since that was the point of, I guess we should, we should broach that at some point. Also, I feel like, um, we need to say at this point that all of this is coming from a very Western perspective on storytelling and that storytelling in non-Western countries and, um, traditions may not fit this formula of where these beats fall and everything like that. Not all storytelling falls in the three-act structure.
Kaelyn (11:57):
Absolutely not, but it does have a beginning middle, and end. Doesn't necessarily mean it's divided up into three acts, but anyway.
Rekka (12:05):
Right, right. There we go.
Kaelyn (12:06):
So when you're starting on a second book, it's hard, because—especially if the first one was successful—because the instinct is going to be, everybody loved this stuff about the first book.
Rekka (12:20):
Do it again.
Kaelyn (12:20):
I should do this stuff again. Yeah. That's great. Except they probably don't want to read the same book again, just slightly different. So it's hard, there's a balance between keeping what worked and what people liked and what made them intrigued and want to read this in the first one, versus putting a new enough twist on it now, that it's not the same thing happening all over again. And this is plot.
Rekka (12:45):
Which is really rude.
Kaelyn (12:48):
It's straightforward plot. This is where you have to move your characters along. Things have to happen to, or around them that influence them and cause them to go forward or to not stay where you left them at the end of the first book. Um, it's really tempting to just pick up exactly where you left off and say, and now these things are going on. And by the way, some, uh, some books do that very effectively with, um, you know, the last sentence of the book, dropping a new bit of information that changes everything. Um, I will admit that I watched too much of True Blood. Um, I didn't get all the way to the end of it because it just got absurd. But one of the things that I always enjoyed about that show was literally the end of every episode is a cliffhanger. So then they were very cruel about that. Next episode always picked up exactly where the last episode left off.
Rekka (13:46):
Keep in mind. This was not the, you know, Netflix weekend-premiere of an entire season. This was every Sunday for however many weeks, and all week long, you'd be like, Oh my Godddddd, what is going to happen?
Kaelyn (14:03):
Yeah.
Rekka (14:03):
And that was, that was very effective use of cliffhangers. They, they resolve the story plot, but then there was also a new complication every time.
Kaelyn (14:14):
It's hard to balance these things. Um, there's, you know, I think there's also a lot of pressure on writers to sometimes start introducing new elements to the book, either through new characters or if it's, you know, a fantasy based book, maybe new magical elements or, um, new locations, to try to keep it fresh. And by the way, that's not a bad thing to do.
Rekka (14:36):
But as you add these new characters and places and elements, you have to know how they're going to wrap up. Unless like we said, you're creating impetus for a five book series or something like that.
Kaelyn (14:48):
[cough] Song of Ice and Fire [cough]
Rekka (14:51):
It's a garden that grows.
Kaelyn (14:52):
Yeah. It's, it's a series of weeds that are strangling everyone at this point. Um, but you know what, that's actually a good example because, um, Song of Ice and Fire was, uh, pitched and signed as a trilogy and he kept adding stuff and kept adding, you know, the world kept growing, had the adding mythology and characters, et cetera. And now we're up to seven books. So, you know, that is something to keep in mind: if you are contracted for a trilogy and you're not George R.R. Martin, you better make sure that you're actually writing a trilogy. So, well—
Rekka (15:30):
I mean, I kind of wish George R.R. Martin had also made sure he was writing a trilogy.
Kaelyn (15:33):
Yeah. Yeah. But along those lines, here's the other thing about the second book? The stakes have to be different now. It's funny because we were talking again about, uh, the Hunger Games. And I remember like I finished the first book and then I was like, "Oh wait, the Hunger Games, it's like the Hunger Games Part Two: Hunger Game Harder. Like, what are we doing here? This is exactly—"
New Speaker (15:55):
The Hungrier Games.
New Speaker (15:56):
There you go, the Hungrier Games. But yeah. And I was like, "wait, so this is Book Two? We're just doing the Hunger Games all over again?"
Rekka (16:07):
Can I say, though, I really liked the world building of the, like the arena? I was kind of sad that I didn't think we were going to get that.
Kaelyn (16:18):
Oh yeah. I absolutely enjoyed that. And I think that's, you know, one of the, this is a good example of one of the strong points of the book that readers enjoyed. So you want it to carry through because then even by the time we get to the third book, the city itself kind of becomes a Hunger Games arena. So there's still that consistent element through the book of anything could kill us at any time and we don't know how.
Rekka (16:40):
If you didn't have that aspect in each book, you might lose some readers who really, like, bit into it because of that.
Kaelyn (16:49):
Yeah. If the Hunger Games had suddenly turned into a super political machination centered book, or I would say even the elements from the beginning of the third with, you know, the secret underground rebellion and stuff, I don't know if there would have been that appeal to the readers who, I think, one of the things they really enjoyed was the suspense and the love triangle (of course, know your audience), but the suspense of trauma dome.
Rekka (17:15):
Right. And there was the, um, seeding of like, what is District 12, you know? And that, that comes around in the third book. So that neatly stitches the series together by the overt trauma dome, you know, element. And then the more subtle, like here's a mystery of like, what did this government do to its people? And why was there an uprising and what happens next?
Kaelyn (17:46):
Yeah. And this is by the way where we come to themes and I'm—for the record, I am not calling the trauma dome a theme.
Rekka (17:55):
Survival in the face of designed disaster?
Kaelyn (18:01):
That's what the themes are: survival, uncertainty, um, staring down at the odds, and constantly feeling unsafe. They do a very good job at creating this sense of not only could you just like we show up 'n arrest you at any moment, you could just die horribly out of nowhere for no reason. And you have very little power to stop it. So that underlying theme of, I will just call it terror through the book and overcoming that is something that carries through. So, you know, all of this talk we've done before about themes and plot, and you know why this stuff is important. This is why it's important. That said it's tempting to clutch everything, to hold on to everything you don't want anything to change. But often it has to for the story to progress, you know, the characters can't be in the same situation, setting, and I would even go so far to say same characters as they were in the first book. Um, it can get very dry.
Rekka (19:06):
I wonder how much of this is, um, that the author is writing the second book under contract after the first book has already been well-received and like, we assume that there've been arcs out already or something when they're drafting the second book—how much of this comes down to confidence and that imposter syndrome? Feeling like they need to follow a formula because they no longer have confidence in anything except for the thing that was already sold?
Kaelyn (19:34):
Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, I would say that's, there's no good answer to that. There's certainly something to be said for taking feedback or maybe criticism and incorporating that and addressing it. Um, there's also something to be said for, you know, if you're getting rave reviews, this author can do no wrong. Don't take that as a challenge.
Rekka (20:01):
Well, you're taking that the opposite of what I'm saying—
Kaelyn (20:04):
No but I understand. You know, there's, there's extremes, you can go to, you can over-correct and you can just throw the entire manuscript into a mulcher.
Rekka (20:11):
You can over-swagger.
Kaelyn (20:14):
And suddenly there's clowns from outer space in, in Middle Earth.
Rekka (20:20):
Okay. So we've said what you want to do, but have we? Like, have we answered the question?
Kaelyn (20:29):
So let's go all the way back. We were talking about these stories within a story. And I think we do ourselves a disservice when we start to think of all of these as different parts of a story. Yes, it is a beginning, middle and end, but within each of those books we're kind of still following the same basic story structure. I hate using this, but it's correct. The same four act structure. We have a setup, a response and attack a resolution. The resolution does not have to be good. It just has to resolve the setup does not have to take a long time. It doesn't have to be the same as the first book where you're establishing and world-building and introducing characters, but you still need to set up—and by the way, the setup at that point in the second book and definitely into the third book is setting up what the story is going to be at this point, rather than setting up the characters in the world themselves.
Kaelyn (21:29):
So the setup is, you know, establishing the stakes, the quest, the incident, whatever you want to call it here, then we've got the response. You know, the characters have to react to what's happened either, you know, by force or by choosing to.You have the attack portion of this, where the characters have to proactively do something and the villain has to as well. And then it resolves. And I think we, you know, because second book, second movies often end on, you know, a lot of open questions and threads and scenarios. We don't think of it as a resolution, but it is it's "okay, I need the next steps now."
Rekka (22:14):
So when your resolution is a lack of something like, "whoops, the kingdom fell."
Kaelyn (22:21):
I hate it when that happens.
Rekka (22:25):
You know, like we tried really hard in this book to protect the kingdom from the big dragon, but the dragon attacked the kingdom. We got the important people to safety, but we lost the kingdom and we still have to fight the dragon. So like, would you, would you say that's a place where you could pinch off the second book?
Kaelyn (22:43):
Let's look at a great example of that. Avatar, the Last Airbender. Just a great example of everything. The second season ends with the line, the earth kingdom has fallen as they're all escaping on Appa. Aang is incapacitated. Zuko has apparently gone back over to the dark side. Everything is a disaster. At this point, the resolution there is "we have to start over."
Rekka (23:09):
Is that satisfying, though?
Kaelyn (23:11):
No, but it's not meant to be satisfying.
Rekka (23:14):
But it feels like, okay, so maybe here's the problem is: our pressure is on to make a book that makes the reader happy when they've finished reading it. They go, "I am so glad I read that. I am so excited for the third one," but not angry. Like, "Oh my God, the earth kingdom has fallen. That guy's cabbages..."
Kaelyn (23:33):
That poor guy's cabbages. Exactly. So when you watched that, I'll tell you what I felt: "Holy crap, what are they going to do?"
Rekka (23:42):
Right. And why do I have to wait to find out? I get angry. And maybe that's the problem. The pressure is on. You don't want to leave a reader going, "well, it really likes the first book, but at the end of the second book, I was just angry."
Kaelyn (24:00):
I think there's a difference between leaving a reader angry and leaving them intrigued. In my case, I, I mean, granted, you know, I desperately want to know what happens next, but when I read the end of something and I'm just like, "Oh my God," I'm impressed!
Rekka (24:18):
It is very difficult to read a second book. So here's, here's part of the, this is the scenario:
Kaelyn (24:22):
Okay.
Rekka (24:24):
Someone has read your first book and they really liked it. And they were very satisfied by the ending. Because as you said, it ended in a good place, a solid, there was solid footing. Even if there was still a threat in the larger world, there was a feeling of triumph at the beginning, at the end of the first book, agreed?
Kaelyn (24:42):
Books often have satisfying endings. Yes.
Rekka (24:46):
So now we've got someone who's interested in our, in our world. Book Two comes out. They've, pre-ordered it. This is awesome. This is very good. We love pre-orders as authors. Um, and then they read it in a day.
Kaelyn (25:01):
Yeah, now they've got to wait a year and a half.
Rekka (25:03):
Now they've got to wait probably 18 months to read the third book, and the book no longer ended on triumph and satisfaction. Now your reader's going to wait 18 months and they don't really feel great about your story anymore. They're left uncomfortable. When they think about your world, like what— There is tension, there is, um, perhaps sadness, perhaps pain, perhaps loss, perhaps anxiety at the very least. How does that reader separate—And this is a totally different question from what was being asked, but I think it's the pressure. And I think it's part of the concern is that—if you're creating a new arc, it's going into the third book and you stop the reader before you get to the end, that will satisfy one way or the other. And I realize this is coming down to the reader, the writer, trying to please the reader, as opposed to trying to write the story. But I think that's, maybe the fear is like, how do I create a second book that has all this great tension? Is the only way to do it by putting a big battle toward the end so that it feels like the middle book had that surge of energy and can come down from that before it has a bigger surge? And I guess, I guess this is part of the problem is like: does every book have to be bigger than the last book, because that's what Hollywood thinks about trilogies, right? Every, every story has to have a bigger dinosaur than the previous work. It's not just good enough to have a T-Rex. Now you have to have a spinosaurus.
Kaelyn (26:39):
The more explosions, the better, to be sure. Um, listen. To, you know, to address the first part of this. Um, I'm not saying this to sound heartless: there— You're never gonna—
Rekka (26:48):
No, it's fine. I just dumped my heart out on this table in front of you. And please by all means, tell me that I'm being silly.
Kaelyn (26:56):
No, you are, you are never going to be able to control the way a reader feels about your book.
Rekka (27:04):
But what if I was a really good writer?
Kaelyn (27:06):
You are a really good writer. You still can't control that. Yeah.
Rekka (27:10):
I don't like that answer.
Kaelyn (27:11):
I'm sorry. You're never going to be able to control the way a reader feels about your book. I can't tell you how many people I talk to that tell me, "well, I don't read books until the series ends," and my answer to that is always, "that's fine. Just make sure you're buying them and putting them away for when you're ready for when the series ends."
Rekka (27:29):
Yes. Can we, we should say that. If you are a reader listening to this: if you want your trilogy complete, you have to buy the books and support them because the publishers are not looking at whether the story is done. The publishers are looking at the numbers.
Kaelyn (27:43):
Yeah. I, I completely understand the people who say, "I'm not reading this until it's done, because I just want to be able to take a weekend and go through the whole thing." That's fine. Buy them when they come out and wait until they're done and then read them all at once.
Rekka (27:57):
At the very least get your library to pick them up.
Kaelyn (28:00):
Yes. At the, at the minimum.
Rekka (28:03):
Yeah. Honestly, buy four copies. That's really....
Kaelyn (28:07):
I think that, you know, having a reader have a visceral reaction to something, having them be taken aback, having them need to know what's happening and what's going on next. Um, that speaks well of you as a writer. That means that you've really struck a chord. So to speak. That also means hopefully that that person is really excited to read what's coming in Book Three now. Now, do you have to top it? I think that's not a good way to look at this. You don't need to top it, but it needs to be different and interesting in a new way.
Rekka (28:43):
So what you did in Book Two, where you changed the scenarios and you changed the stakes and you make the characters do and try and fail and succeed in different ways... Now you gotta do it a third time?
Kaelyn (28:53):
Do what Star Wars did and go back to the way you did it the first time.
Rekka (28:59):
Star Was has done that several times.
Kaelyn (29:01):
Several times. Um, it's all building, it's all leading up to what your ending is. And it can be very hard to order these things and to keep it in a satisfying way. Before when I was talking about the four act structure: you can't have a second book that is just a middling of events happening with no real climax leading to anything in that book, because the climax is in the third book.
Rekka (29:29):
Okay? So this is going back to "this isn't filler."
Kaelyn (29:34):
This is not filler.
Rekka (29:36):
And you're not stretching out the middle act just to make it three books.
Kaelyn (29:41):
This is still a story. It's still, even though the trilogy is a beginning, middle and end, your second book still needs a beginning, middle, and end. It still needs a setup, a response, attack, and resolution. It's a very basic form of story structure, but it's a good one to kind of build off of. And it's broad enough that you can interpret it. And by the way, it's not at, "I must be at the resolution at 75% of this." No, like, you know, you can, some of the books I've enjoyed the most are books where I'm like reading through them and going, like, I feel like there's a lot to go here still, and we've only got 15 pages left. And some of them are rushed and I'm kind of like, "all right. I just, they finished that." But some of them, you know—
Rekka (30:25):
That last 15 pages is not what you expected, but it wraps up the story in a new way.
Kaelyn (30:30):
Yeah. And some of them, we just drop an Ex Machina in there and call it a day. You know, it's, um.
Rekka (30:36):
It's a choice. Some of our greatest playwrights've done it.
Kaelyn (30:41):
But sometimes that works. Sometimes it's kind of like, "yeah, that makes total sense." And sometimes—
Rekka (30:49):
The thing is like, if it makes total sense, it's not a, I mean, it may function as a Deus Ex Machina, but if you've set it up, it's still going to be satisfying.
Kaelyn (30:59):
Yeah. And then sometimes it's the Tyrannosaurus Rex at the end of the first Jurassic park movie who absolutely could not fit through any of those doors and creep up quietly behind everybody, but we still really enjoyed watching it because it was cool.
Rekka (31:11):
Yes, it was, it was extremely cool.
Kaelyn (31:13):
It was very cool.
Rekka (31:14):
That roar with the banner. I mean, I would, I would live in that moment if I could.
Kaelyn (31:18):
And it's standing on top of a skeleton of itself.
Rekka (31:22):
Yeah.
Kaelyn (31:23):
Yeah. That was great.
Rekka (31:24):
That was good stuff. Give me more of that. And then they tried to, and then they failed. Okay. So to wrap up what we're trying to say here: you can't wrap up what we're trying to say here, cause this is Book Two. So you can't really wrap it up.
Kaelyn (31:41):
No, but.
Rekka (31:41):
So we're just going to stop. No satisfying ending, just the anxiety of, "where are we going from here?"
Kaelyn (31:48):
I don't know. Some cops are going to burst in and arrest me and we'll call that the Ex Machina.
Rekka (31:51):
I heard a lot of sirens before we started.
Kaelyn (31:52):
There were a lot of sirens.
Rekka (31:54):
Book Two is still a book.
Kaelyn (31:56):
It's still a book.
Rekka (31:59):
Write a book. Plan it out, according to Kaelyn. And frankly, I agree, especially, okay. So if I were, um, just real quick, like my method for, for what I do with a trilogy, which is bullshit because I wrote every Book Two thinking that there'd be at least five books. But! What I did was I imagined the end that I was trying to get to with the end of my story. And I picked a clinch point in that story that I could use to write up to with Book Two. But I didn't like just think of this as writing to the end of my story, but stopping early. I thought of this as, what is the structure of this? Like where are these people moving?
Kaelyn (32:42):
Rekka, you're singing to my heart right now.
Rekka (32:44):
I, yes. So once I picked where that story was going to end, that became the end that I was looking at. And like, yes, I, I seeded it in things I could use later, because we're still in the middle point. I can still Chekov these Rifles, um, for a little bit longer. And then, um, and then I write the story and I make it, again, you know, the right number of acts. I put things in the right place. I, I make sure that there's an arc to it. And then I adjust it in revisions. That's the nice thing! You can re adjust all these things in revisions.
Kaelyn (33:22):
No, No, Rekka. Once it's written, that's it.
Rekka (33:22):
No! You can! You can adjust them a heck of a lot. So maybe don't worry about it too much... question mark?
Kaelyn (33:34):
Well... Again, I think if you're concerned about it, make sure, take a step back and make sure that you are not writing a second book in a trilogy for the sake of writing a trilogy.
Rekka (33:46):
And also make sure you are not worried about writing the second book in a trilogy because you're worried about the reader's reaction.
Kaelyn (33:53):
Absolutely. Um, this is the, the heartless thing for me to say: you are there, you were writing a book to, write your book to appeal to the people who are going to like it. It is not necessarily going to be everybody's particular brand of vodka.
Rekka (34:08):
It is literally not going to be for everyone. So if you write the story along the lines that you approached the first story, but treat it as a slight broadening of the world, you know, you're not, you're not just trying to like make the same souffle the second time.
Kaelyn (34:34):
I'm going to say something that is going to horrify Rekka. So I apologize for the—
Rekka (34:39):
I can edit it out. It's okay.
Kaelyn (34:41):
Your job is not to make the reader happy. Your job is to make them interested.
Rekka (34:48):
As exemplified by George R.R. Martin.
Kaelyn (34:50):
It's an excellent example because I am so frustrated with that man, for a lot of reasons, the day The Winds of Winter comes out, I will probably take a day off work and read the book. Am I proud of this? No, but I resign myself to the fact that this is probably gonna happen.
Rekka (35:10):
I've read all the books and, given the HBO series, and given his history, and given his obvious inability to take this in for a landing, I think I'm done.
Kaelyn (35:31):
Oh, no. I'm not.
New Speaker (35:31):
I will let you tell me... but like one of the books—
Kaelyn (35:36):
In six years when this comes out, I'll let you know.
Rekka (35:37):
Well, that's the thing. Okay. So here's our advice for writing the next book in your series, whether it's Book Two in a trilogy or book 18, in a maybe-he'll-survive-long-enough-to-finish-this. Just write the book so that your audience isn't waiting six years between books.
Kaelyn (35:59):
Yeah. Um, you know, there, look, there's definitely something to be said for like the books come out when they come out. Um, you know, not just George R.R. Martin. Authors in general. Um, there is a point where you kind of feel like this is starting to feel a little rude. Um, you know, anyway, all of this is to say that like, there's, I, I know a lot about like the, uh, the history of going into the, you know, how these books were written and the versions and things that changed. It's frustrating. I wish I didn't know this stuff. I wish I just thought that he was just a really slow writer. That said, I'm not necessarily happy with all of this stuff; I am very interested and intrigued because I want to know what happens here. And that is what your job is as a writer. It is to entertain, to interest, and to intrigue. You want to keep people coming back for more.
Rekka (36:55):
Okay. So go from, "there is no war in Ba Sing Se" to "there is no Ba Sing Se" and, um, and leave them wanting more for Book Three, which hopefully you know where it's going. At least roughly.
Kaelyn (37:13):
I will say that watching the season finale of the second season of Avatar was possibly the most stressed I've been watching a television show in a long time. Yes. And I, I was, I was DVRing all of these and like getting home and watching them immediately. And when it concluded, I was kind of like, "of course that's what had to happen. That's the only thing that could have happened here in order for the story to make sense. I still want to kill the writers of this because how dare they!" But I can take a step back and go, "This is excellent storytelling. And I cannot wait to see what happens next."
Rekka (37:52):
Right? Well, hopefully, listener, you are going to write us a trilogy where we are carried by the momentum you create into the third book to finish it off to a very satisfying third book ending.
Kaelyn (38:08):
If anyone listening to this is going, "well, I know what I'll do, I'll just write all three of them upfront and that way they'll all be queued up and ready to go so nobody has to get mad at this." That's not how this works. That's not a thing that happens. A publisher will not release a trilogy all at once. They probably won't even release them six months apart.
Rekka (38:25):
Okay. To be fair. This has happened.
Kaelyn (38:27):
It has.
Rekka (38:27):
It is rare though.
Kaelyn (38:29):
When these things happen, typically what goes on there is that that author already has a massive online built-in following. You know, Andy Weir with the Martian—obviously that wasn't a trilogy, but we're talking that level of like interest.
Rekka (38:45):
Popularity. Yeah. And anything outside of that is probably an outlier. And even that is an outlier. So don't count on that. Also as a point of, um, you know, if this is your first book, you're going to be shopping around potentially for an agent. And if you shop around with a project where you've been spending all your time writing three books in one world, and then Book One is rejected, you don't get to bring them Book Two.
Kaelyn (39:12):
Yeah.
Rekka (39:12):
So if you are looking to go the traditional agent-then-publisher path, um, you might not want to plan to break into publishing with a trilogy.
Kaelyn (39:22):
I will go so far as to say that it could almost be a little off-putting. Um, I've definitely had things submitted that were just hundreds of thousands of words of multiple books. And it's like, "what do you expect me to do with this?" Um, it's not, again, it's not unheard of. But anyway, so don't, don't think you're going to skirt this by going, "that's fine. I'll just write everything at once and then it'll be done and I don't have to think or worry about it."
Rekka (39:51):
Well, like we said, so a publisher is not going to necessarily be tempted by a trilogy. Neither is an agent. You've just spent years, potentially. You don't have any other projects now to shop around if it doesn't work. And then also, if it does sell, the editor will give you changes to Book One that will ripple all the way to the end and you will be rewriting those books anyway.
Kaelyn (40:12):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Nothing, nothing wrong, by the way, with having drafts or outlines or whatever, just don't, don't think you're done.
Rekka (40:20):
If you just want to write a trilogy and you just want to have it done at the end and this isn't about business and this isn't about selling it and this isn't about anything like that, by all means, write it all at once. Write it as a full story and find the spots where it makes sense to, you know, twist your balloon animal into three segments. I'm going for a new metaphor.
Kaelyn (40:42):
Those weird snakes. I like those. I like the, you know, the snakes with the twists in them. Yes.
Rekka (40:47):
So your balloon sausage hopefully has three satisfying segments and then you're done.
Kaelyn (40:58):
Balloon sausage!
Rekka (40:58):
And I think we're done, on that note. I hope this was helpful. I hope this made sense. I hope this gives you hope that it's just writing another story.
Kaelyn (41:07):
It is. It really is. And to be honest with you, if, you know, as I said, if you're struggling with that, maybe take a step back and try to identify why.
Rekka (41:16):
Yep. Think about it as objectively as you can, because chances are your anxiety comes when you are subjected to the subjective worries.
Kaelyn (41:25):
Yes, exactly. So, well on that note, so this is the end of the podcast.
Rekka (41:31):
Forever?
Kaelyn (41:32):
Well no, this episode, because remember each of them are their own story.
Rekka (41:36):
So what are you going to do that's going to leave me with anxiety?
Kaelyn (41:41):
Oh goodness, I feel like just by talking to you, I can—
Rekka (41:45):
Okay, fair. All right, yeah. I am speaking to an editor. There's always anxiety.
Kaelyn (41:49):
I was going to say. I feel like Rekka, you can just look at me sometimes. So here's what I will end with, with trilogies. There is a reason they are one of the most commonly used forms of storytelling.
Rekka (42:02):
Is it because they're easier?
Kaelyn (42:04):
They're easier.
Rekka (42:06):
How? We just said like, you're filling in the gaps, and make it two books.
Kaelyn (42:11):
Well, you're going to have to wait to find out, Rekka.
Rekka (42:14):
Awwwwwwwww!!!! Boo!
Kaelyn (42:14):
Yes. So next episode, we're going to talk about duologies. We're going to spend a lot of time comparing them to trilogies, and we're going to spend some time talking about why they're really hard and why trilogies, for everything we just said here, are also comparatively much easier.
Rekka (42:30):
So two weeks: we're talking about two books, the two of us with too many opinions, is that about right?
Kaelyn (42:39):
I was hoping we were going to be talking about this on the 22nd.
Rekka (42:41):
Nope, no luck. 22nd is Thursday. Yeah. I mean, we can release the episode late if you want. Or wait. That would be early.
Kaelyn (42:50):
Yeah that would be early. That would be early.
Rekka (42:52):
Woooo no. I have to edit that. Okay. So I'm done for today. Done for trilogies. Done for Book Two in a trilogy. Probably not done for trilogies.
Kaelyn (43:00):
We're never done for trilogies.
Rekka (43:01):
We're never done on any of these topics.
Kaelyn (43:03):
Thank you so much, everyone for listening.
Rekka (43:05):
We are at wmbcast.com for all our old episodes. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at @WMBcast. And if you'd like to support our show, you can either leave us a rating and review—and please make sure to subscribe—on whatever podcast app you're using and also at patreon.com/WMBcast.
Kaelyn (43:26):
And if you have a question or, you know, something you'd like to hear about, send it to us, we love those.
Rekka (43:30):
Send it to us. If you want it anonymous, you can send it in DMs. And, uh, we will feature it in a future episode. Cause that's where this one came from.
Kaelyn (43:38):
Thanks again, everyone. We'll see you in two weeks when we're talking about duologies.