GUEST BLOG: Katharine Kerr on Writing Long Series

Saga, Series, and Just Plain Long Books

There is nothing an author today has to guard himself more carefully against than the Saga Habit.  The least slackening of vigilance and the thing has gripped him.

            -- P.G. Wodehouse, writing in 1935

            How little things change!  I too am a victim of the Saga Habit.  Fifteen Deverry books, four Nola O’Gradys -- and I haven’t even finished the Nola series!  Now SORCERER’S LUCK, which I   a “Runemaster trilogy”.  Over the years, a number of people have asked me why I tend to write at this great length.  I’ve put some thought into the answer, and it can be boiled down one word: consequences.  Well, maybe two words: consequences and characters.  Or perhaps, consequences, characters, and the subconscious mind, above all the subconscious mind.  You see what I mean?  These things multiply by themselves.

meant to be a stand-alone, is insisting that it’s only the first volume of

            Not all series books are sagas.  Some are shaped more like beads on a string, separate episodes held together by a set of characters, who may or may not grow and change as the series continues.  Many mystery novels fall into the episode category, Sherlock Holmes, for example, or James Bond.  Other series start out as episodics, but saga creeps up on them as minor characters bring depth to a plot and demand stories of their own, for instance, in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series or Ian Rankin’s detective novels.  What determines the difference in these examples comes back to the idea of consequences.

Is This Story Too Big…Or Is The Book Too Small?

Recently, I read two novels that left me chewing over the issue of story size. The two novels were Love On The Run by Katharine Kerr and A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Both were absorbing, with characters I cared about and nifty plot twists, ideas to chew on, and interesting locales. In other words, they were respectable novels by competent authors. I enjoyed them, yet each in a different way left me wishing the book had been either longer or shorter.

Love On The Run is the fourth in a series about a paranormal investigator, Nola O'Grady, her sweetheart Ari who is by no means mundane, the various doings of the super-secret agency that employs her, and her family, variously gifted and not always on the right side of the law on this and several other worlds. By the time Love On The Run takes place, we've had a chance to get to know these characters and worlds. The multiplicity of related alternate universes reminded me of some of my favorite early Andre Norton science fiction.

A Discovery of Witches is actually the first volume in a trilogy, but for some reason I did not realize that until I sat down to write this essay. I was thoroughly prepared to enjoy it -- what a delight to begin a story in the research shelves of the Bodleian Library, tracking down and deciphering ancient manuscripts.