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.
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.
