The Stand-Alone versus The Sequel

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, lately, as I’ve gotten deeper into writing the first draft of “Book of M”.  It’s especially come to the fore the more I think about the background material that I’ve developed – and continue to develop – for this project.

I’d always conceived of “Book of M” as a “Stand-alone”.  It has a self-contained plot with a clear beginning, middle, and end.  I didn’t always know exactly where the story was going or how it was going to end, but I had a general vision for it.  And now that I’ve got the thing outlined, I’m confident the story can be told in 250,000 words or less – even if I do go over my target length of 125,000 words, it will still be within the bounds of a typically-successful epic fantasy novel.  From my outline, I don’t really see a satisfying way of splitting the book into a longer story.  My plan for the novel does not make for the springboard to a traditional fantasy trilogy.

And yet, I’ve now committed nearly 50,000 words just to the backstory: the background details, the history, the worldbuilding.  That’s a significant investment in detail for a one-and-done story.  And naturally I’ve wondered: Should I make this the beginning of a series? 

Well, I don’t know the answer to that, yet.

The Tragedy of Multi-Volume Epics

Read an interesting article this week on “the perils and pleasures of long-running fantasy series” by Zack Handlen.  The article seems to conclude, ultimately, that all very long, multi-volume epics are by design doomed to disappoint – and yet we love them anyway.  It’s a difficult conclusion to reach.

Zack Handlen appears believes this happens because readers become attached to the characters in these stories – a true enough proposition.  I know I’ve become strongly attached to characters in long-running series.  The readers, Zack argues, are involved in an intimate “relationship” with the series that is ultimately “one sided”.  With each successive volume, the epic fantasy author raises the stakes – and reader expectations – for the final volume, making his job increasingly difficult.  Part of the problem, the article suggests, is that the once a book is published, it’s “set in stone”.  The author can’t go back and tweak it, revise it, and refashion it.  As the story changes in the telling, the details at the beginning of the series may no longer mesh with the reality that comes at the end.  The series accumulates so many threads, some are left loose and other resolved unsatisfactorily for at least some readers.

However, I’m not sure I agree with the general thesis that all long-running epic fantasies necessarily lead to disappointment.