Return of the Sequel: Duologies, Trilogies, and Series

As was long ago foretold in our prior blog “Successful Sequels” (Click here to teleport for a refresher), one thing we wanted to come back and discuss is how sequel stories may play out in regard to series of different lengths.

            In our initial dive into sequels, Kristin and I identified four points successful sequels, by that we mean sequels that topped their prior first novels (in our opinion), typically tend to hit:

1.     The Promise of Premise is the Same: meaning the sequel offers up all the same stuff you loved about the first book to draw you in.

2.     Higher Stakes: meaning if you thought B1 was stressful, plot’s about to hit the fan.

3.     Expansion of Lore/Characters: meaning we get to see way more of the world or characters (new or old) that we did not have time for in B1.

4.     Expansion of B1: combining all of these factors and just taking everything to the absolute next level with your storytelling. This is where you broaden your plot, your worldbuilding, your stakes all into one big, blended mass of stress that will keep your readers desperately hanging on for more.

As I acknowledged though in “Successful Sequels”, all the example sequel books I used were from trilogies, where the second book plays a very specific role of expanding the world of the first one and raising the stakes for B3, typically meaning the world as the characters know it will get obliterated in some way to where they’re going to be forced into moving forward to the climax of the story.

But is this the case for all stories?

As y’all know if you’ve been reading prior blogs and monthly reading wrap-ups, I have been waiting forever to read the newly released sequel to Amie Kaufman’s The Isles of the Gods duology, and this might be just the book to help answer this question.

Duologies

            I think they’ve become much trendier recently, but if you’re not familiar with what a duology is, this is just a fancy way of saying a series with two books in it. Duologies are not something I typically think of, being someone who grew up with massive, long-running series like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or James Patterson’s Maximum Ride. But, if executed well, this two-book format can be wildly satisfying.

            Amie Kaufman, herself, seems to be an author who really favors this format as many of the series I’ve read by her have been duologies: Unearthed (with Meagan Spooner), The Other Side of the Sky (with Meagan Spooner), and The World Between Blinks (with Ryan Graudin). She also seems to favor co-writing, which I can only assume means she definitely read our other blog “How to Not Kill Your Co-Writer”, which you can find right here. Just kidding, I’d actually freak out if Amie Kaufman read something I wrote, but I digress.

            The Isles of the Gods though is written just by Kaufman and creates this fascinating technological fantasy world that I tend to describe as like Avatar: The Last Airbender fused with a swashbuckling story like Pirates of the Caribbean. Something around there, at the very least, and I absolutely loved the first book as it had a ton of elements I just really love in stories: adventure, elemental powers, mythology, romance, characters that were all over the place in terms of moral and ethical lines. I shall try to keep it as spoiler free as possible as I know this is a new book and I know several people that want to read it.

            But what I found wildly interesting about reading B2, The Heart of the World, was that Kaufman didn’t maybe stick with what my traditional expectation of a sequel would be. Now, to clarify, she did hit all the main points Kristin and I threw out: we have the same characters and world we grew to love in B1, we’re dealing with the aftermath of B1 and no one has any clue what’s about to happen, we have several new characters to get to know and we’re seeing the side of the world we only got glimpses of before, and all this is getting fused together into a big high-stakes melting pot to where we don’t know what’s going to happen.

            So, all those same points to hit are still there and being hit, but what I found most interesting was that while B1 was a swashbuckling race against time (legit, there is no safe place to stop after a certain point), B2 was a little bit more of a court drama as Leander, Selly, and Keegan return back to Alinor’s palace after their breakneck run to prevent their enemy’s god from awakening to bring war. Kristin and I tend to have differing preferences, I think, on these two core types of fantasy stories- I think she’s a bit more fond of court drama and I’m more favorable toward a “journey” story. Still, I found it absolutely wild that Kaufman essentially gave both books wildly different plot set ups and executed it brilliantly.

            In our prior conversation about sequels, we really focused in on sequels like Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire that are literally just the plot of B1 repeated, but even more risky. To me, it’s a little counterintuitive to my writer brain to write a book that is very strongly one specific type of plotline and then completely switch gears, but it worked for Kaufman in The Heart of the World. Most strongly, I think the main reason is she kept the danger/intrigue factor that coursed through the first book- characters playing with elements bigger than themselves, the inability to discount anyone as a threat so you don’t know who to trust, and clear and present danger of a war- all throughout B2. In one sense, things are a little bit calmer as the characters are not running for their lives like they were literally every second of B1, but the risk is still astronomically high.

            As we were talking about this though, Kristin made the point that this drastic shift in plot type probably stems from the fact that this series is a duology. You don’t have a whole other book to wrap things up in, so you’ve got to move fast. In fact, this is something I can say for all of Kaufman’s duologies that I’ve read- the second book is always drastically different from the first as you’re literally just dealing with the aftermath of B1. Usually by the end, you look back through and go, “Wow, did that stuff all happen in this book?” because you’ve covered so much ground plot-wise, character-wise, and drama-wise.

            Thinking on it now in comparison to trilogies, duologies hit that “point of no return” obliteration point that’s usually in a second book at the end of the first, and that way the authors can spend all of B2 wrapping up as the story has to end in the second book. Come to think of it, even if they don’t totally cliffhang, all three of the duologies I’ve completed reading by Amie Kaufman (I haven’t read B2 of The World Between Blinks so I don’t want to speak for that one specifically), either cliffhang or wrap up just enough to keep you satisfied but still hanging on the edge of your seat.

            So, looking at duologies, you almost have to make the normal movements of the first and second book in a trilogy within the entire first book. As someone who’s not very good at being succinct, that is an astounding feat to me to be able to write a book that feels like two books and not have it be a thousand pages. It’s a daunting task, but I think Kaufman does it excellently. Go buy all her books.

Trilogies

We’ve talked a lot about trilogies already and I think I did a much wider breakdown of this within the other blog, so I’ll keep this short and simple. With trilogies, you’re essentially breaking the story into three parts.

Part One needs to be where you set up your initial characters, worldbuilding, and plot to create a memorable, high-stakes environment. Let’s keep with The Hunger Games as that’s an easy example. We see Panem, District 12, the Capitol, and the Arena- to be honest, there’s really not a ton of locations, is there? Character-wise we have Katniss’s family, Gale, Peeta, Haymitch, Effie, Cinna, and the other tributes in the Arena most notably. Most of the tributes we really don’t even see or learn much about as Collins literally kills them off entirely- which, as I pointed out in the last blog, does not mean those people aren’t fleshed out characters, at least somewhat. We see Katniss, maybe somewhat unknowingly, defy the Capitol’s stranglehold on the county in a super public way, but she and Peeta get to live, go home, and allegedly, everything’s all fine and dandy. Well, at least she thinks it is until President Snow starts threatening her.

Part Two in a trilogy is the expansion. As Catching Fire gets started, we learn Katniss has screwed up in a big way and maybe triggered a growing rebellion against the Capitol. Her family isn’t safe, she’s not sure how she feels about the guy she’s publicly supposed to be madly in love with, and on top of that, she’s getting chucked back into the Arena right after surviving it the first time. This time though, we get to see a cast of tributes who are known to Katniss from their celebrity status as Victors, and many of them become long-running characters and allies. In this book though, there’s a much larger game of rebellion happening behind-the-scenes that Katniss is caught in the middle of. By the end of the book, she’s getting whisked off to the allegedly destroyed District 13 to be the face of a rebellion she knew very little about.

Part Three is the wrap up. I feel like with the third part of trilogy, characters are usually given a little bit of time away from the action (In a duology, I think this kind of happens similarly at the beginning of B2) where they learn how things really are and recoup. Not gonna lie, Mockingjay is not an easy read. Katniss, among other characters, is in a horrible state of trauma that is very painful to read. She’s being used to film propaganda for a war she can’t really see, she has no clue if Peeta’s alive, and it’s hard to know what people’s motivations are and if they’re working in her best interest. Typing it now, this also sounds a little bit like the beginning of The Heart of the World where Selly, Leander, and Keegan get back to their home country and suddenly aren’t sure if their royals have the country’s best interest in mind. Maybe this intrigue line is also a trend. Curious.

Anyway, Peeta is eventually rescued and Katniss gets out in the action, finding herself in the heart of the fighting in the Capitol. President Snow is overthrown, but Katniss herself delivers a shocking blow by killing the person the rebellion was going to put in his place, whom she didn’t trust. Beyond that, you see the brutal aftermath of the war and the seeds of how Katniss rebuilds her life, love, and self after it seems like all is taken from her. The story resolves here. Last books, especially ones as dark as Mockingjay, can be very hard to read, so there’s a fair amount of action scenes interspersed with the new normal of District 13 Katniss is in throughout the book.

            Initial set up, raising the stakes, and resolution. Three specific movements distributed fairly equally among separate books.

Series

            This one’s a bit trickier as I was trying to think about it after considering duologies and trilogies. I didn’t really realize it until looking at things from a more writing-focused perspective, but a lot of longer series tend to have a smaller plot for each book, leading up into a larger overarching plot. For example, each Harry Potter book mostly focuses on the characters going to school with some element that leads up to the larger plot once we get to the final book. Percy Jackson works the same way where each book focuses on a smaller quest, all of which contributes to the big final climax in the final book of the first series. Actually, I find it really funny that the first three PJO books kind of have the exact same plot: find Percy’s mom, find Grover, find Annabeth.

            So, clearly, when you’re thinking about writing an extended series, you need to consider how the smaller parts of the story add up into the larger, overarching plotline. With Harry Potter and PJO, you’re talking about series with seven or five books respectively, which is a lot of time to character-build, expand your plot, and build up to the big plot you’re working toward. With Harry Potter, although the final showdown with Voldemort doesn’t happen until the last book, you still see him or his allies popping up at least once within each book. With PJO, although Kronos himself isn’t fought until the last book, as he has to be reformed from Tartarus, he still makes appearances in each prior book through Percy’s demigod dreams.

            With extended series, it’s all about the long game. It has to be clear what the overarching plot, threat, and consequences will be if the heroes don’t succeed, and you have to see said threat often enough that the readers don’t forget about them. In both of the examples, Voldemort and Kronos play a very limited role initially in their respective series as there is some sort of limiter keeping them away, which now that I think about it is literally the same thing. They have to reform due to some consequence of a prior rise to power that cost them their initial form.

            So, if you’re considering a longer series, think about how each individual book will add step by step into the larger overarching plot you’re setting up. How does the plot and characters and trials of B1, B2, or B3 play into the final showdown. Write your individual segments but focus on how these things will propel your characters or their development to where you need them to be.

            Got any other thoughts on writing expanded stories or favorite duologies, trilogies, or series you think are good examples of writing technique? Let us know!

            Thanks for reading. Write on.

            -Kamryn