I am tentative about announcing a series because I recall the thrill of reading Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson when I was much younger. In this historical fiction a teenager escapes imprisonment on a ship and flees through the wild highlands of Scotland with the assistance of an actual historical murderer, Alan Breck Stewart. Stevenson wrote a sequel to this book named after the main character, David Balfour. The beginning section, in which David encounters Stewart again piqued my interest. However, the rest of this novel devolved into a love story that was pale in comparison to the first book.

Despite my fear of launching into a series that I could not complete, I started playing with plots for an alternate world series. Initially, a small group of people cross a mountain range and encounter a land with signs of a flourishing civilization that had disappeared, or so they thought. Then, they started running into the inhabitants of that fallen empire. But, I wanted my characters to deal with problems that have plagued people throughout the history of our real world to give me enough fuel for my series.

Series do not have to be started with the intention of creating one. A complete first novel, which would seem to be a stand-alone work, can be expanded. There are numerous ways to do this. Minor details of plots are often not completely wrapped up in the first book and can serve as a basis for the next. The books that follow can explore the life and times of lesser characters as they move into the limelight as the protagonist. In addition, the author can move back in time to prior adventures, such as the origin story of the main character, or forward to show the character’s influence on the future of their “world.” 

When Orson Scott Card wrote Ender’s Game it was a novelette complete in itself. First, he expanded it into a novel, introducing new characters. Then, he started a series based on the characters found in this Hugo Award winning science fiction tale. The next one, Speaker for the Dead takes place in the future, 3000 years later. Ender’s Shadow, a parallel novel, retells Ender’s story from the viewpoint of his very different friend, Bean. The Shadow series continued with the story of Bean’s children. There are now sixteen novels to tell the saga of Ender, his siblings and friends. 

It is not easy to create a fresh new story each time. Books in the series should grow the sphere of the original characters. It would be nice if I could come up with a series of problems that make up one overarching challenge for the main character in the rare case that he or she became unexpectedly popular. Then, I realized the solution was to use Card’s tactic. Build my alternate world and create enough ancillary characters that could appear with problems of their own in each new novel in the series.

My alternate world scheme would not leave me alone in peace. I couldn’t figure out how to develop new plots when I had yet to build my world. Then, I realized I had almost duplicated the society in Britain after the Roman leaders pulled out the military, leaving the people to fight migrants and invaders as they saw fit. Their newcomers arrived by sea, and not over mountains. As I started researching this era, the scarcity of documents from that time period became a challenge. I wanted a realistic history, but the only ones written were penned by two clerics, more interested in defending their religious views than recording history. The later documents were not reliable.

Then, I recalled a student who approached me moaning because she couldn’t find any factual information for a history class report on King Arthur. I informed her that everything she had heard about him was a legend. Historians did not know if he really existed. I was facing the same problem as my new series was set to occur during the time that Arthur was supposed to have lived. I had thought that changing my alternate world to a real historical time period would make it easier. But, I would still be building a world for my characters almost from scratch.