Planning a series: keeping names, places and facts straight

Readers of a series remember more than you expect. They remember that the innkeeper’s daughter had a scar on her left hand, that the river runs east, and that the hero could not swim in book one. They will write to you, kindly or not, when book three gets it wrong.

The writer is at a disadvantage here. You wrote book one two years ago, in a different mood, and you have reread it less often than your keenest readers. The answer is not a better memory. It is a habit of writing things down while they are fresh, in a form you can actually use when you start the next book.

Decide what kind of series it is

Series come in a few shapes, and each one asks for different records.

• One long story across several books, such as an epic fantasy or a family saga. The plot itself runs on, so you need to track who knows what, and when.
• The same characters, a new story each time, such as most crime and many romance series. Each book stands alone, so the people, places and running details matter more than the plot.
• A shared world with different characters, where each book follows someone new. The setting, its history and its rules are the thread.

Knowing which you are writing tells you where to spend your effort. A detective series needs a meticulous record of the detective. A shared-world series needs one of the world.

Keep one reference for the whole series

Many writers keep a separate notes document for each book. It feels natural, and it means that by book four the facts about a single character are spread across four files that partly disagree.

Keep one reference for the series instead, organised by subject rather than by book: a page per character, a page per place, a page for each set of rules. When a book adds something, add it to the right page with a note of which book it came from. When you need to know a character’s sister’s name, there is one place to look, and it already includes everything every book has said.

What to write down as you go

The best time to record a fact is the moment you invent it, in the middle of drafting, before you have a chance to forget you made it up. A quick note is enough; you can tidy it later. These are the details that most often go astray across a series:

• Names and their spellings, including nicknames, titles and what different characters call each other.
• Ages and birthdays, or at least the year each character was born, so that ages stay right as the books move on.
• Physical details that are easy to contradict: eye colour, height, scars, which hand someone writes with.
• Places and distances: how long the journey takes, what is on which side of the river, which street the shop is on.
• The rules: how the magic or technology works, what it costs and what it cannot do. Readers forgive almost anything except a rule that changes when the plot needs it to.
• Who knows what: secrets, and the book in which each character learned them.
• Loose threads: anything you hinted at and might want to pay off later, so a hint does not turn into a promise you forgot.

Keep a chronology in story time

Books are written in one order and happen in another. Flashbacks, time skips and the gaps between books all make it easy to lose track of when things happened, and a series multiplies the problem.

Keep a simple chronology of the story’s own calendar: the key events of each book with a date or a relative marker such as Day 3 or spring, two years after the fire. You do not need exact dates if the books do not use them, but you need the order and the rough distances. It is what lets you check, quickly, how old the children are now, or whether a character could really have heard the news before the wedding.

In Author Sweets, the Timeline tab lays a book’s scenes out in the order they happen in the story, and each scene can carry a story date in your own words, so the chronology of each book sits right beside its draft.

Choose names that will not collide

Across a long series, the cast grows, and similar names start to cause real confusion. Two minor characters called Mara and Marta are fine in one book; across five books, with a Mark and a Martin arriving later, readers start to mix them up.

A few habits help. Keep a list of every name in the series, minor characters included, and check it before naming anyone new. Vary first letters, syllable counts and sounds. Be wary of names that look alike on the page even if they sound different aloud. And give places the same care: a town, a river and a family that share a name are a gift to the plot only if you meant it.

If you need a fresh name that does not echo the ones you have, the name generators offer character, fantasy, villain, place and town names, twelve at a time.

Reread before you start the next book

Before you draft a new book in the series, read the last one again, with your reference open beside you. You are not editing; you are checking what is actually on the page against what you remember. Add anything the reference is missing, and mark anything that contradicts it, so you can decide which version is true before you build on it.

If rereading a whole book is not practical, read your outline or synopsis of it and the last few chapters in full. The ending of the previous book is where the next one starts, and its tone and situation are the details you most need fresh.

Remind readers without an info dump

Every book after the first has to serve two readers at once: the one who has just finished the previous book and the one who has never read it. Both need enough context to follow, and neither wants three pages of summary.

Weave the past in where it matters. A character’s history comes up when it changes what they do in this scene, not in a block at the start. A sentence of reminder at the moment a returning character appears is usually enough, and it reads as characterisation if it comes from the point-of-view character’s feelings about them rather than from the narrator.

In Author Sweets

Each book keeps its own characters and places, each with a page of its own. Facts hold label and value pairs such as an age, an eye colour or an allegiance, so the details readers notice sit in one tidy list, and the search finds a character by a fact you have filled in. Also known as keeps the other names the text uses for someone, a nickname, a title or a maiden name, and Mark names in the text underlines every mention in the scene you have open.

A World tab keeps everything that is not a person or a place: items, factions, lore, creatures, events, or a kind of your own.

The guide to outlining a novel is a good companion for planning the next book’s shape, and the story structures can lay its chapters out for you the moment you start it.