Maintaining Creativity While Writing A Series - Melissa Addey
Tuesday 1 August 2023
There are lots of good commercial and artistic reasons for writing in a series but what happens about maintaining your own personal creativity over time? What if you wind up feeling bored and resentful, trapped by a never-ending series that was only ever intended as a handful of books and now won’t let you go?
I’ve worked on three series of books, each one a quartet, which is pretty short by some writers’ standards of a series. And yet, with the third in the series I’m currently writing I suddenly got bored and felt thoroughly uninspired. I’d just had two great new ideas for future books (ooh, shiny things!) but felt like I was ‘obliged’ to complete the existing series first, which didn’t feel the least bit creative, more like a contractual obligation.
So how to regain the va-va-voom? How to get creative and inspired again? Or should you just give up altogether and leave a series half-finished so you can magpie on over to the new shiny ideas just begging to be worked on, while your loyal readers sob and rage at being abandoned? Here’s a few solutions you can use in this situation:
Absence makes the heart grow fonder: have some ‘me’ time:
Your creative well needs to be filled up, not just drawn from. Go on some artist’s dates, as Julia Cameron calls them, where you do something that fills you up creatively: try a new skill or experience, soak up someone else’s art, enjoy time staring at the clouds. I got in touch with an escape room provider and asked if we could collaborate to build a room themed around one of my series, not for the money, just so I could have a new and fun experience. And that same week I finished the draft I’d been dragging my feet over. Not a coincidence.
Fall in love again
Revisit the initial spark – what made you want to write this series in the first place? Look through the five-star reviews, see what your readers love. Look at what you had planned going forward and see if you can add something fresh that will get you interested again, perhaps a new direction, character or location. If the series has been out a while, consider a bit of a refresh to how it looks – new covers or adding that map you always wanted inside, perhaps developing merchandise linked to it. Have some fun and see it in a new light.
A trial separation
If there’s a good point to leave in the series, take the opportunity for a break, but leave the door ajar. My current series has both an obvious spin-off series and an obvious prequel. I don’t want to write them right now, but I can still come back to them.
Have an (agreed) affair: go write something different and come back
Let your committed readers know there’s going to be a break so you can maintain your creative spark – they will understand. Then go away, write something else and come back when you’re ready. Both the Hunger Games and the Twilight authors did this for a few years, before coming back with a prequel and a different character’s viewpoint.
There’s always polygamy
You can try writing multiple series simultaneously, to keep things fresh. You can start a new series with a light link to the old one, just to help the readers move across. Or write each book as a standalone but they all weave together if you read more than one – I did this for two of my series and it worked well because you can stop any time.
Stay together for the kids: how to keep going till you reach a good place to stop
Writing that third book got slowed down due to various life things taking over, and I lost the flow, which contributed to feeling disconnected from it and bored. Try and keep the flow going, or take the time to re-immerse yourself as soon as you can. If you can stagger to the first draft, you’ll enter the editing phase and that different stage can reinvigorate things. If your books are research-heavy, try and split it up so you have to learn something new for each book.
Get an amicable divorce
You know what, sometimes you just have to finish a series if it no longer inspires you to write well. If there are still obvious threads to tie together, to avoid your readers feeling too disappointed, consider whether you can write a short sequel piece to wrap things up and give them a sense of completion. It could even be a giveaway piece you add to your website, a little ‘thank you’ for all the enthusiasm shown along the way.
As for me, I had some play time, pushed my way to the first full draft so I could enter the editing phase and now, with one last book to complete the series, I remember where I wanted my characters to end up and I’m looking forward to taking them (and my lovely readers) there so I can wave them a fond, rather than resentful, farewell.
I’ll be running a workshop on Writing a Series at the Queensland Writers Centre on 26 August and I can’t wait – we’ll be looking at why writing in a series is a good idea, brainstorming ways to do it well, as well as looking at some of the downsides and how to tackle them. I hope to see you there: come with one book and leave with ideas for a series!
Melissa Addey is a fulltime author of historical fiction set in Rome, Morocco and China. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and was the Writer in Residence at the British Library. She campaigns for excellence in self-publishing with ALLi (www. AllianceIndependentAuthors.org). Visit her website www. MelissaAddey.com to collect a free historical novella.
Melissa Addey will host the workshop Writing A Series on 26 August, at Queensland Writers Centre and online.