I haven't as yet tackled a trilogy, but I'm reading the second book of the 'Field of Blood' Trilogy by Eric Wilson. OK, it's never going to be a very literary book, but I thoroughly enjoyed the first one.

Book 2, however, is a very different story - it seems that in Book 2 you have to recap enough of Book 1 so that anyone who has just plunged in halfway through can pick up what happened. As a result, there are big chunks of 'telling', just reeling off what happened earlier and filling in big chunks of backstory.

For any of you who have written/are writing trilogies (e.g Florapost), how do you get round this?

(Incidentally, the writing in the second book is fairly second rate overall, so perhaps it's just a reflection of shoddy editing)

Well I got around this by cutting masses of the back story and just plunging the reader in. I'm not sure if this is totally wise or not but I figure in these days of the interweb people can research enough of book 1 to know the basics, if they feel at sea.

My editor did give book 2 to a totally new reader to test how much she understood, and she seemed to pick most of it up. There were a few points that caused misunderstandings which had to be solved, but really not many.

But I think it depends how far you're writing a separate story and how far it's one over arching story. Mine is about 50/50. There is an over-arching story but there's also a main narrative in book two which is self-sufficient so I hope that will satisfy new readers, even if they miss some of the finer points of the over-arching story.

I think in that respect what JK Rowling did with Harry Potter was very clever - you had to read all of the stories to make sense of the entire Voldemorte/Harry feud, but she barely recapped at all, each story picked up afresh and you could read from that point on and still get the main plot, just not some of the finer nuances.

it seems that in Book 2 you have to recap enough of Book 1 so that anyone who has just plunged in halfway through can pick up what happened. As a result, there are big chunks of 'telling', just reeling off what happened earlier and filling in big chunks of backstory.

I've read enough trilogies to guess that stuff shouldn't have been left in. It's either poor editing or the author's been asked to bulk out a sequel to make it into a trilogy.

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...although when it comes to large chunks of backstory I'm reminded of JK Rowling's Half Blood Prince where she put in all the backstory her editor made her cut from the earlier books.

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...there does tend to be a significant amount of backstory in the middle of a lot of novels, so I guess I can forgive that, but you wouldn't be reading the second one of a trilogy unless you'd read the first so recapping is totally unnecessary for the majority of the readers (thinking of The Deepgate Codex and The Mortal Engines series, which had very little recapping).

Yes, I would have thought that you would naturally read the first one and therefore the second can just plunge straight in with the action.

The first book didn't 'end' properly - just kind of finished in the middle of a scene. So I guess it was really one book that's been stretched into three! Certainly there isn't much plot development in the second - just more of the same, and much of it could have been guessed in the first book anyway.

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And yet in spite of all this, I'm still enjoying the book! How contrary is that???

Each book in your trilogy should stand on it's own. I always refer to the Harry Potter books, which are great examples for alot of things. If you pick up the first, you don't know what's happened in the first, though there are minor references.

Thanks - I've just read the Hunger Games Trilogy in one week, so it's given me a fair idea to be going on with.

I can't imagine the complex plotting that must have been done before JK even began to write the HP books - seven of them, all interlinked!

I think as writers it's really important to always try to see clearly how other writers have constructed their books. Or how they haven't.

I don't believe for a minute JKR did any complex pre-plotting for those seven books. I think she wrote the first (which itself is very linear, no real plot) pretty instintinctively and just had a vague idea for more books. I've only read the first and fourth - but could not see any plot at all in the latter, not until about half way through and even then the story is very 'running around in the woods' (with logistic faults); no arcs, in other words. At a very basic level, no one plots seven books which just keep getting longer and longer: if they were planned, they'd all be about the same length.

Just one specific example - and any HP fan can feel free to shoot me down for getting my facts wrong - but if JKR knew she'd need a port key to make the end of No 4 work (even though she makes a logistic error with it anyway), surely she'd have introduced them a lot earlier than at the start of No 4?

In other words, I'd say the complexity that the HP books became is more down to the story having a lot of extraneous words thrown at it to disguise the lack of plotting.

Terry

if they were planned, they'd all be about the same length.

Why?

but if JKR knew she'd need a port key to make the end of No 4 work (even though she makes a logistic error with it anyway), surely she'd have introduced them a lot earlier than at the start of No 4?

And again, why? One of the themes that crosses all the books is that Harry is a stranger to this world - that he was excluded from it on the death of his parents, so he is constantly finding out things that to him are strange and wonderful while to Ron they are quite mundane (e.g. in the last book play is made of the fact that he & Hermione don't know the same fairy stories as Ron, which has implications for the plot.

I'm not sure what you mean by plot, but for me, plot is the engine that drives the reader's interest in what happens next and can come both from story developments (will Harry find the philosopher's stone/ win the tri-wizard tournament) and character development (which is especially important in a series like HP where the core reader has a lot invested in Harry's ultimate well-being).

Certainly, there are unifying themes that run through all the books and which provide a lot of their emotional depth. For example, Harry's search for a family and in particular, a father figure, is a recurring theme which has implications for the story and for the development of his character and which goes well beyond 'running about in the woods'

Well, to turn that around: why would you plan seven books where there is a sudden jump in the middle with the length almost doubling, then write following books even longer? If JKR had told her publishers that was her plan right at the start, it's hard to see them agreeing, either for commercial reasons or artistic ones. And what's suspicious is that the length keeps increasing, rather than say decreasing or at least alternating, i.e. it suggests the story got taken over by too much detail, rather than it was all planned from the beginning.

As for the port key: it's suspicious that it's only introduced just before it's needed to make the plot of that particular book work. This is often done in badly written fantasies that haven't been planned out. Harry might be a 'stranger' to port keys before he bumped into them at the start of book 4, but other wizards aren't; and neither is the author - unless of course she only cooked them up for convenience at the last minute.

I think plot is part of the emotional structure of the story, and reflects the author's themes - which are perhaps the strongest part of his/her plans. One of the reasons I could never get interested in HP was that the themes are so flimsy, which in turn leads to shallow emotional lives for the characters: Harry is 'good' just because he is; Voldermort is 'bad' just because he is. The Dursleys are cartoon child abusers with no light or shade. And hey, Dumbledore's gay - where is the evidence for that in JKR's story planning?

Terry

I have to confess I've never read them - I just couldn't get into the first one. But I agree with your point about planting early clues about later happenings. I am reading as much as I can at the moment, noting how seemingly inconsequential things are dropped in at the beginning because they're so essential to the unfolding of the plot later.

I'm learning to try and do the same with my own work. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the Hunger Games, I did find that there were one or two characters or events introduced that I thought were going to be highly significant later on (e.g the Avox girl in the first book), but faded out into nothing.

why would you plan seven books where there is a sudden jump in the middle with the length almost doubling, then write following books even longer?

And what's suspicious is that the length keeps increasing, rather than say decreasing or at least alternating,

That isn't correct.

No 4 is 766pages
No 5 is 607 pages
No 7 is 607 pages

One of the reasons I could never get interested in HP was that the themes are so flimsy, which in turn leads to shallow emotional lives for the characters: Harry is 'good' just because he is; Voldermort is 'bad' just because he is. The Dursleys are cartoon child abusers with no light or shade.

But you have said you have only read 2 of the 7 books, so surely you would need to be psychic to know about the reasons why the characters develop as they do.

On a very immediate level, good & bad is a theme that is close to the surface of the novels, but there is a lot more that is less apparent unless you actually read the books. So, for example, the idea of searching for and creating family is there from beginning to end, as is the theme of choice and how this impacts on the issue of good & bad which again is there from the very first book and which is developed further in all the books that follow.

But you have said you have only read 2 of the 7 books, so surely you would need to be psychic to know about the reasons why the characters develop as they do. On a very immediate level, good & bad is a theme that is close to the surface of the novels, but there is a lot more that is less apparent unless you actually read the books. So, for example, the idea of searching for and creating family is there from beginning to end, as is the theme of choice and how this impacts on the issue of good & bad which again is there from the very first book and which is developed further in all the books that follow.

I read 1 and 4 - which is a span of over half the story - and didn't need to be pyschic to see that HP's character had not developed at all in that time, and that there was no discernable plot arc from the first book to the fourth. After 300 pages or so of no plot whatsoever in book 4, it was then the same old Hogwarts event leading to Harry vs Voldermort at the end (even though the port key device with the Goblet was a logistic error, i.e. why couldn't the bad guy have simply made one of his coffee cups a port key connected to Voldermort and handed it to Harry earlier on, thereby saving himself all that effort in rigging the tournament?). And I still couldn't see any shades of good/bad in any of the characters apart from perhaps Snape (is that the Alan Rickman character)? It's similar with the magic system: it just is. There's no consequence; no balancing out. In The Wizard of Earthsea, by contrast, it's made clear right at the start, that you can't say make rain appear here without somewhere else losing rain. Which is a principle that then affects the moral choices of the characters. Yet in HP, stuff - like meals at Hogwarts - is just magicked out of nowhere.

Terry

I suspect we are looking for very different things from books and if you can't see certain themes that is probably because they are not important to you - but that doesn't mean they are not there or that they may not resonate with other types of reader.

I suspect we are looking for very different things from books and if you can't see certain themes that is probably because they are not important to you - but that doesn't mean they are not there or that they may not resonate with other types of reader.

Or maybe they're just not explored with any depth. For example, what exactly are the ingredients of the 'good' and 'bad' themes in HP? Right from the start, the Dursleys are relentlessly nasty with no hint as to why. And with Harry, stuff just happens to him because he's 'good'. Which is a shame, I think. The HP books don't explore the ambiguities of life that better children's books do.

I'm learning to try and do the same with my own work. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the Hunger Games, I did find that there were one or two characters or events introduced that I thought were going to be highly significant later on (e.g. the Avox girl in the first book), but faded out into nothing.

I enjoyed The Hunger Games; well - I really liked the first book; the second wasn't bad, but I thought it all fell apart in the third. Which for me is a tell-tale sign that the author didn't actually plan out the series before starting. Which means, increasingly she got caught up in the weaknesses of the first book, e.g. as you say, things that were introduced but which didn't turn out to suit the way the story went and so were dropped. I'd say the same is true for world-building. The vagueness of the setting in the Hunger Games just about works for one book, but after that it begins to unravel somewhat.

Or maybe they're just not explored with any depth.

I disagree, and as I have tried to explain,there are themes that are explored in depth throughout the series. Just because they don't resonate with you doesn't mean they are not there.

I agree that the Dursleys are cartoonishly awful (although there is a long history of that in kids' books stretching back to fairy tales), but we do get a convincing explanation for Petunia's hostility (and the seeds for that explanation are present from the very beginning).

Also, even though Dudley is a very minor character, it is interesting to see the way he copies his parents as a small boy, treating Harry as a ready-made victim, until finally as an adult he begins to question the way they have behaved towards him. It reminded me of the way one sometimes hears kids parroting their parents' views on things like race (which is not always pretty) but at 18 or so may suddenly start to question those beliefs.