Fiction: The magic number
Commissioned to write a trilogy, children’s author Lari Don decided to tackle all three books at once. Learn from her experience here
Writing a trilogy is just like writing three novels, isn’t it? Only with the same characters, the same fictional world and the same research. So it should be easier and less time-consuming than writing three separate novels, shouldn’t it?
That’s what I thought when I agreed to write an adventure trilogy for my publishers Floris Books. After all, I’d already written two standalone novels and a series of four novels for 8 to 12-year-olds. How much harder could a trilogy be?
I soon discovered writing a trilogy is much more than three times harder than writing three novels: it’s the kind of challenge that forces you to grow as a writer.
As a writer, you can’t think of a trilogy as three separate books, loosely linked by a main character or a magical world. You have to see it as one long story, developed across three books, but also as three coherent individual stories. Balancing those four stories – one overarching, and one for each book – is incredibly complex.
I hadn’t anticipated how challenging a trilogy would be. So, without claiming there is one right way to write a trilogy (there’s never only one correct way to write anything) I’ll share what I learnt, so you can decide whether writing a trilogy is a challenge you want to take on.
Read the first chapter athttp://writ.rs/wmsept16
The logistics
Three is a wonderful number in stories (The Power of Three, by Diana Wynne Jones, is the book that inspired me to become a children’s writer) and in many fairy tales three incidents or three repetitions give the story its power. So a three-part narrative seemed ideal when I started to write Spellchasers. The original idea was about a girl who is cursed to turn into a hare at inconvenient times, and who signs up for a curse-lifting workshop. A trilogy would give me the chance to lift different characters’ curses in each of the three books.