Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

Spinning off from another thread where DBActive wrote about some long series here: "you can pick up any part of the series and not have missed anything."

I get the popularity of series where the characters don't significantly evolve. Most television series are that way and a lot of long running book series are that way (particularly in mystery and thriller).

I also get the popularity of series where the characters only change slowly over what are otherwise self-contained episodes. Again, TV sitcoms often have characters pairing up or changing jobs and such over the course of multiple seasons, but it's slow and often not a planned arc (more—"we need to keep this fresh, so now what?").

I also get the desire to see the characters grow and change over a long series. A long arc can be really satisfying if it gets finished, but can suck if it doesn't (I won't call out a couple of well-known mainstream fantasy authors here, but you know who I mean).

But as a writer, I'm not sure if there's a way to satisfy both camps or not. Especially in erotica. Many of the folks here are just reading for the sex scenes and you can only do so much before it becomes "wash, rinse, repeat."

Ulterior motive on the table time:

I've been working on a very long series—it'll be ~800kwords or more when it's done, broken up in to seven books. Book one will start being released to my Reamstories subscribers this fall and it'll show up on Bookapy and also here in the spring.

The story is planned as a full character arc. The main character is going to go from a moderately conservative guy to someone who regularly engages in wild orgies. It's going to take that many words because I need the main character's growth to be believable and that means slow change. Real people don't change overnight and "Road to Damascus" conversions are rare.

But… I also want the individual books to be logical self-standing volumes in and of themselves. If you only read book one, you get a satisfying story. If you skip book one and read book two, you get a satisfying story. I've figured out how to do that plot wise, so it's now mostly figuring out how to work the recaps of what happened earlier in without it being clunky.

So… would this satisfy both camps?

And a more general question: what's been people's experience here with erotica stories in both camps? Is episodic enjoyable enough? Are the long arcs better?

What would you want to see in a long series and what would drive you crazy?

So… would this satisfy both camps?

I doubt that you will ever satisfy both camps. One camp wants to see the character develop over a period of time to include the development of the supporting characters and done over multiple chapters. The second camp wants to see the fully developed character in the first couple of chapters. Some authors have tried the fully developed character approach with a flashback showing how they and their supporting characters evolved. I don't think that works very well for there would be too many chapters in the flashback.

One of my problems with writing a long story is that I am a write-then-post writer. That means I post infrequently. My readers may not recall what has happened during the chapters of prior parts that support a scene in the current part. At that point I have to decide to reference a prior Part and Chapter or to write a brief passage on what happened. Neither is a good solution. That is why in my Introduction, I always suggest my reader refresh their memory by rereading prior parts. Most readers don't want to spend their reading time rereading the prior parts of a story. In fact, a number of readers skip Introductions and Forwards.

A second problem with long stories is the number of characters in the story. Readers sometimes get lost when you mention a character from a prior Part for they don't recall the activities that character was involved in, which is a good argument for a character list. I maintain a character list for each of my stories containing all characters mentioned in the story, but I don't publish the list. My Opening Earth character list contains 221 characters. The lists are basically a prompt to my memory and not suitable for posting. Updating and maintaining the list would be a major task if I were to include it in a story. Most of the character lists I have seen in other author's stories are basically useless to me because they contain physical descriptions of the characters and rarely mention the characters role in the current and prior stories.

I also get the desire to see the characters grow and change over a long series. A long arc can be really satisfying if it gets finished, but can suck if it doesn't

Well, a lot of that is also in the style that somebody wants to write.

A great many of my stories are "coming of age", where part of the point is that the characters change and evolve over time. And this can be good or bad, but it is a change I felt was important to the story I was telling.

In once, the MC was naïve and trusting. Accepting almost anything he was told, and having a very positive outlook in life. But later on after the knocks of life he became a lot more cynical and harder.

And another where he was an independent loner that thought he knew everything has come to learn that is not really the case at all. And that trying to get along with others is not a weakness.

In most of my longer form stories, the growth of the main character is actually a key part. And very rarely do I let them leave a story the same way they entered it.