Wednesday's Writer's Tip - Series and Consistency #MFRWauthor

When I was reading Writing The Fiction Series by Karen Wiesner she mentioned consistency when writing series. My first thought was what exactly did this mean and wasn't this the same as continuity? Suddenly I realized though they seemed the same there was a slight difference. I've read a lot of series and have suddenly stopped reading one or more series and I wasn't sure why. These series had many of the qualities needed to establish them as a series.

I remember one that was a romance series and suddenly the author wrote a story that was a lot different from the other stories. There was no romance. There were elements contained in the story that fit the series but the lack of the romance made me stop reading that series. The series had lost that consistence. Yes, there were similarities. They still took place in the world the writer had established. There were familiar places, even a character or two were the same as in the other books but there was a missing element. There were no characters seeking a happy ending.

I'm reading another series that has I believe 13 books and probably more to come. These books are consistent. Though the characters grow and change most of them are present in each of the stories. The world is the same most of the time. When the world changes there are reasons for the change that make sense in the consistency of the story. The changes in the world are held together by the characters who remain the same as in the other story are ones who have been in the other books. The pattern of the stories remain the same.

I'm not talking about the kind of pattern where something that happens on page 50 of one story are the same in every book. This isn't the consistency That I'm looking for. There are series written where the same action occurs in Chapter 3 or Chapter 7 in every book in the story. This pattern becomes one the reader sees as a habit and though it seems consistent it becomes boring. So when you're writing your series, you need to remember the small details that make for consistency.