The downside of the episodic series is that no permanent change takes place. It also has an additional benefit of letting the reader enter the series at any book and not be lost. When I buy one of those books, I know exactly what I’m going to get: a mystery wrapped in some humor and fun cameos by my favorites. Let’s say Writer A writes funny mystery books about a group of quirky characters in a small town.

While that sounds like a bad thing, it’s not. You’re writing another fun adventure in life of the character.įor the reader, it means more or less the same emotional experience and payoff. You never have to one-up yourself and reach for bigger and bigger stakes, you just have to have different stakes. You’re essentially writing the same type of book over and over in different ways, starting with the same setting and same character. The episodic nature of the series has several advantages. The characters would’ve come full circle and we could’ve done another story, again drawing on Dali’s unresolved crush for the emotional payoff. Or, another way to look at it, if we took Magic Dreams, but at the end, instead of Jim and Dali having a date, Jim remained oblivious and nothing happened. There isn’t that much character progression. To put this in Kate Daniels turns, Magic Bites and Magic Burns are somewhat episodic. Things sometimes change for a book or two, but they inevitably return to the status quo. Sherlock Holmes stories are mostly episodic. Children grow up, friendships are formed, cases are solved, but Spencer himself remains unchanged. Robert Parker’s Spenser stories are written in the similar vein. The reader gets their emotional payoff, but the world of Batman and Batman himself remain largely unchanged. A typical episodic Batman comic book goes something like this: Batman faces a thorny problem Batman gets his butt kicked, literally or figuratively, which causes him to reexamine himself Batman wins through some clever twist, resolving his internal issue or seemingly making progress in it but, and this is the crucial part, at the end of the story the status quo is restored and it’s as if the story never happened. A series can be done in two ways: episodic and progressive, and we mostly do progressive route in terms of character development.Ĭomic books are classic examples of an episodic series. “Why do your books get better later in the series?” K. Because time is short, we bulk-archive, meaning we hide all of the posts either by date or the category and sometimes interesting stuff gets caught up like the post below. We archive most posts after 3-4 years, because the publishing world moves fast and what might be accurate today is completely off the mark tomorrow. Today we’re resurrecting an older post by popular demand.

Stephanie plum 19