On Continuity

I’ve spoken before about the early-career mistake that was Boone Shepard’s cliffhanger conclusion. At the time, naïve about the realities of publishing, I assumed an ongoing series was a guarantee so I had no qualms ending that book with my protagonists in an impossible situation with several mysteries still dangling and various set ups that would not pay off until the then theoretical grand finale. It never occurred to me that the book might not sell enough to justify a sequel, and that I very possibly could have ended up with one unfinished, unsatisfying chunk of a story. And very nearly did.
 
Since then, my approach to telling ongoing stories across multiple instalments has changed. My philosophy is to make every book I write as standalone as possible, while trying to split the difference so that character arcs and plot threads continue but each book is a complete story unto itself. Characters like Maggie and Jack Carlin might grow and change and develop across several stories, but each appearance has to function as comfortably the first or last time you might encounter them.
 
Those ongoing threads become trickier to manage the longer they go on. You have to somehow maintain continuity while ensuring that every new story doesn’t require an awkward and clunky info dump to catch up new audiences. And while you might assume that most of my readers will follow most of my stories, that’s not always the case – my Audible Originals, for example, are as crucial to the recurring characters and their arcs as my print novels, but plenty of people who love my books don’t listen to audiobooks. So I can never assume that somebody will, for example, have listened to The Hitchhiker before reading The Caretaker – even if I think doing so makes the latter better.
 
The truth is that the vast majority of authors cannot expect reader familiarity with everything they’ve written. The other truth is that it’s hard to predict which books will be successful and which ones won’t. The Hunted hit far bigger than The Inheritance. High-Rise, the novel I’m working on at the moment, is very much informed by what happened in The Inheritance, but I have to bear in mind that less people read it than read The Hunted or The Caretaker – which also inform High-Rise’s narrative.
 
Is your head starting to hurt just thinking about all this juggling? More to the point, are you starting to wonder whether I’m causing myself more trouble than its worth by interlinking all these stories?
 
If so, you’d probably be right. But the truth is I interlink my stories because I like interlinking stories. I like that Jack Carlin can be a supporting character in one story, the lead in the next, and referenced in the background of the one after that. I like that Hunted/Inheritance protagonist Maggie can walk into a country pub halfway through the seemingly standalone events of The Hitchhiker and hijack the story. I like that The Hitchhiker’s nameless serial killer can turn up a year later in The Caretaker and make the experience of reading that book vastly different depending on whether or not you know Hitchhiker.
 
Connections and crossovers are a lot of fun and can absolutely enrich a story and infuse it with a sense of history. But they can never come at the detriment of the primary story being told.
 
It’s not a line I’ve always straddled well. In preparation for High-Rise, I recently went back and re-listened to The Consequence, my first Audible Original and Jack Carlin’s first big starring role. I like The Consequence a lot, but it never made much impact and I think, in retrospect, that its relationship with other texts is a big part of that. The Consequence is a 30,000 word novella that, while trying to tell its own story, serves as a sequel to my lockdown web series The Pact, a prequel to The Inheritance, and in one subplot a set up for The Caretaker. That is a LOT of pressure for a story that is less than half the length of the already-short Hunted. Probably too much, especially with me tripping over myself to explain elaborate backstories that are more fully depicted in other stories.
 
I think I’ve learned from that. Andromache Between Worlds, for example, takes place in the same universe as the Boone Shepard books and ties into several plot points from them, but in writing it I made the choice to only refer to or use what I absolutely had to from the earlier books, rather than extensively recap them or pack it with characters or storylines that its audience will almost certainly be unfamiliar with. More pertinently, High-Rise is in many ways a direct sequel to both The Pact and The Consequence, but is very limited in what it uses from the former and barely references the latter. I’ll never retcon or contradict anything, but nor will I do an Ahsoka and write something that requires extensive homework to be fully enjoyable to the casual audience.  
 
Do I think the experience of reading my work benefits from being across all of it? Totally. But I have to be realistic. For example; The Pact was in every way a product of the pandemic and suffered from some clunky early episodes that I suspect put off potential viewers. I’m immensely proud of that series, but not many people watched it and I’m keenly aware that resolving its character arcs and cliffhanger ending is not something a huge swathe of people are crying out for. But I want to finish that story and I want to do so in a way that will be entirely satisfying regardless of whether or not you know The Pact exists. If you do, High-Rise is a sequel and a conclusion. If you don’t, it should still be a barnstorming action packed thriller that will leave you breathless and blown away and never once feeling like you’re missing anything. 

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