Structural Issues (Cecilia Peartree)

I had been waiting for quite a while for the third in one of my favourite series by one of my favourite authors, so I could hardly wait to read it when it was finally published. While the story managed to wrap up some plot threads that had been left dangling after the first two books in the series, in a way that was satisfying in itself, I couldn't help finding the structure of the story a bit laboured. After thinking about it for quite a while, I realised why I had noticed this. The answer surprised me. I had myself wrestled with a similar writing problem in the past. 

I am a very low-profile writer - I have written and self-published a lot of novels but none have been wildly successful, which I think is partly because I tend to write in the odd gaps between genres. This is more or less unintentional. My cosy mysteries are either not cosy enough or not mysterious enough, and my historical romances are not romantic enough, though I have found a few loyal readers who seem to stick by me no matter what. I hadn't really expected to find anything - least of all a problem! -in common with an established, published author whose books do get on to the best-seller lists for the chosen genre. 

Oddly enough, this structural issue had also made itself known while I was writing the third book of one of my series. As usual, I hadn't been planning ahead at all. I had an idea for one book, and then the second had developed out of the first, and then there were a couple of characters left over and I thought I'd write a third one. 

The beginning of the third one went fairly well, with some back story in the first few chapters that was relevant to the first in the series. However, it was when I reached the part where one of the two 'left over' characters, now the hero of his own story, interacted with the hero of the second book in the series, I realised I was covering the same ground all over again, though it was from a different point of view. Not only did I have to re-read the second book and note all the details in case I changed anything, but I knew it would be boring for readers when they already knew the outcome of one or two action scenes.

The favourite author, whose book I have just read, had dealt with this problem by keeping the main characters for the third book more or less in the background of the first two books, though much of the timeline overlapped with that of the other  books in the series. However, this solution is only at all feasible if you plan well ahead!. And I also felt that knowing some of the outcomes for other characters did reduce the tension somewhat in this particular third book. 

Still, one advantage of the struggle I had with my own third in the series was that when I came to write a fourth book, also unplanned, it seemed ridiculously straightforward compared to the one immediately before it in the series. It helped that only the hero was left over from other books, and he had been mentioned only in passing, while the heroine was someone complately new who had never interacted with anyone else in the series and her story was therefore a blank slate. If there is a cautionary tale here, I suppose it must be to do with the need to plan ahead in a series, although I must confess I have hardly learnt anything from the experience. I've only just recently got into the way of plotting individual books before starting to write.

Here are the covers for the series in question. By the way, if you ever feel like reading them, feel free to miss out the problematic third one as it doesn't really add much to the overall story!