How I’m Designing Resolutions for Every Character in My Series
This past week, as I was rewriting scenes for my upcoming novella, Normous, I realized something: I needed to make sure I kept track of where my characters end up at the end of this series.
Was I smart enough to keep track of the character arc for all my characters? Only in my head, which is a bad way to do things. I have the character arcs for my main characters planned out. I even have the resolutions for my minor characters as well.
I just hadn’t written them down.
My fear grew. The fear that I would forget about some characters by the end of the series. So, while I was not smart enough to plan more definite endings for the characters in my series, I was smart enough to create an index of characters, technology, organizations and so on. This index covers the first four books in my series and can be found in The Consortium Saga Omnibus.
Here is what I did: I took the index, which I affectionately call a codex, and made notes of where characters and plot points ended up. In my defense, I already have an idea of what is going to happen, but I should have written this down a while ago. In the meantime, the ideas are swirling in my head. I needed a reservoir to keep my thoughts straight for my book series. Much like Professor Dumbledore and his Pensieve, a magical device where he kept his memoires and thoughts for review.
I am in the process of creating my own Pensieve.
It started when I came back to the outlines of the last three books of my Consortium space opera. I knew the endings for my main characters. I even made a few updates. I was starting to feel overwhelmed. After four books and almost completing the fifth, I felt the need to review the final destination of all my characters, especially the minor ones. So, I took my index and started writing one sentence conclusions to their stories. Most I already knew. It felt good to record their journey’s end. I also realized I hadn’t made plans for some others. My index saved me time, and I was also able to give these characters end point.
As I continue the process, I am also devising the ultimate stops for non-character entities in my series. By this, I mean objects and organizations such as starships, planets, and groups of people.
The fun about completing a character arc for characters is deciding whether they have a positive or negative ending. What kind of transformation did they go through from the beginning of the series? Is their arc a redemptive one? Not every ending will be a happy one, but some of my characters will end up facing new positive challenges.
Another benefit of thinking about the end stories of my characters is introducing any last minute elements now so I don’t have any Deus Ex Machinas. On the flip side, I want to honor Anton Chekov’s rule about placing a gun on the mantle early in the story. I need to use that gun at some point, figuratively speaking.
Are you writing a series? Have you considered what happens to all your characters? Perhaps you prefer to just keep writing and see what happens. Nothing wrong with that. For me, I needed to take inventory, so my series concluded as neatly as possible.
Friday’s Findings
- Writing in the Age of GEO
- Worldbuilding: How to Create a Believable World for Your Fiction Characters
- How to Get a Book Published in 8 Steps
- What is Atmosphere in Literature? And How to Build it
- Talent vs. Grit
Andrew M. Friday 
Leave a comment