The Seven Book Itch

As I noted in a previous post, when I finished a draft of my second novel, I began to think long thoughts about writing a series, and about my career as a whole. 

I was sent down this road by a review of Laura Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere. In it, Patrick Anderson notes that Lippman’s first seven books had been a (prize-winning) series, but, “Like Dennis Lehane after he’d published five Kenzie-Gennaro private-eye novels, she must have decided she could do better, and like Lehane (who proceeded to write Mystic River), she was right.”

I thought about this, and another great writer spring to mind. Iain Pears wrote seven books in a series about Jonathan Argyll and the Italian Art Squad, who – I assume – went about solving art-related crimes. Then he wrote the far more ambitious (and staggeringly good) An Instance of the Fingerpost, and he appears to have abandoned his series altogether. Had Pears, like Lippman and Lehane, suffered from something that looks like the Seven Year Itch?

At the other extreme you have Sue Grafton, who went the opposite direction. After two novels, not about Kinsey Millhone, she has cranked out twenty-two in that series. (I suppose it is possible that Grafton wanted to move on after seven books, but when you start something called the Alphabet Series, you’re pretty much committed to twenty-six!)

I can see how either course is frightening. Lippman, Lehane, and Pears had a franchise working for them and (I assume) were making a pretty good living. Then they took a chance. I cannot imagine how long Pears spent on researching and writing Instance, but it must have been years. What if it had bombed? Or if the publisher had laughed? Then what?

On the other hand, how can an author spend twenty-plus years with the same character? You’d have to work very hard to include a long narrative arc for your people. Matthew Scudder battled the bottle, Spenser broke up/got together with Susan Silverman, but not all authors are so considerate. God bless Miss Marple, but she is the same character in every novel.

I know there’s not a right answer, especially since I’ve only finished a single novel, but I can’t help wondering what drove Lippman, Lehane, and Pears to jump into untested waters, and what allowed Grafton to stay with Millhone. Do I have the guts to jump off the Midwife gravy train (assuming it turns into one!). Or do I have the imagination and skill to keep her interesting - to me and the reader - for twenty-plus years?

I don’t know, but it will be fun to find out.

On People and Places (a response to Nancy)

Hi Nancy,

Great post!

I’m struck by two of the issues you raise, for they resonated with my experience in York, researching The Midwife’s Story, though in different ways.

The first of these is how you dealt with historical and fictional characters, for two of my characters Bridget Hodgson (the protagonist) and Martha Hawkins (her sidekick) are simultaneously historical and fictional. There was, in fact, a midwife named Bridget Hodgson who practiced midwifery in York in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, and I kept many of the details in place. My fictional Bridget lives and worships in the same parish as the historical Bridget, she comes from the same gentry background, and is daughter-in-law to the Lord Mayor of the City. We also know that she had a maidservant named Martha who she trained to be a midwife.

Historical Fiction is a Dining Room Table, Part I: The Setting

Writing historical fiction is akin to building a dining room table. To build a table, you will need the table-top, of course, but in the next few posts I’d like to talk about its legs, because getting those right is tough. The four legs of historical fiction are: Setting; Plot; Dialog; and Character. Each individual leg must be straight and solid (of course), and you also must ensure that it lines of perfectly with the other legs. If any of the legs is the wrong length, or extends at the wrong angle, your table will be wobbly, uneven, or both.

(If I’m stretching the metaphor here, I do apologize. One of my betas noted that I hardly used any, and I’m trying to practice. The point is that you have to construct each of these legs in relation to each other. You can’t dump the entire historical setting in Chapter One and never return. And you can’t sketch out your protagonist in Chapter Two, and forget about it. You have to slowly reveal each to the reader.)

When I sat down to start The Midwife’s Story, I did so with a bit of an advantage over other authors of historical fiction – I’ve been writing about the seventeenth-century England for nearly fifteen years. (The downside of having this kind of background is you must constantly struggle to keep unnecessary details to yourself. Just because I dug up some obscure fact about the price of butter during the siege of York, doesn’t mean you need to know it.) If you haven’t got this kind of background and want to write historical fiction, don’t give up: Nancy Bilyeau developed her long-standing interest in Tudor history into a thriller set in Reformation England which is due out in January.