Top Ten Ways To NOT End a Series: An #RWA15 Workshop

[ceciliatan]

Just came from the panel/class on “How Not to End a [Romance] Series” at RWA 2015 and I am rushing up to my room to see if I can crank out a blog post about it before I go off to a publisher party!

The panelists were Jaci Burton, Marie Force, Jill Shalvis, and Shannon Stacey. All NY Times and USA Today bestselling authors of multiple series. All have sold in the millions.

All of them write series with a central concept of either geography (small town, island, etc) or a brotherhood (firefighters, football or other sports team) that keeps providing them with heroes and characters to be paired up in future books. Each writes the kind of series that has a different romantic pair in each book and since they are character driven, none of them uses large overarching plots to tie things together: they just write whatever character calls to them next.

And each one said, basically, they don’t know how to end a series. All of their series but one are still ongoing (the exception was Shannon Stacy’s Kowalski series, because, as she put it, “I ran out of Kowalskis.”)

They said a lot, all of it excellent advice, but in the interest of time, I’m boiling it down to my top ten takeaways from the panel.

TOP TEN TAKEAWAYS ON HOW TO WRITE AN ONGOING SERIES:

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.