Tips for Taking Your Reader on a Road Trip

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

There are many things that I really like about writing series.  For one, readers seem to love them.  I think that’s because they have more of an opportunity to really get to know the characters and become invested in them.  They also enjoy becoming part of a familiar world…the setting we’ve created in our books.

As a writer, I like series because they’re much easier for me to write.  I establish my regular characters, create a world, and then come up with fresh adventures in each book.

The problem is that, after a while, either the readers seem to get restless (at least their customer reviews tend to reflect this sentiment) or the writer feels a little restless.  This has happened to me a few times.  In Memphis Barbeque book four, I decided that I would (clearly, since the series mentions Memphis)  set the book in Memphis, but I would center the book’s action around a large barbeque festival/competition there instead of the barbeque restaurant the book is usually centered around.  In Southern Quilting mystery three, I took my characters out to a remote location in the mountains and stranded them there the entire book.  And now, for my 7^th Myrtle Clover book, I’m planning for most of the book’s scenes to take place at a retirement home.

The good part about doing this—it makes the story feel a little fresher for series writers.  It makes things fresher for readers, too.

The bad part about doing this—editors aren’t wild about it.  And readers may think they want something different, but not realize that there’s actually a comfort in familiarity.  They may not want things as different as they think.

How these road trips went for me:

In the Memphis book, Rubbed Out, it went the easiest.  I had some of the book’s action back at the familiar hangouts.  The regular characters that the readers loved were all still in the book—and in a believable way, because they were all attending the local festival or competing in the barbeque contest. I had the best of both worlds there.

In the Southern Quilting book, Quilt Trip, it was admittedly tough.  My editor raised several concerns when I shared my outline with her.  She commented that readers love the familiarity of a particular setting and that they enjoyed seeing all of their favorite regular characters in a book.  She had a point—I know I feel the same way when I’m reading a series or watching a television show and a book or episode leaves out one of my favorite characters. I feel a little cheated.  So I revised my outline to incorporate as many of the core group of regulars as possible on the road trip…while trying to keep it believable.  And I offered to set half the book back in the old setting if she still wasn’t wild about it.  But I’d sold her on it.  And I was glad because I was so gung-ho to write that book.

The only problem was that it’s very hard to write a book from one limited setting.  This was a Southern Gothic inspired book with a crumbling Victorian mansion as the setting—and an ice storm that cut off the house from the rest of the world.  You have to work especially hard to make things lively and keep conflict and excitement going.  It’s tough.  About halfway through the book, I wasn’t sure if I could keep it up any longer, but then I got an idea for an additional obstacle or two to throw at the characters. It ended up being one of my favorite books and I haven’t yet gotten any direct reader complaints about the way I handled the road trip.

I’m a little more nervous about the 7^th Myrtle Clover book that I’ll be writing in about a month (it’s fully outlined now). Readers of that series are very set in their ways and I do hear directly from them if I make any changes.  And this will be a change.  But I realized how much easier it was to write the Memphis story by having the story’s action switch between the new setting and the older, familiar one.  So I’m planning to make it more like that story and less like the (difficult to write) quilting mystery.

In Summary:

Readers like series regulars.  Unfortunately, those regulars live in the town that you’re leaving behind as the character(s) go on a road trip.  Is there a way that you can either believably bring some of them along, or incorporate those characters into your novel in other ways?

It can be tough to sustain a story at a limited location (or a country house mystery…which is what I was trying to create when I wrote Quilt Trip) for the span of a whole novel.  Could you have half your action in the old, familiar setting and half on the road?

Basically, you’ve probably considered this because you either wanted to world-build a little or experiment somehow.  We just have to make sure it works.  It’s a risky proposition, really—we’re taking something our readers find familiar and comforting and pushing them to expand their boundaries.

Have you ever taken your readers on a road trip?  How did it go?  How did you satisfy your series’ readers?

Image: MorgueFile: andi