: Re: How do I stay motivated while planning a series of novels? I've been working on a fantasy series for the past few years. When I first started, I wrote my first draft (for the first book)

@Caterina108

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The thing you may need to realise is there's planning and there's planning.

You could plan everything to the minutest detail and have a long arc across all of your books (much like Harry Potter) but each book has to be separate in its own way, otherwise people will wonder why it wasn't simply released as one book.

Plus, it's all very well meticulously planning out the entire series of books but what happens if, midway through book 2, you realise that you've got to go off in a different direction and the plans for rest of the books are useless?

Every book could be planned in as little as one line or even a blurb.

If we were to use film as an example, looking at the original Star Wars trilogy, you have "A New Hope", "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi". Each title is a key, small example of what happens in each film and is enough to build a story around without getting bogged down in the details of it.

There's nothing wrong with doing both your writing at the same time. You're writing a chapter and something happens which gives you another idea of what could happen in the future, whether in the same book or a different one so you stop and sketch out what happens later. And likewise, you could be planning and realise you've got a great idea for something to happen right now and jump straight into writing.

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