Why I Wrote a Quartet, Not a Trilogy

Why do you write four books in a series? Here’s a bit of inside baseball. Among authors, a minimum viable series is the fewest books needed for the series economics to support paid advertising. I’ve long been told the magic number is three. But I’ve always favored writing four books.

The three-act structure is a narrative framework breaking a story into setup, confrontation and resolution. But the “confrontation” act is twice as long as the other two, and is usually split into two sub-acts. Authors don’t want to disagree with Aristotle, who came up with it. A common problem in novels is a “sagging middle.” The naming and sagging hides the that there are four acts.

Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method calls it three acts but plots the novel in four. Snowflake provides the setup, three surprises end the first three acts, and a resolution closes the fourth. The result is a story that has greater continuity and structure. I’ve used Snowflake for well over a decade.

Randy’s guidance is great for a single book, but he has no advice for a series. Lacking advice on a series, I adapted Snowflake to a series by “going up a level.” Four novels organized into a quartet, and each provides one act in that larger story. Go up again: four quartets form a 16-novel arc, each quartet an act in that larger structure. I’ve roughed out every series this way. Yep, there are 12 high-level outlines for Postal Marines and Strand on a shelf somewhere. Since I’ll start a new series later this year, that means I’ll rough out a 16-novel arc before I start the first novel.

So while three is the minimum viable series for authors, four is the minimum viable story for readers.

I’ve started writing Strand: Retribution, the fourth in the Strand Series.