I have a book that became a trilogy that became a series. Or a trilogy-of-trilogies. Though probably more a series, because I'll be switching protagonists. All of which is difficult and perhaps a little laughable, given I haven't actually written the first one yet. (Well, not a lot of it. I've had to pause to reinvent some world that I hadn't painted in because I didn't think I'd be using that bit. But I digress). Though if J. K. can have seven books in her head before her train reaches the station and she's penned a word, I don't see why I can't have nine before I've finished writing the first.

The thing is, the plotlines of a book, a trilogy and a series are different. Or not different per se - they still follow the same principles. The difficulty is in the layers. (Obligatory Shrek reference here.) Plot are like onions. Or like onions would be if they grew with layers twisted over on themselves so that the outside layer was also the third layer from the center, and if you peeled it then you'd also peel all the other layers because they were all connected, and if you dye one green, another one goes purple. So not really like onions. But I'll explain:

Imagine a book has one 'layer' - your basic story-plot. A character has an issue, goes through some adversity that is connected to the theme and helps them to grow as a person, reveals their growth in a final climactic action and resolves things. Pretty standard. Your book has a Plot. I'm lumping the arcs of all the protagonists and other major characters into one Plot, here, to avoid confusing the issue too much. 

Now, a trilogy (assuming you're not writing a three volume novel - my pet hate) has two layers. Each book has its own plot, but the trilogy itself also has a story-plot, overarching and encompassing all of the book-plots. The two layers (usually, though I don't think it's a rule. But unless you really, really, know what you're doing, they should:) complement each other - the book-plots are like echoes or variations upon the trilogy-plot. Like Star Wars: the Underdog Republic defeats the Evil Empire (trilogy-plot), with Farmboy Becomes Powerful Magician, Farmboy Discovers Truth About Self, Farmboy Redeems Father From Evil. All three of those are steps towards an 'Underdog defeats Evil' super-plot.

The trilogy-plot also controls the rise-and-fall of the book-plots:  The Empire Strikes Back has to end on tragedy (Han has been captured, Luke is minus a hand and has been given terrible knowledge about his ancestry) to give the lowest-of-the-low starting point that the trilogy-plot needs for the final act.

So a book has one layer, a trilogy has two layers that interact. And a series? A series can have dozens.

Not only do we have the book-plot and the trilogy-plot (or, in this case, the series-plot: the throughline holding them all together), but within the series are multiple sub-series plots. Arcs that can cover two, three, four or more books, that may overlap and interact with other arcs. And each of these arcs still has to support the main series-plot.

And remember when I lumped all character arcs and subplots into the same 'book plot'? Those are actually layers in themselves. Some of them may continue over more than one book. Yeah. We're talking Escher-onions, now.

Now, there are series that don't do this. Twilight, Harry Potter, are what I'd call a 'simple' series (without any derogatory implications). There's really just the Series plot and the Book plots (with book sub-plots), and that's it, more or less.  And there are other series that don't even need the Series plot. 'Standalone' series - Pratchett's Discworld comes to mind - where the books are happening in a sequential order, but they're entirely separate stories that happen to have a shared world, history and characters. There isn't a throughline to the whole series. (And there's a third type, call it 'Episodic series' where nothing changes from book to book. The old Y.A series like the Babysitter's club, or Sweet Valley High, for those old enough to remember them, are examples of this - we have an adventure, and then everything returns to normal. Though these are multi-author series, a very different animal.)

Absolutely nothing wrong with any of those, they're just different flavours of series-writing. And they're not what I'm trying to do.

I didn't set out to write a 'Layered' series (seems as good a term as any. I refuse to call in an Onion series.) It just sort of grew out of the story, and my personal taste - I like easter-eggs and surprises in my stories. I like discovering that something in book 5 had actually been planted back in chapter 3 of book 1. I like the richness it gives, the feeling that these worlds and lives are real, and that small things can be significant, that stuff goes on 'behind the scenes'.

But to do that, I need the basic plots in advance so I know what needs to be set up, what can't be revealed yet, what hints and easter eggs to bring in. What is influencing what (so if a storyline is canned or changed, what else has to change). What will work and what's just not going to make sense. Basically, it means knowing the basics of the whole series before I finish book 1. Yikes. In theory that does mean I can pretty much stream through the lot, though, and not do a George R R Martin. Yeah, right.

But I'm discovering it's hell to nail down. 

I'm a very visual person - one of the reasons I love Scrivner so much is it lets me literally plot my stuff on index cards before I write it. Though I don't like actual index cards too much, because in practise I find I can never read half of what I've written, they never stay where they're supposed to, and I always want to put one card in three different piles or places, or colour it in five different ways, and it takes so long compared to software-cards and you can't have them everywhere you have your laptop. Besides, I seem to work by writing a lot of plot in a paragraph and then splitting it up, which doesn't work so well when it's on an actual piece of card, because you end up with bits of card so tiny they're eaten by onion-gnomes.

I've tried the various story-software demos I have (most of which either give no plotting help, or are far too prescriptive.) I've tried so many mind mapping tools, but their internal logic makes a mess of what I'm trying to say with connections, because they're not designed for what I'm trying to do. I've tried excel (about three times, now) and MS word (in various templates and techniques). And it's not that none of them worked. But none of them worked well enough that I'd be happy to use it permanently. There were always some pretty fatal bugs in the process. 

I went looking online for ways to visualise interweaving, interacting plots like this. And pretty much all I got was:

• graph plotting software
• business direction blogs
• realestate and location-based software
• How To Plot Your Story (a collection of Worst Advice Ever for writing)
• I Like To Use A Whiteboard (responses from various forums and tweets).

The closest I came was from SeanPWallace who suggested Gannt charts, which is more or less how I'd resigned myself to doing it for now. (Actually, it's back in Excel, but in a Gannt chart-like fashion) It's very-much-not-ideal - there's no real way to indicate that Plot Point A influences Storyline D, etc. Or a lot of other important information. And it doesn't work too well with my start-broad-and-split-it-down-to-details approach, either. But it's the best I have for the moment.

I resolved to write my own software to handle this since there seems to be a big fat nothing out there that works the way I want. Which is a laugh, given how often my other software projects either get permanently back-burner'd, or lost in Developer Limbo (SubTracker is still under development. Just very, very slow development. I am working full time, writing and househunting, after all. ) But I have a pretty good idea of what I want now, how it has to work. If only I had a spare couple of months to code the damn thing.