Plot Monkeys

Donna McClure asks:
Why do series usually have 3 books as a Trilogy, why do 3 seem to work so well?

CP: I loved this question. Unfortunately I don’t have a good answer! And now that I have two new paperbacks out a year, each 3 months apart, I’m wondering if 3 won’t work. I have two schools of logic.
a) two new books a year that are related in a series; next year another two; or
b) a trilogy which means two books one year; one book the following year that finishes the trilogy and then the next new book starts a new series and you have to weight eight months or so for the next.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?

And maybe my plotmonkey pals have a real answer on why series work well!

LK: What a great question, Donna. But like Carly, I just don’t know the answer…lol! It does seem to be an industry norm, doesn’t it? Even a non-industry norm…I mean, look at the great movies in our pop culture. Three seems to be the magic number. Just this summer we’re getting Shrek 3, Spiderman 3 and Pirates 3. The original Star Wars came in 3 and so did the prequel package. Ditto with Indiana Jones and Die Hard (though, I know they’re both coming out with sequels…I kinda wish they’d just left them at 3!) Lethal Weapon should have stopped at 3. The original Superman movies. The X-Men movies. Back To The Future. Wow, there really are a lot of trilogies out there!

Maybe it’s just that old superstition–good things come in 3’s. (So do deaths, but we’ll leave that out of it.)

I have not set out to do a lot of miniseries, I just tend to fall in love with characters & places and want to keep writing about them if I can. It doesn’t always equal three. My Joyful, GA stories only had 2. My Derryville story spanned over, like, 4 books in one way or another. The Santoris are going to fill 5-6. And while there are 3 brothers who are the heroes of my “big” Trouble books, there are at least 2 other stories that go with the series. So I’m not limiting myself to anything. But I will say that my new romantic suspense idea is a trilogy…it just seemed to me that I needed to tell the stories of 3 different types of h/H pairings in that case.

Again, great question–wish I could have actually answered it!

(PS: My hubby just informed me that three is a sacred number in ancient geometry that turns up again and again throughout history. I dunno…maybe we’re all just a superstitious lot like Janelle’s post showed?)

JD: Wow, I don’t think I can answer this question any better than Leslie just did! It’s something I’ve really never thought about before — but it does seem that series do come in threes! Or at least they start out that way! I know with my Wilde series it was originally supposed to be only 3 books that told the stories of the Wilde brothers. But then the Wilde cousins were introduced throughout those three books and readers asked for THOSE stories, too! So far, it’s a series that has spanned 7 books!

JEL: I think the significance of the number three is simply ingrained in our psyches and manifests in ways from the spiritual to the commercial. Also, three implies a beginning, a middle and an end. If you analyze the first (and only IMO) Star Wars movies, Empire Strikes Back is clearly a transition between A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. When I was planning my upcoming paranormal series, which will (God willing) be six books, I definitely planned the story arcs in threes, with one overall storyline to tie all six books together.