Series Arc
It’s really great that some elements out of each story that’s added to a series get captured in the Series section of the Series Bible. But what is really important for long series is a cohesive story arc that has a solid spine.
The recommendation is that each time a new story is added to the series, a series arc element gets updated with the beats of the series. This is for those writing the series as they go.
However, there are some that want to plan the series before they’ve started book 1. It would be excellent to have a “Build Story Arc” feature. If I want to write an 8-book detective series or a fantasy series, planning the overall series arc should be the first step. We would give Sudowrite some details like number of books in the series, overall arc of the series, etc. This way we establish a series theme or problem that our MC will have to overcome/achieve. As anyone who has written series knows, sometimes we don’t know where to go in the series, and having thought that out in advance, gives us a chance to overcome walls of creativity. Once we know how we want to take the reader over the course of the series, we can now start going into the details of each book.
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Comments1
JT Kaelen
Dec 3, 2025
This is very sorely needed for those of us writing series!!!
I defined MPM as shorthand for “My Plot Method.” It’s my personal adaptation of the fractal story structure - the idea that the classic dramatic arc(Inciting Incident → Progressive Complications → Crisis → Climax → Resolution) can be applied at every scale - from an entire series, to a single book, to a chapter, or even an individual scene.
For instance, the entire series’ arc (18 books) looks like:
Then the next step in towards the individual story is a series Act (6 books) looks like:
When building the book’s outline I use the “Custom Outline” and am currently struggling with how to make sure my chapters and book stay in alignment with the Act and Series.
NOTE: This is also true for characters - and I don’t want to have 18 copies of 23 characters!