While I definitely have a great deal of fun writing short, one time, stories whenever I can, and they’ll always have a very special place in my heart...I think I still prefer to write stories that are a little bit longer even more. I like having the room to breathe, you know? To explore my own characters and develop them a bit more so they end up becoming a bit more three-dimensional in my mind, and they’re a lot easier to work with once I get a chance to know them a little bit better. The unfortunate part of my personal process is that I end up getting to know them a little TOO well, hehehe, and then I don’t ever want to let them go. So the journey gets longer and longer and before I know it, I’m fifty chapters deep in a story that was only supposed a fraction of that size.

What can I say? I love my characters! Even when they’re being brats and giving me a headache. So sue me...

However, one of the worst things that you can do to your own series is allow it to become a one note journey and stretch it out longer than its welcome deserves. You readers can very easily burn out over time if you keep using the same scenarios again and again with similar outcomes. Especially since I write mostly teenage protagonists and love interests...there are only so many alleys that I can have them travel down before it becomes monotonous. Only so many jealous feelings, so many worries about coming out, so many parties or trips to the movies, or private conversations in those high school hallways. Every now and then, depending on how long your story is and how many chapters you’ve got ahead of you...you’ve got to switch things up a little bit. Reinvent the feeling of the story and restore a certain level of freshness to it, while still having it be familiar and connected to the audience that jumped in and got all invested in you work in the first place. That switch up can be really helpful when continuing forward with new storylines, characters, and events, in future chapters. It breaks the monotony, without shattering the blueprint. So adopt this technique into your repertoire. It comes in super handy when you can’t stop snuggling your fictional people, chapter after chapter. Hehehe!

When I first began writing “The Secret Life Of Billy Chase” (https://imagine-magazine.org/store/comicality/), I never thought that I’d one day be heading towards my 500th chapter! They just kept coming, and I kept growing closer to all of the characters involved, so I continued to find new parts of their personalities to explore and bring alive to all of the readers out there who were looking for reasons to stick around and find out how much there was for them to discover too. However...this is where ‘switching things up’ first became apparent to me while I was writing.

In shorter stories, I had an end goal to reach, and the events included within simply escalated towards that goal. It was a straight shot that I could follow. But I couldn’t do that with “Billy Chase”. Not for THIS many chapters! Hehehe, I mean, where am I escalating to? “Billy Chase Goes To Space”??? But I still had so much more left to do with that character and the steps that he’s taking towards slowly getting older and wiser with every conquest and heartbreak he has to navigate his way through. But how can I do that if most of his life is dedicated to school and homework and hanging out with his friends, all while drooling over all over the cute boys that he wish he had the courage to talk to? That set up can only last for so long before it get stale and becomes so predictable that my audience begins to drift off, and eventually tune the story out completely.

Naturally...I don’t want that. Not when some of my best ideas are still yet to come!

So...switch it up, Comsie! Read the title of the article! Geez!

When I say that, I’m talking about setting up new challenges, new problems, sometimes new characters, and new goals for my main protagonist to reach for, all while having a connect effect on all of the other characters surrounding him. It keeps readers engaged and glued to the story as it moves into new territory that hasn’t been introduced to them yet...all while being familiar enough where they can remain invested in the characters that they’ve come to know and love without abandoning any of the treats that came with starting the story off in the first place. It’s an all around win.

But the most important part of using this technique is to make the changes in your extended series match up with everything that came before it. You’re not writing a whole new story here. You’re simply altering the aspects of your current work to keep things fresh and relevant. You’re basically adding a bit more salt or a pinch of garlic to a sauce that’s already hot and bubbling. You want to ‘enhance’, not completely revolutionize. I say this because there are writers who try to invigorate their long running stories by pretty much tearing them down and starting all over from scratch for the sake of re-inventing them...thinking that readers will appreciate this brand new take, or reboot, of their beloved saga. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a coin flip in that sense, and if you get it wrong or stray too far from the original ‘feel’ of the series...you could end up derailing the whole effort and ruin the appeal. Again...that’s not what you want.

You want to maintain the emotional connection between your fiction and your readers. That counts more than anything. You want to expand the boundaries of what you were writing before, but still let your audience know that you plan to keep your unspoken promise to deliver them the story that you told them you would. The way that you accomplish this is by being fully aware of all of the events that came before, which ones went over well with your readers, and continuing on that path while merely changing the situations surrounding them. If you’re writing a heavily character driven series, that familiarity needs to be present. Even if they change over time as a part of their personal character arc...those changes should be a building experience for both you as a writer and to others as readers. Why the change? What’s going on? Why is this character not the same person that they were when I started reading? These are all questions that should be gradually explained ahead of time. Let it rise and escalate naturally. Nobody just changes overnight like flicking a light switch. They may try...but there’s a story in that need for a change as well. Build up to it in previous chapters...so when it happens, it’s not like slamming your readers into a brick wall.

So...how do you pull off a big ‘switch up’ in your story? I would narrow it down to three big methods...

All using “Billy Chase” as my example, but I’ll try to avoid spoilers as best as I can if you haven’t read it yet.

1- New characters. This is a technique that I would advise you use sparingly, but it does work. Obviously, you can’t introduce a new character to your story every single time you want to make things a little different. That would be ridiculous, and after a while...it would just become repetitive and predictable. So use it only if you really think that it’s necessary. When is it necessary? For me...it’s when I want a new part of my main character to be shown to the readers that was lacking before. It answers questions like...how would this person deal with possible temptation? How do they deal with heartbreak and loss? How do they deal with bullying? What is their home life like? How secure are they in their sexuality? Adding a new character that is dealing with something similar, or maybe even something completely opposite, can help to present a new dimension of your protagonist’s heart and mind to themselves...thus presenting it to the audience. It adds another layer that wasn’t there before. With “Billy Chase”...what if had a shot at a boyfriend for the first time? What if he had a rival in love? What if he found a girl that was interested in him? What if he had a friend dealing with alcohol addiction? How does he process these things and react in general. New characters can bring out new facets of your main character and put them front and center in your storyline. Create a character that embodies a new part of your protagonist’s journey, and have them sort of play off of one another to revive some of that energy that your readers felt when the story was brand new.

2- New environment. With “Billy Chase”, I knew that the whole thing couldn’t take place in high school forever. (Even in his weird ‘time warped’ version of it all! Hehehe!) So sometimes I changed up the rules with his environment or in the life that he was leading. He’s still the same old Billy, but I might take him out of the high school setting for a while and change the environment around him to let people see how that affects him and his behavior. Let’s see what Billy does when he’s on Summer break. How does he react to having his very first job? What happens if he really does go into space? LOL! Kidding aside though, changing up the environment changes the rules, but keeps the main characters familiar and relatable to the people who are already invested in them. Remember, you want to stick to your framework, but you want to elevate it to the next level. Put your protagonist in a new environment, have them interact with new people, show your readers how they use the lessons they’ve learned thus far to adapt. Subtle but different, re-invented but familiar. That’s the mantra to keep going on in your head. Listen to that inner voice. It knows more than we do.

3- New Perspectives. This method is dependent, mostly, on the build up and the personal ‘history’ of the character that you’ve been nurturing from the very beginning. This is when you use a major event to alter the current flow of the story, and force your protagonist to deal with it in ways that they probably never had to deal with anything prior to it. A death, a heartbreak, a betrayal, being outed at school, or at work, a virgin experience with sex, a sudden windfall of money, a divorce, a painful break up...all of these situations that might change your main character’s outlook and approach to what’s going on around them. So Billy may get his heart broken, or might become suspicious that he’s being cheated on, or he might have to sacrifice something dear to him in order to fight for the greater good. All of these situations will affect him in different ways. How will he navigate his way through it, and what will it do to him emotionally? How will he see it? With sadness and depression? With anger and envy? Will he head down a darker path? Will he fight to head for the high ground? Will he fly or will he fall? All of these things add a new dimension to what’s going on in your narrative and will keep your fanbase highly involved as new questions, challenges, and possible outcomes, are introduced into your story. This is a method that you can use for almost anything that you’re writing, and you can continue to use it over and over again as long as it doesn’t move into the realm of being overkill. And it’s always a breath of fresh air in a long running series. Just remember to give it time to breathe, k? Otherwise, the storytelling comes off as cluttered and clumsy. Take your time. Your natural instincts will guide you in the right direction. You just have to trust yourselves.

Alright, folks! That’s it for now! Remember...switching things up can make even the longest running series stay fun and interesting until you finally reach the end. You know those movies like “Avengers: Endgame” or “Avatar: The Way Of Water” or a number of others that have a runtime of three whole HOURS or more? And you doubt that you’re going to be able to sit through the whole thing at the beginning...but when you watch them, it hardly seems like it was that long at all? That’s the ‘switch up’ technique at work! Just when you think that you’ve had enough and need a break...the characters, environments, or perspectives, change...and then you find yourself all invested again. It’s the same reason that people can binge watch an entire series on Netflix in a single night, or spend three hours on Tik Tok! Your extended story follows the same principles. Same rules. Remember that...and write to your heart’s content!

Take care, folks! I love you lots! And I’ll seezya soon!