RARA-AVIS: Regular Joes and Series

Fred Willard (rainwill@mindspring.com)
Sat, 15 Nov 1997 16:29:42 +0000 Regular Joes and series books.

The term I use for regular Joe books is "ordinary man in
extraordinary circumstances."

There is a rich literature outside of this hard-boiled that deals
with this premise. You'll find it in westerns, cold war espionage
(much more WWII era espionage), Bob Johnson (or Fred Willard) saves
western civilization thrillers and on and on back to Tom Jones.

There are a number of practical reasons a writer might consider
writing a book series. One is that it takes a lot of time to imagine
a fictional universe for your novel to derive from. If they all come
from the same fictional world, it's faster.

A series helps a writer with name recognition, because both the
protagonist and the writer can be recognized. Frequently, the
protagonist is recognized more than the writer. This sells books,
making publishers, agents, and the writer's spouse and landlord
happy.

The practical problems are probably numerous also, but one
significant one is that these days it requires a stable relationship
between a writer and his house. If you change houses, unless you're
an A+ list author, you might not find anyone interested in buying
another publishers' series character.

It could have been very different in the past, but today's market is
not very author friendly. I've read reliable print articles that said
if Amy Tan and John Irving were breaking in to today's market, their
initial sales would not have allowed them to have a second book
published.

For me the single biggest problem with series is just what this
thread has been saying. I like to write Regular Joe books - well, in
my case, they're highly abnormal regular Joes, but the point is they
aren't paid to solve problems.

Maybe, they get in the middle of a problem, and see an angle for
themselves, but this isn't their profession.

In the course of their adventure, they experience significant, life
changing events.

The way these events change them is very interesting, but sometimes
inconvenient for the next book.

I think this may be a good argument for the detective, or some other
professional, as the anchor for a series. Not exactly a new discovery
on my part.

A number of years ago, I heard John D. MacDonald talking about how he
fought writing a series for many years. A lot of these books could be
called regular Joe books.

I can't remember any of the names of the regular Joe characters at
the moment, but I do remember Travis McGee.

Fred

------------------------------
Down on Ponce by Fred Willard
fwillard@mindspring.com
http://fwillard.home.mindspring.com/
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.