Series Planning Quotes

Parker wasn't supposed to be a series. He was supposed to be one book, and if he was only going to be in one book, I didn't worry about it. And then an editor at Pocket Books said "Write more books about him." So I didn't go back at that point and give him a first name. If I'd known he would've been a series, I would've done two things differently. First, I would've given him a first name because that means for 27 books, I've had to find some other way to say, "Parker parked the car."

I think they thought it was very arrogant of me to write the end of my seven books series when I didn't have a publisher and no-one had heard of me

When I started 'City of Bones,' I knew exactly what was going to happen in 'City of Glass.' When I first started the six-book series, I thought of it as a three-book series.

I very much use Bill Willingham's approach on 'Fables,' which is that rather than having an end point to a series, I have an end point for the various story lines.

I think one of the problems in determining the ending for a television series is that you don't know how long the show is gonna last. Particularly because we were in the unique position of adapting Tom's Perrotta novel The Leftovers, it always felt like the first season was gonna end with the end of Tom's novel, and then we would figure things out from there and look back.

To be honest, when you're running a series and you have an open end, you don't want to limit yourself too much with the choices you've got for a particular character.

There were two things going on: 1) I had already established in my own mind where I wanted to go with the next series, and having James around as a Grey Eminence would have complicated matters. He had had an amazing life and it was time to bid him good-bye.

There's only one set of books I've written that I knew was going to be more than one book at the beginning, and those are the 'Missing Link' books.

While I had no intention of ending the series after 'The Spellmans Strike Again,' I did close many doors in that book and, with the fifth one, I was opening a lot of doors and not finding anything behind them and then opening another door and another until I found something. It was a while before I found my stride.

My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.

'A Storm of Swords' is a massive volume, and it seemed like it would be shortchanging it to try to cram it into ten episodes.

It's important to know the kind of character that you need to be building up to, throughout the series.

There was so much talk about the movie and we thought, "Wouldn't it be great to still do the movie, but to give everybody this thing they didn't see coming?" Even with the number of episodes, it was reported that there was going to be 10 episodes, and then there was talk about adding more.

Even as I was writing 'Empire State,' I knew there were more adventures for the main character, private detective Rad Bradley, to have. I also knew that the world was far larger than what I'd presented in book one.

In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.

When we shot the first series of Aerobic Striptease, we shot five DVD's, so we slowly put out each DVD and timed it out that they were all done and shot and ready to go. We just started shooting the next series once we felt it was time to work on the next one.