How to write an episodic book?

You could weave your character's life around the episodes. Think TV series. Say, Spenser for Hire. He detected a different case every week, but had an ongoing relationship with Susan and Hawk, and other personal things throughout.

One pattern I've used is several increasingly longer stories, from short story to (eventually) a capping novelette. Each story was complete, but they all had a common thread: increasing self-realization of the main character.

I'm following this same pattern in Cameron of the FBI: the First Year. She is given five increasingly harder cases to work on.

television shows use a technique to combines these all the time. Joss Whedon is given a lot of credit for using this on Buffy and Angel, but i like to give credit to Straczynski's Babylon 5. You see it everywhere now, from procedural cop shows, to Preschool children's animation.

You do a monster/crime of the week, and you drop in clues or hints for an over-all acting plot as well. the mid-season break, and season finale are mostly about the "mythic Arc."

the Classic example is, you have some big bad, a crime boss, or a super villain, who keeps sending thugs and henchman against the heroes until the heroes manage to "cut the head off the snake," so to speak.

there are other ways to do this. The Myth Arc page on tvtropes is a good place to start if you want to look for more kinds of examples.

I'd suggest looking into how comics and graphic novels are plotted. You'll often see 80% or so dedicated to the issue's main plot, with a couple of pages spared to set-up plot-B, which will come to the foreground in the next issue, and maybe a single frame or splash used for plot-C which is "the danger on the horizon." You can use the plot-C slots to frame out and set-up the main arc for several chapters / episodes and then it moves into the primary focal slot toward the climax.

Cyia said:

I'd suggest looking into how comics and graphic novels are plotted. You'll often see 80% or so dedicated to the issue's main plot, with a couple of pages spared to set-up plot-B, which will come to the foreground in the next issue, and maybe a single frame or splash used for plot-C which is "the danger on the horizon." You can use the plot-C slots to frame out and set-up the main arc for several chapters / episodes and then it moves into the primary focal slot toward the climax.

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This is great advice!

In a 22 page, serialized comic book, with the same staff, it can get very formulaic. it's a great place to learn from.

i remember my editor telling me, that every comic page had to have the last word start with a hard consonant like K or T, and the 3rd page had to explain the plot in a single sentence. obviously this isn't all companies, but it reminded me of the 22 minute rule i was taught in film school, where in a 90 minute film, sometime in minute 22 someone will explain the plot in a sentence.

Hill Street Blues (TV) did this as well. There was the ongoing daily crap of an inner-city police precinct, but there were officers coming and going, living and dying. Furillo and Davenport's relationship. Belker and Tataglia's relationship. And Belker goes through this whole thing of being known as the biting cop, and his thing with his ma calling every day ("Hi Ma.") But you get closer to him, and he matures so much.

You're basically doing an ensemble drama in a book.

KittenEV said:

Thanks for the advice everyone! I still have a question though. Do I assemble all the cases in one book (because that would be a very long book) or do tiny mini novellas for each case?

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How do you plan to sell your stories? If you plan to self-publish, I don't think the length of the stories matters, so doing mini-novellas would probably work better than one long book. But if you plan to publish traditionally, like trying to find an agent, you might want to compile your strongest stories into a single book of palatable length (say ~80K). If you still have written stories leftover, and more stories to write, those could get polished up and go in a second book, provided your first one sold well enough.

Best luck!