Tips to Transform Your Novel Into Trilogy

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Tips to Transform Your Novel Into Trilogy – How To Write the Future podcast, episode 155

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“Be here, be now. Be with your project as it exists right now.” — Beth Barany

In this episode of How To Write the Future podcast, host Beth Barany answers a readers question on “Turning one novel into a trilogy.” She shares advice on how to start the process all the way how to enjoy your finalized, polished book. Beth also dives into topics such as overcoming imposter syndrome, world building, and how to maintain your writing momentum.

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About the How To Write the Future podcast

The How To Write The Future podcast is for science fiction and fantasy writers who want to write positive futures and successfully bring those stories out into the marketplace. Hosted by Beth Barany, science fiction novelist and creativity coach for writers. We cover tips for fiction writers. This podcast is for readers too if you’re at all curious about the future of humanity.

This podcast is for you if you have questions like:

– How do I create a believable world for my science fiction story?

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This podcast is for readers too if you’re at all curious about the future of humanity.

Transcript for Tips to transform your novel into a trilogy

[00:00] Introduction and Host Background

Hi everyone. Welcome back, or welcome to this podcast, How to Write the Future. I’m your host, Beth Barany, and I am an award-winning science fiction and fantasy novelist, as well as writing teacher, creativity coach, podcaster, and filmmaker.

I run this podcast because I believe that with our creativity and our desire and passion to write stories, we can remake the world. And my vision and my hope and my mission is to help us revision how we want to be, how we want humanity to be. And my hope is that it is for positive, optimistic futures, not an easy task, and there are a lot of nuts and bolts that go into writing a good novel, a good science fiction and fantasy novel.

[00:55] Listener Question: Turning a Massive Novel into a Trilogy 

And I got a question from one of my clients, Hugh, and he asked me: How do I turn this massive, I mean massive, over a hundred thousand word epic fantasy novel into three books.

So that’s what we’ve been working on together and he brought that question out for more feedback.

But also in case any one of you is wrangling with this question: how do you turn a really huge novel into three books or maybe more?

So we came up with a bunch of questions and I’m gonna go through those today and hopefully these will help you in your project as well. 

[01:33] Contact and Support Information 

Now I’m gonna just say, if you have any questions about this topic, you can contact me.

And how to do that is with the show notes, and how to write the future.com.

You could reach out to me, write me a note, send me a voicemail. I have a thing set up for that, and just ask me a question. Or you can ask me a question on the socials tagging my name, and reach out. Ask me your question.

And also, just so you know, I have been running this podcast for nearly three years as I record this. This is May 13th, 2025. And I do this because I care very much about this topic. I’m a writing teacher and a creative, and I want to share my wisdom and knowledge with you. If you like what I do, please like, subscribe, all the things, leave a review.

And I welcome donations. I have a tip jar. You’ll see the link for that in the show notes as well. If you wanna support us, that is definitely another way you can do that. And really the easiest thing that you could do to support us is like and subscribe. That is really beautiful. All right, and thank you for your support.

So let’s get on with the show. 

[02:38] Starting the Process: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

Today we’re gonna talk about, as I said, how do we turn one novel into a trilogy, which is the most common thing in science fiction and fantasy. Boy, do we love our series. I know I do. I love reading series and I write series. Something that you might notice as you consider this is you might have a lot of fears about moving one book into three books. And you might be hit right away with imposter syndrome.

So do you feel like you’re an imposter, if you wanna move this one big novel into three books?

Yeah, that might be something that you face. And how do you handle that? 

One of my favorite authors, I’m pretty sure that she did this. And so there’s a lot of ways that you can handle breaking one big novel into three parts. And the novelist I’m thinking of is Elizabeth Moon, and it’s her Deed of Paksenarrion. 

 It’s an epic fantasy saga.

When I read that, I realized there is an option about turning a big novel into three novels if you just cut it. I literally had to have books two and three lined up so that I could read, just read the rest of the story.

 There was no ending at the ends of books one and two. It just stopped. 

I’m here to tell you that if the prospect is so overwhelming, you think, how could I do this? And, oh, who am I to do this? You could just chop the book into three equal parts and publish it that way. Why not? If that is your passion, I say go for it.

Now, if you’re faced with the idea of creating three books that are connected and you have to read them in order, but you’re like, how am I gonna do that? There’s no way I could do that. Who am I to be able to do that?

I just wanna encourage you that yes, it is a challenging task and you may not know how to do it, and the only way to figure it out is to go through it.

With any big creative endeavor– I can speak from firsthand experience– I didn’t know how to write a novel, and then I wrote a novel because I did it. I didn’t do it all in one day. I only did it step by step.

In fact, that very first novel, I only spent one day a week on it. It did take me a long time. It took me five years and I finished it.

All that to say, just because you don’t know how to completely solve the problem, doesn’t mean you can’t start right now because you don’t actually have to solve all the problems. You only need to solve the next problem. Whatever is next for you, and then you need to solve whatever shows up next after that.

So basically, imposter syndrome, I think one of the reasons it comes out is because people think they need to have it all figured out before they start, but actually most people don’t. I have yet to meet anybody who’s figured it all out before they start. Another way to handle imposter syndrome is to listen to a lot of people’s stories.

I actually don’t know Elizabeth Moon’s story about how The Deed of Paksenarrion was just chopped into three parts. It very well could have been a decision by her editor and publisher. In fact, I bet you that it was. That’s my guess. So gather stories, ask people how they did it.

And, I tend to plan my books one at a time, but I write in series. But I also didn’t know that book one, Henrietta the Dragon Slayer, which is for those watching on video, which is behind me. I didn’t know that when I finished Book One that there would be a Book Two. It took me a little while to figure that out. And then while I was writing Book Two, I realized the entire story that I wanted to contain in the second book would be its own thing. And I couldn’t actually get to the rest of the story. And so there obviously had to be a third book. So I did create endings, for each one.

Lemme see if I can just, my desk is on wheels, see, and there’s book three, the red cover. So I have Henrietta the Dragon Slayer, Henrietta and the Dragon Stone. And Henrietta and the Battle of the Horse Mesa. But I didn’t conceive of all three at once. I really did it one at a time.

So all that to say, let me move my desk again.

All that to say that you don’t have to have it all figured out when you start. So I’d be really curious to find out for those who might feel imposter syndrome, what is below the surface. What are you comparing yourself to?

Imposter syndrome is often about comparisons, and it’s really not fair to compare ourselves to anybody else. We don’t know their journey. We don’t know how they got there. We don’t know where they were when they started versus where we were when we started. So it’s totally apples and oranges in my opinion.

And this is something that I have to, um, coach myself on repeatedly. Like comparing myself to anybody else is really not fair to me. So when you compare yourself to anybody else, or even some perfect vision of how you think you should be, that’s really not fair because it’s not taking into account who you really are right now.

So we wanna work with your strengths and work with where you are right now and take the next step. That’s all you need to figure out right now–is the next step, and eventually you’re gonna get there.

All right, so that was with my coaching hat on for sure. And here’s another coaching related question. It is such a big topic of turning one big novel into three books, into a trilogy.

[08:16] Maintaining Momentum and Avoiding Pressure

Hugh asked: How do you maintain momentum and avoid feeling pressure after the first book is finished? Might you want to finish two or all of them and then publish over time?

So that’s a really great question and this answer will serve for anyone who is working on a series and maybe has planned and written them ahead of time.

Do you release them one at a time? Do you wait till everything is beautiful before you even try and publish?

So of course there’s a lot of schools of thought on this and it really, in my opinion, honestly, this really depends on your digestion. What can you stomach? What can you handle?

So for some people, it will be very satisfying to go through the entire process of one book and bring it to polish and then publish and then going back and doing it again with the next one and so on and so forth.

If you’re a beginning writer, that might be the best way to gain momentum because there is such a tremendous, incredible release that happens when you publish a book and when you go through that whole process and there are so many decisions that it’s almost better to just get it out the door. Learn all that you can, and then take that knowledge that you’ve learned from that entire process of polishing and revising and making your book beautiful– beautiful cover and being really proud of it and letting it go so that, you have room to make all those new decisions for the new book and do that one at a time.

[09:47]  Be Here. Be Now. 

Now, how do you maintain momentum and avoid feeling pressure after the first book is published?

So that kind of comes back to my, one of my core teachings, which is: Take a deep breath and be in the present time.

Be here, be now. Be with your project as it exists right now.

And it’s really great actually, once Book One is done, say you decided to publish Book One and then you have Book Two and it feels daunting, ’cause then you gotta climb that mountain again of editing and revising and all the decisions, to just really digest all that you have learned and really help yourself integrate everything that you have learned so that you can take this new project, which may feel like you’re at the bottom of the mountain again, but actually you’ve already gone through this with one book, and you will be able to apply lessons learned to this next book.

But don’t expect it to be perfect.

Honestly, for some writers, they’re fast learners. They’re gonna integrate really fast, and the next book will be much better than the first book.

Or maybe you gotta get three books under your belt or five books under your belt before you feel like you know what you’re doing. Like me.

That’s how it happened for me, it took me a bunch of books to feel like, oh, now I understand the process. So really don’t compare yourself to me. Just take what you know, and draw a circle around yourself and live inside of your own bubble about what it is that you know and that you can do.

And that’s all that matters. Really comparing yourself to some imagined past, present, or future version of yourself is not gonna be helpful.

So that is my main teaching: come back to yourself and to yourself in the present and work with what is in your energy field and in your know how and in your knowledge and experience, and also the kind of resources that you have. The people you know that you can reach out to for help and all of the amazing resources that live in internet land, of which there are so many.

[11:43] Why do that?

So one of the core questions about turning a novel into a trilogy is why would you even wanna do that?

And it has a lot to do with bandwidth for you as an author, if the story feels too daunting to edit, you might want to do this. If the story feels very unwieldy to market, you might wanna develop it into three parts.

Those are the two main reasons why you would wanna take a huge novel and chop it into parts, into a trilogy.

[12:11] Beth’s Recommendations

So what do I recommend?

I really recommend that you do what feels feasible to you. I have published a novel that’s over a hundred thousand words, and that is book three in my Henrietta the Dragon Slayer Trilogy.

For those watching at home on video, I’m moving my desk again, so you can see The red cover Henrietta and the Battle of the Horse Mesa.

And, I have a book I’m working on right now that’s 135,000 words, and am I gonna chop it into pieces? Probably not, because I can handle it. I can handle the bigness, I can handle the stories. 

Actually just considering this right now, I could even put into the book parts one, part two, part three, but I probably won’t.

We’ll see. We’ll see what the beta readers think. We’ll see what the response is from my early readers, my critique partners. If they’re like, oh my God, this is too much, then I might consider putting parts inside of the book, but I’m actually, I don’t wanna, publish it as multiple books. I don’t need to.

My capacity is I can do this. And, earlier on in my career, the first Henrietta was only 260 pages, and the second Henrietta book was 300 pages and obviously the third Henrietta book’s 500 I believe. So as my skills grew, I was able to write longer books, and feel confident about releasing them and marketing them.

[13:40] Priority 

So really what’s the priority?

If you’re faced with a huge manuscript that you don’t know how to edit, but you wanna be editing, priority is ask yourself: do I wanna turn this into three books and work on each one separately? Notice if that feels priority, because if you’re stuck and you’re not moving forward, it could be because the project is too big, and that’s another reason why to break it into three parts.

[14:04] World Building and Consistency Across Books 

How do you ensure consistency across all three books?

What a great question. So, to answer this question, I am gonna talk about world building, and keeping track of your story world. 

So what does consistency mean?

If you mean all the names of things and your culture and your world building and your character.

So first of all, you wanna keep track of all the story world elements.

And then second, you want to have some trusted critique partners or an editor or beta readers, or all of the above, to help you stay consistent.

One of the things my critique partners will say is, oh, no. Janey wouldn’t do that, or Henrietta wouldn’t do that. And they help me stay honest. Because your early readers, they’re gonna start to take ownership of your characters and help you stay on the straight and narrow of who these characters are. So it’s really wonderful to have dedicated beta readers who you cultivate over time. So that’s something to think about as you start building, as you start getting ready to share your work with others, is start to put it out there that you want some dedicated readers and beta readers who can give you feedback just on the story itself. And critique partners ideally who can give you feedback on craft, or you hire an editor, which is a cost and an investment.

Or you do some combination of that. And they will all help you stay consistent because it is a lot. It is a lot. I’m gonna share on the screen now some images from my story world building file inside of Scrivener for, this one is for my Janey McCallister Space Station Mystery series.

And you can see, I do a lot of things and I keep track of a lot of things, including place names, character names, character traits, customs, logos, gosh, so many things, the whole nine yards. It’s also where I brainstorm and where I wrote my first draft.

[16:05] Developing Character Arcs in a Trilogy 

So here’s a really great question. How do you develop character arcs that span three books?

It’s a really great question. Something to consider is your genre, number one.

The expectation for epic fantasy is there’s going to be a big change of character, big transformation from the beginning to the end of the three books, and that means– the change can be radical also in each individual book.

Epic fantasy often has the expectation of lots of changes and lots of transformations.

You can consider: where do you want the character to be by the end? And are they gonna go through some radical transformations by the end of book one and then maybe another by the end of book two?

And then maybe at the end of book two, since it’s the midpoint between–it can be a big turning point.

Think of, Empire Strikes Back, a very big turning point at the end of that movie. So that’s developed as a tradition, and you’ll see that in a lot of storytelling sagas, where two thirds or three quarters of the way through the saga, through the epic, they’ll be such a drastic change.

The reader’s like, I don’t know how the main character’s gonna come back from that. Don’t they need to accomplish this big goal? I really don’t know how they’re going to get there.

So you end book two with that really dramatic hook. So that book three is really, the stakes have gotten even bigger.

So you wanna think of your character arc in terms of transformation, but also as they change, the stakes need to get higher.

So both. They need to grow to be able to meet the bigger challenge.

So you might wanna think of: what is the big change by the end of Book one, where the reader’s like, wow, now what? Now that their life is completely done, a 180, now what? And then they go on to book two. And book two is like amazing and so much transformation and change and challenges.

And then you gotta end with like a, oh no, you make us really worried for your character. They’re faced with a really hard choice. You could even leave it on a cliffhanger. Or they’ve done something really dramatic that you’re like, how do they come back from that?

So you see, what I’m going for is not only do you want your character to change, especially, in, in fantasy, but you also want it to be dramatically connected up with the plot.

Now, not in every genre or subgenre will you have dramatic character arcs. Maybe your character just gets older and wiser and makes some changes that reflect their maturity.

Maybe your character only shifts a little bit and every few books do you have a dramatic arc. And that’s more what I’m doing with my Janey McCallister Space Station Mystery series.

Like in a lot of detective stories, she doesn’t change a whole lot from book to book, but over the span of the whole series, she will have shifted. There’ll be some points in the bigger series where she has shifted. So I have a big shift that is gonna happen in Book five, and that I lead up to, by the time you’ve read all four books and, I’m not gonna tell you what it is.

So something that I did is when I wrote both the Henrietta books and the Janey books, I didn’t really know consciously what the character shift was in the first draft, but I made some decisions in the revision phase, but I did not know what the next book change arc would be until I got to those edits and wrote that book.

So you don’t actually have to know it all ahead of time. I would say trust your intuition and notice the change doesn’t have to be linear. It can be up and it can be down like a change for the better and a change for the worst. Or it could be a change professionally, it can zigzag, it could look like real life.

But what you might wanna do is just track the character change from the beginning of the book to the end of the book, and then when you’re faced with the next book: go, how do I make this different? How do I give it a new feeling so that we’re not rehashing the same changes? We have some new changes.

What are the new changes that my character can be faced with?

And then you just do that one book at a time. You don’t have to have the whole series figured out.

You can have a rough idea, which is really fun, and which is what I had for Henrietta the Dragon Slayer. I knew by the time I had published Book One, I knew that at some point I didn’t know when yet, she was gonna have to be this new role in life that was very different for her. But I didn’t know how or when I was gonna get there, and that’s why I had to write book two before I got to book three.

[20:37]  Common pitfalls to avoid when expanding a trilogy 

So what are common pitfalls to avoid when expanding a trilogy?

I would say repetition, where it feels like you’re rehashing similar dynamics between characters and character arc.

So you wanna challenge yourself and you want to get help too with editors and beta readers and the like, to make sure you’re doing something fresh in the other book and in the final book. 

So that the story doesn’t feel episodic, meaning this happened and then this happened, then this happened, which is very common when we’re working on our early drafts.

And you wanna say: how does this lead to that and what are the consequences?

So you wanna make sure that you set up things that have consequences and then there’s a payoff. And that is something that I get a lot of help with, frankly, ’cause I’m not super plot focused.

So I get a lot of people who help me make sure my plots have the setups and the payoffs.

Actually, I’m very good at the setups. I don’t always remember to do the payoffs.

So be sure you’re checking for whatever challenge you set up in your stories, and hopefully it’s multifaceted, that you wrap them up at the end or you very consciously don’t wrap them up at the end and you leave the reader hanging, which is totally fine too.

[21:46] Other Pitfalls? 

What are some of the other pitfalls? yeah, I’m gonna leave it at that.

[21:52]  Handling world building expansion across three books

All right. How do you handle world building expansion across three books?

Take lots of notes. Have a map. Take lots of notes, copious notes. Use something like Scrivener. Use a tool that’s searchable. I know there’s a lot of tools out there that you can use to help you keep track of your world building. I use Scrivener.

[22:10]  Maintaining tension throughout a longer story arc 

What about maintaining tension throughout a longer story arc?

Yeah. So you wanna have a very big goal that only gets achieved by the end of the trilogy, and you need to make that clear at some point what that is. And you need to remind the reader about that.

So by maintaining tension, the tension is: will they or won’t they obtain the special item or conquer the big baddie or get to this new location?

And to maintain tension, you need to create believable, relatable obstacles in which the character really has to struggle through them. So it’s not just performa. It’s not just, oh, here we are at the bridge. We have to cross a bridge.

No, make the bridge wobbly. Make the bridge that it might break, or make the bridge cursed, or, give their movement through the world and through the story, real conflict with real people and real obstacles.

And the way you maintain tension is you increase the stakes at every step. You gotta make things worse and worse and worse, and you gotta make your character grow to meet each challenge.

Now, all huge caveats there. That means you’re writing an epic fantasy for a Western audience who are expecting these things. If you’re writing a subgenre of science fiction and fantasy that doesn’t have those expectations, that’s totally fine. Whatever are the expectations in your sub-genre that keep the reader turning the page, it’s either: what’s gonna happen next? How is my dear character gonna fare against these obstacles? How is it gonna work out between your main character and the relationships? How are they gonna handle this problem?

And so you create a relatable character with relatable relationships in situations, even outlandish situations, but that their response to them is relatable.

[24:04]  Best practices for planning plot threads across multiple books 

And lastly: What are some best practices for planning plot threads across multiple books? If you’re super plot oriented, go ahead and break out your writing tool, Scrivener or some other tool, and just take copious notes and write it all down, so you have a map of an outline of all the plot threads, and you can even make a little map.

I’ve seen writers who do that.

My husband, who’s a writer and who also writes in the science fiction fantasy realm, created a visual map of the world, but also created a linear map on Canva, and that was really cool where he put the different plot items happening.

So come up with a visual that allows you to see your whole story. Another thing that you can do and something I do in Scrivener, and I’m gonna put it on the screen here — is I will keep track — because I write murder mysteries on space stations– I will keep track of the villain’s timeline. I will keep track of the victim’s timeline. I’ll keep track of my, of Janey, the investigator’s timeline, and if there’s any other timelines I need to keep track of, I will do that as well. And so I create little documents for that. And I do that in revisions, which is how I figure out a lot of these things.

Or if you’re very plot and outline oriented ahead of writing, do it. Do it before you write. 

[25:25] Conclusion and Final Thoughts 

Alright, so that’s it for this week, everyone, on how to turn your one novel, your one huge epic fantasy or sci-fi novel into a trilogy or multiple books. I wanna thank my client, Hugh Tipping, for this question.

It’s a really great one.

If you are wrangling with this topic and you have more questions that I did not cover today, please let me know in the comments section or email me or DM me where I am out there in the world on all the socials. You can even leave me a voicemail, which would be awesome.

Please like and subscribe wherever you get this podcast, whether it’s YouTube or any of the other channels. And also if you like what you see here, please consider donating at my tip jar, and the link will be in the description.

That’s all for this week, everyone. Write long and prosper.

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ABOUT BETH BARANY 

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Beth Barany teaches science fiction and fantasy novelists how to write, edit, and publish their books as a coach, teacher, consultant, and developmental editor. She’s an award-winning fantasy and science fiction novelist and runs the podcast, “How To Write The Future.”

 

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