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If you want to have a series of books which tell an ongoing story, but you want readers to be able to drop in midway, you will of necessity need to recap something in the beginning. How you do it d...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-13T12:00:15Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/7463 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T02:46:39Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/7463 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
If you want to have a series of books which tell an ongoing story, but you want readers to be able to drop in midway, you will of necessity need to recap something in the beginning. How you do it depends on your skill and comfort level. In the Harry Potter books, it was basically just narration in the opening chapter. This does run the risk of being boring, but it's all in the execution. In the Belgariad and Mallorean series from David and Leigh Eddings, each book had a prologue of some kind. Sometimes it was a recap, sometimes it told a different part of the mythological backstory. Anne McCaffrey used a recap prologue for her original dragon trilogy; I don't recall if she did it for the Dragonsinger set. The first book in CJ Cherryh's _Foreigner_ series was admittedly so challenging that she just outright explained what happened in book 1 in a prologue to book 2. (The rest of the series was less impenetrable and didn't need much recapping.) A recapping prologue can be skipped by people who know what's going on, but brings new ones up to speed.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2013-03-19T00:16:45Z (almost 12 years ago)
Original score: 2