How to Plan & Structure a Trilogy (Writing Advice)

Learn how to plan, structure, and write a trilogy with examples from Star Wars.

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[WilliamReginaldLucas]

Original Star Wars trilogy, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones! George Lucas said in an interview once that his view on trilogies is that each film should “rhyme” like verses in a poem which I think is a great metaphor

[jaxonwoods]

Avatar: TLA does the trilogy strategy well albeit in show form. Separated into three distinct acts (Water, Earth, Fire), each season is a representation of its part in the three-act structure. It's phenomenal how the writers wrote the show to correspond to the elements while also advancing both the external and internal plot points.

[LarryThePhotoGuy]

Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune. The incredibly tight plotting with 17 major characters is brilliant.

[google_was_my_idea_first]

Don’t know if it’s hilarious or sad to think the Star Wars sequels could have been saved with a single You Tube video.

[littleredruri]

Favourite trilogy is Back to the Future. I actually love how I can pinpoint every single moment that you laid out in the breakdown sections in the trilogy itself.

[darkyboode]

I’m planning to write a hexalogy, but these trilogy tips will be enough for me to get the general idea of how to write a series of any length.

[tattoodude]

I would love to see you expand on this subject a little more - specifically the Lord of the Rings style and what goes into breaking a story into three parts that was originally one. I kind of ran into this with my trilogy. I had intended on writing a single story and had my plot points I wanted to hit, but at about a hundred pages in, I realized there was no way to do this without writing a one thousand page YA novel. I know that I would not be the first to do such a thing, but it was smarter to break it into three parts. Easier said than done of course and found myself in a situation where my editor was/is telling me I have to make each book independent and essentially, I have to follow the "Stand-Together Trilogy" model.

[Reunion]

I've heard it said that the best trilogies come in threes.
In all seriousness, found you channel a few days ago and am really enjoying the videos. The use of examples to highlight your points is incredibly helpful!

[WriterBrandonMcNulty]

What's your favorite trilogy? Let us know!

My favorites are the original Star Wars Trilogy (movies), Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy (books), and Metal Gear Solid 1-3 (games).

[wachyfanning]

There's also another kind of trilogy where the first entry is its own, stand-alone thing, but the next two were made with the intention of making it into a trilogy. Think Pirates of the Caribbean, where the first is completely stand-alone, but the following two movies pretty much take place right after the other.

[anglachl]

Just leaving you a note saying that I just came across your channel this week and am literally binging everything you’ve ever made. At this rate I guess I’ll have to buy your books. Thank you for the helpful and succinct content!

[Idkman]

My favorite trilogies: OG Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Thrawn Trilogy, Dark Knight Trilogy, Darth Bane trilogy, Lord of the Rings, Dollars/Man With No Name trilogy, Back to the Future, Berserk Golden Age trilogy

[stephvandykeozzy]

I'm glad you had a video about this. Right now, I'm working on a FanFiction series that I'm planning to have it similar to a book trilogy. By watching your video will help me to figure out how to plan the entire series. It makes much more sense by looking at the plotline for each book contained by the entire structure. I had a feeling it did.

[Zagrakhen]

Peter Jackson's _Lord of the Ring_ trilogy of course.
He managed to give this sense of one self contain story in each movie, which we could say is not the case with the books of Tolkien. And it's mostly because of planning with the scripts, changing chronology of events, and editing the movies afterwards.

[SDsonny]

The og star wars trilogy, lord of the rings, or avatar the last airbender are some of my favorite trilogy’s

[Jaice]

A really good recent trilogy is the Xenoblade Chronicles series of video games. It also has a unique structure that wasn't mentioned in the video. 1 was written to be standalone because there weren't plans for a sequel at the time. Then 2 comes in with another mostly standalone story with barely any story connections to the first one. Then lastly 3 is the least standalone and combines the story elements introduced in the preceding entries.

[toasteroven]

Have you done a specific video on ways to introduce romance related sub-plots, when to do it, as well as the do's and don'ts?

[MSILAER]

My opinion on a trilogy:

Act I: The set-up exposition that explains who the characters are, and what type of story.
Act II: The turning point climax that displays the core conflict, and what the story is about.
Act III: The overall conclusion that resolves all that's happened, and gives the story's lesson.

Example:

Act 1:🕵‍♀🤝🤵A female detective and a male agent from opposite sides of law worked together and become friends.
Act 2:🦸‍♀🦹‍♂😈The female detective discovers male agent's secret, and both forced to fight because of agent's evil boss.
Act 3: ⚖💑👨‍👩‍👧‍👦With both broke, they've then discovered faith, fought and defeated the great evil, thus married having kids.

[tomlewis]

I find there to be a paucity of good advice regarding trilogies. There is very little, anywhere. I know this from searching for years. I think the reason for this is because it adds a very complicated layer of writing and structure on top of the huge complications of writing a single stand-alone story, which is already about as complex and difficult structurally as it comes. More complication was the last thing I was wishing for. And patting one's head while rubbing one's tummy has never been my métier.

My only regret is I didn't find this video years ago (please get into your time machine and go back then and post it). It would have allowed me to consciously understand the basics of what took me a very long time to understand, much earlier.

I have written a stand-together trilogy. I had great difficulty, though, with the concept of B1-2-3 simply being acts 1-2-3. If each book is an act and the trilogy is ~300, 000 words, that implies that B1 and B2 will each be ~75, 000 words long and B2 will be ~150, 000 words long. That just doesn't fit. I don't think I can find any trilogy that does that.

But if the books are approximately equal in length, then Act II begins at the ~3/4 mark in B1, and Act III begins at the ~1/4 mark in B3. That doesn't exactly fit, either. Layering the full arc over top of the three book arcs just doesn't seem to work. So I find the 1-2-3/1-2-3 concept to be very, very shaky.

But the biggest thing that dogged me for the longest time was how to put closure and resolution late into the 3rd act of B1 and of B2. It felt like I would have to rob the closure and resolution (falling energy, denouement) from B3 in order to do that. Having both the overall story arc as well as a full arc for each book sort of feels like trying to have your cake and eat it, too. I didn't want the reader left up in the air at the end of B1 or B2, but I also didn't want to dilute the ending of B3. That is a huge dilemma. Or was, for me. It seemed to have no good answer.

But after years of struggling, I figured out how to do this. Being a long story, it has subplots. I believe subplots have to be closely interwoven in order for the story to be coherent—the subplots have to inform each other and depend on each other, and I believe that's also important for a single stand-alone novel. It makes it feel like a single, coherent story. Otherwise, what you have is an anthology that risks constantly whipsawing the reader in and out of separate stories. Most readers don't care for that. Tolstoy is infamous for doing that, but then, he's Tolstoy. He gets a pass.

But not all the subplots need to have the same on-screen amount of content that others do. Some are only there for part of the story. I think that's legit. So I hope this idea can help others:

What I ended up doing is mostly resolving 4 subplots (and not the main genre plot) at the end of B1, and resolving 2 more subplots at the end of B2, leaving the closure and resolution of the global main plot untouched until the end of B3. It seems to have worked. The reader now gets closure at the end of each volume, and the closure and resolution of the global genre is left untouched until the very end.

I guess that is similar to what Star Wars did, and to what Tolkien did. But having no exposure to either of them, I had to beat my head against the wall until I could figure it out for myself.

[djdashdfw]

You are fantastic! This is my new favorite channel