That feeling when you find a show with seven seasons, all twenty-four episodes. When you know you can get cozy and stay with it for a while. You’ll get to know and love the characters. Details from the beginning will pay off seasons later. You’ll catch yourself exclaiming aloud when something you noticed finally matters. And if you rewatch it, you’ll see how much was there all along.
Big book series can have the same payoff. Big narratives give space for the entire cast to breathe, for relationships to be explored, for writers to play with plot points and develop their own skills over time. It gives you time with the story, lets you breathe it in deeply before it eventually comes to an end.
And it’s not for everyone. Sometimes you want a short series to watch while you’re on break at work, or to read a stand-alone book when you’re trying to fall asleep. Deep narratives take time and commitment. You’ll fall deeply, in love or in hate, with many of the characters. They might hurt profoundly, or leave you engraved with lessons or strong, wistful feelings.
Today, leading up to the announcement of my fifth novel, I want to take a moment to talk about long-form content. What it asks of us, and what it gives back.
Truth 1: Long-form demands trust, not immediacy
It takes a lot to pick it up the first time. The twenty-four-episode season. The 800-page novel. That trust requires a leap. Authors exist at a disadvantage against physical media perpetually, and long-form writers are at the apex of this. We can’t create a trailer to show our book – well, we can, but they require a whole different battle of voice actors, stock footage, and don’t really show what we made. We have our book cover, we can summarize the book, but the rest is trust.
That’s only the first half. A long book still has to earn its place in your hands. It has to make you care early. Not by rushing to spectacle, but by grounding you in people, questions, and a sense that there’s more beneath the surface than what’s immediately visible. And often, it’ll still give you spectacle. Long-form storytelling asks for patience, but it doesn’t ask for blind faith. It asks the writer to be intentional. To plant threads they intend to return to. To build momentum through curiosity rather than constant escalation. To explore stories and possibilities, and let the journey be a journey, not a destination.
When it works, the payoff is different from immediacy. Instead of a one-time hit, you get a long, stacking meaning that hits you harder as you keep going. Stories can be impactful in short-form, but long-term familiarity with characters can become a deep, entangling web that favors those who trust in it.
Truth 2: Long-form is about sustainability, not spectacle
Both writing and reading long-form content require determination. It’s not about maintaining constant intensity, but how to keep going. Long-form stories are built through routine, revision, and the willingness to return to the same world again and again.
Over time, this changes how you write. You stop chasing moments and start building foundations. You learn when to slow down, when to let scenes breathe, and when to trust that the story doesn’t need to be a string of constant explosions to matter. The story grows, and so does the writer. Between the beginning and the end of the series, writers and readers will change.
Readers notice the details and trust the writer. Over time, through growth, readers stick through a story because they fall in love with it. Creating long-form content creates a bridge that requires that trust, but exchanges it for a wealth of stories.
Writing long-form taught me that I couldn’t rely on bursts of inspiration forever. I had to learn how to return to the same world consistently. To revise, to course-correct, and to trust that the work deepens itself over time rather than peak all at once. I think about how choices will echo from book one to the end. I’m more interested in what a character carries forward than how a chapter ends.
Truth 3: Long-form builds memory, not just moments
Meaning grows continually through a long story. Early decisions create ripples that leap forward. Small interactions can take on new weight in hindsight. A line of dialogue, a quiet choice, a relationship dynamic – things that seem small at first gain weight because time has passed around them. Characters aren’t defined by a single dramatic moment. They’re defined by patterns. By how they respond, fail, change, and repeat themselves over the course of a story. Readers remember not just what happened, but how long it took to get there. In long-form storytelling, this can turn from pages into literal years.
This is also where long-form content differs from simply telling many shorter stories. Smaller books often resolve their arcs cleanly and return characters to a baseline before the next installment. Long-form storytelling resists that reset. Consequences carry forward. Emotional damage lingers. Relationships don’t neatly close just because a volume ends. In longer narratives with overarching trials, each book’s ending becomes stronger because of what it took to get there. Here, the number of books doesn’t matter. It’s about whether the story honors itself.
This is why re-reads feel different in long-form stories. You notice the early foreshadowing. You see the pressure building long before it breaks. You see ticks before you see the reasons spelled out on the page. The story hasn’t changed, but your relationship to it has, because you’ve lived with it.
Long-running fantasy series like the Sword of Truth resonate so strongly with their readers for this reason. Early philosophical choices, moral compromises, and losses don’t vanish between books. They accumulate. Later moments land not just because of what’s happening now, but because of everything the reader remembers carrying into it. Re-reading this series myself and knowing the ending, character growth is boldly outlined. Seeing little dots of foreshadowing in the beginning, and following an author as they grow over a decade of books, is an awesome experience.
This is the kind of story I’m drawn to write. One where time matters. Where characters don’t reset, and the past doesn’t stay buried. Where characters are explored deeply through the passages, taking you with them on a long, winding journey.
Despite trends, despite shrinking seasons and shorter attention spans, long stories endure. They survive because people choose them. It takes trust on both sides. Readers trust by picking up the first book in a series, the first episode of a long tv series. Authors trust that their people will find them.
Sovereign Soul 