Over the years, various writing buddies and I have dreamed of creating massive stories set in a massive shared world—a collaboratively designed fantasy setting with thousands of years of history, with the theory being that any of us writers could pick any place and time within the world and write anything from a short story to a full length series or serial, and over time we’d build up a huge library of works within this one universe. (And with the further idea that, if a reader liked one of those stories, they’d probably want to read the rest, and we’d thereby all be supporting each other’s audience growth.)

Most of those ideas never panned out, but I’m still deeply fascinated by the idea of “massive storytelling.” Both in terms of length (a series with a single throughline, with dozens of novels worth of entries, or millions of words worth of content, from beginning to end); and in terms of width (a series with multiple parallel throughlines, like a shared universe with many entries, or a series with such a huge cast of characters that in practice it may as well have multiple parallel throughlines).

I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts on “massive storytelling” for a while now. What makes one “massive” series successful over another? What causes a massive series to die out? What qualities can a massive series have that will contribute or detract from its literary success? Or, as a separate question entirely, its commercial success?

Let’s look at some examples and try to figure these things out.