Mary Beth Norton: How to Write a Trilogy

Mary Beth Norton’s recent book, Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World, is being published this spring by Cornell University Press.  She has conceived this book as part of a trilogy of works that includes Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women and Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Origins of American Society.

Norton offers some tips about how to write a trilogy.  Here are the basics:

1. “Start a trilogy without announcing it, or even without realizing that is what you are doing.”

2.  “Plan a volume that then morphs into two–or three–instead of one.

3.  “Write the second volume last.”

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