avoiding scary owls

and opportunity cost

It’s time to continue our journey into Sequel Country, where so far we’ve surveyed the foothills of what a sequel is, poked around in the forest of different kinds of sequels, considered the paths ahead and told stories of debut novels around the campfire. It’s time to make some serious progress into sequel writing, at least it is for me. I’ve written novels before – I even finished one, once – but I’ve never written a sequel before and it’s a lot more difficult, for reasons which I went into when I was setting out.

I did try writing a sequel too, once before. The things slowed my pen to a halt (literally, in those days) were the same two things that are stopping me now, except that this time I’m not going to let them.

Firstly, I got interested in editing the first book. I keep working a little on the sequel, then having more ideas for improving the previous book and going back to it. Most recently, I resumed work on the sequel in December/January, but then I read an article on self-editing which gave me a new idea about how I could improve Parallel Lines and I’ve spent most of my writing time (evenings and weekends) making a new draft. It’s taken a couple of months, since it’s quite a long book at 110,000 words. But I enjoy editing; it’s a craft, and you can pick it up for half an hour if that’s all the time you have, and most importantly, it makes something better when you put it down than it was when you picked it up.

Secondly, and this is something which has stopped me from writing a dozen novels by now, is the allure of paths not taken. Every time I start a new chapter, I can think of lots of possible ways forward. So many promising ideas, so many glittering palaces, shady forests, cool oases and psychedelic mirages I could be exploring. And yet when I get the first few sentences down, they’re shit, like all first drafts are. And I throw away the dross and spend even longer daydreaming about how shiny all the other paths would be, trying to pick the best path for my story to go down. And I end up spending hours daydreaming with a pen in my hand (or these days with a macbook on my lap) and getting nothing done. The thing is, writing the first draft is the opposite of editing. Writing some crap makes your draft worse, not better, and that can be very disheartening.

I could write short stories, that was fine. Even a novela. They weren’t for publication, so it didn’t matter that they weren’t great. But the novel, I cared about, and with a novel (or a sequel, you see), the opportunity cost of going down the wrong path is much, much higher. Opportunity cost is a term I came across in my business career, which for those who aren’t familiar with it, means the notional cost incurred by not doing something; by choosing between mutually exclusive alternatives (such as how to invest resources or time), you incur the cost of not doing the other thing that you could have been doing. Opportunity costs are hypothetical, so don’t appear in your accounts, but if you choose the alternative that looks best in the short term (usually because accountants are in charge, thinking only about the accounting costs) without thinking about alternatives (economic costs) that are better in the long term, you can fail to do as well as you could – or for that matter, fail completely and go bust. Hopefully it’s obvious how this applies to writing: every time you choose a bad path to go down, you’re wasting precious time and creative energy.

I mentioned last week that I once wrote 80% of a novel before getting completely stuck. It was good stuff, too, mostly – there were some parts I still think were great (it was a spy novel set in the near future). But I wrote it mostly by the happy-go-lucky method of seeing where each new idea would take me, and ended up down a dead end.

At this point I’m reminded of something E.L. Doctorow once wrote:

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

That’s a great description of the process of writing a novel, and yet you do need a map. You need some idea of where you want to get to, otherwise you may well end up at the bottom of a dead end. In the dark. With an owl.

That’s how I succeeded at writing Parallel Lines: by always having some idea where I was going. Many times during the writing process (the moment of choosing which way to go at each junction, to use the driving analogy) I had a better idea (a better destination or a better route towards it) than I had originally envisaged, and updated my mental map of the novel. I strongly prefer ‘driving in the fog’ to a regimented approach of writing a scene-by-scene synopsis and then just filling in each scene by the numbers; that would leave so much less room for creativity. Yet it was only by having a map that I avoided taking a series of very interesting roads that led to a dead end.

And that, for me, is the key to writing the sequel. I need a manifesto that sets out the main themes, which I can use to think about how they relate to the previous book. And I need an outline of the plot that show how plot and characters will bring out those themes. Those things don’t guarantee success – as I said last week, I tried the ‘just continue the story’ strategy and didn’t like how it was going in spite of having both of those things – but they are essential tools, to me.

If other writers reading this can recommend a different process, please use the COMMENT button below.