Byker Valley Beats, Parallel Lines

one decision made, but...

Happy Mayday weekend, ramblers of Sequel Country. In my last but one column, too many words, I wrote about how my current approach to writing my sequel (the third one I’ve tried) was finally working, except that I can see it’s going to run long, very long. I had decided to stick with it until I reached the end of act 1, and then see how I felt about continuing.

Over Easter, I had 10 solid days of writing, so I have now reached that point. Act 1 (of 5) is written, and it’s 14 chapters, totalling 41,000 words. If all 5 acts were this long, the novel would break 200,000 words (at 700 pages, too big to be a paperback). If the remaining 4 acts are only half as long, it’ll still be 120,000 words. The plot will speed up, but I doubt by that much, so my best guess would now be 150,000 words. That’s shorter than The Name of the Rose (195k words) or Dune (180k words), both of which I found readable; and at a dense 300 words per page, about 500 pages. Ambitious, for an unpublished author, but not absurd, maybe.

I was in a similar position when I wrote the first draft of my debut novel, Parallel Lines(*). I knew it would have three main acts, with two short interludes between them, and I was aiming for 90k words, with the main sections being between 25-30k each. But by the time I reached the end of act 1, I had written 38k words, all of which seemed necessary to the story: it was tightly plotted and every scene was significant to what would come later. However, I knew the first of the three would likely be the longest since the characters are getting to know each other, and in the later sections they already know each other. In writing the rest of the novel, I wrote sparingly, skating over less important points and learning to discard anything that wasn’t important – in a way, it was a good learning experience in how to write economically. The first draft ended up at 109k words, a bit more than the 90k I was aiming for but not ridicuously more.

However, when I came to editing, I soon realised that the second half of the book was seriously under-written, with a lot of what I wanted to say not really landing

I made about 30k words of cuts, but I also had to expand a lot of scenes, particularly in the under-written later sections, and after several years of editing, the book is now 108k words. It just can’t be told in fewer; the story spans 11 years, after all.

I’ve decided that I’ll stick with the sequel (current working title: Byker Valley Beats) and write the whole thing. It’s the story I really want to write. I think I have to write it, before I can write something else. And in an endeavour of several years, it’s possible that I will change my mind about what’s important about it, making it possible to cut away some of the parts I currently have planned. Anyway, if Parallel Lines(*) never sees the light of day, it doesn’t matter how long the sequel is.

* Parallel Lines jumped out at me as a title when I wrote what is now chapter 1, which includes a memory of my own, of hearing Heart Of Glass, from Blondie’s Parallel Lines album, at a country fair in Sherburn in 1979. The book is full of parallel lines, especially railway tracks, being used as metaphors for the two main characters’ lives. (Interestingly, the song Parallel Lines itself didn’t make it onto the album, though the lyrics were printed in the LP I believe.) I did some searching online, of course, and was pleased to discover nobody seemed to have used it as a novel title. That was in 2020.

So, since I read a review of a novel of that name in the Guardian this week, I’ve been kicking myself for not trying harder to get an agent and get published in the 4 years since I finished writing it. Fuckity fuck. After 5 years of Parallel Lines, it’s going to be very difficult for me to think of it as anything else.