the Story so Far
how my sequel is going
Welcome back, fellow-travellers in sequel country (and welcome to those joining us this week). I’ve been making inroads into sequel territory for the last two months and was going to take a look at how far we’ve come this week anyway. It strikes me that Substack lists my columns in the social-media style, most recent first, but I conceived them as a forwards journey, so it might be helpful to give you a forwards-reading list.
In January I was concerned with what’s visible from the borders of Sequel Country:
My manifesto: who this column is for and why, in 100 words, writing sequels is harder than writing a standalone novel
Expanding on some of the problems with sequels: what is a sequel? How to continue the story if the first novel has a proper, satisfying ending? What will readers expect?
What is a novel? It has its own unique content and structure, so how unique does the content of the sequel need to be?
Some examples of sequels, looking at how their authors continued their characters’ stories and what was expected of the reader.
Finally, I summarised five approaches to sequel-writing that I can think of. Two of them (setting the sequel a long time after the first, to justify change in the characters/setting, and writing a sequel with different characters in the same world), I ruled out as not fitting the sequel I want to write.
In February I started moving into new territory, looking in more detail at my own debut novel (Parallel Lines - yes, I am going to keep on mentioning the title every time) and what parts of it I could develop as a sequel. To illustrate this, I recounted some of the main points:
Some of the main ingredients (the 80s, rural gay life, the miners’ strike and AIDS) and why they’re important to me.
Some of the techniques I developed, including narrative points of view, and some ways to write a novel that spans a whole decade without it becoming epic-length.
The choices to be made around writing regional accents and dialect.
Navigating around a novel with synopses, manifestos and blurbs.
All these columns are in the archive. If you know anyone who might be interested, you can share this substack by clicking/tapping this handy widget:
In March, we’ll be moving forward in the sequel landscape, entering uncharted territory. In parallel, I’m entering uncharted territory in writing my own sequel, which to be honest I haven’t spent much time on recently. (But hey, I have written about 10,000 words for this column so far this year!) While I’m stocktaking, I might as well look over how that’s going.
It’s really a story about what hasn’t worked, so far. To some extent, I’ve tried all of the three possible strategies I identified earlier.
Carrying the story straight on was easy to write, but after a few chapters, I just didn’t have much confidence in the approach. It felt soapy (as in soap opera), just churning out more relationship twists and complications. I tried to reintroduce the main characters a little, so that a new reader wouldn’t just be baffled – but it really felt more like a “part 2” than a novel in its own right. I suppose if any readers love my characters as much as I do, they’d be happy with this, but I want my sequel to be its own thing, with its own feel and structure. It’s the only way I can feel like I’ve done a proper job of it. Well, at least that’s something I’ve learnt from trying this.
Adding new characters, mixed in with the existing ones, seemed more promising. I have two new characters: one who sprang from a short story I wrote five years ago, and who I could see was much bigger than that story. I’m excited to write more about her, but also deeply wary of narrating a woman’s point of view when I’m a cis man (there are so many traps, many of which I’ve seen other male authors fall into). So, not sure yet whether she should be a protagonist or a main but “non point of view” character. And I have a second character, completely new to the sequel, who I have plenty of ideas for, and I’ve made a back-story, but they are still lacking the spark of life, the insight into what makes them work as a person. I need to write some sketches, some scenes from their life that could bring them alive for me, before I write any more scenes for them in the novel. I say they/them because I’m not quite sure whether they would best be male, female, non-binary or anthropomorphic corvid.
Telling the story purely from the point of view of these new characters is what I’m trying out at the moment (except that I got distracted with a new edit of PL). Mixing the new characters with the old still seemed kind of soapy for the old protagonists. I think I need to get clearer about the themes of the sequel, if I want to write scenes for the old characters that advance the new themes. With the new characters, I have some idea what stories I want for them, and writing new characters naturally seems fresher and more interesting. I can see why a lot of authors never bother with sequels; at this point, I could just say fuck it, I’ll write this as a stand-alone book with new characters and its own plot and structure.
So why don’t I do that? Perhaps it’s the strong stubborn streak in my character which I’m told is typical of Yorkshiremen. When I’ve made up my mind to do something, I stick with it until I’ve succeeded, unless the world forces me to give up. And that’s a big part of what kept me going to produce PL, spending a year writing it and two years editing it while working full-time, instead of what I did for the last 25 years: justifying forever writing fragments of something new on the basis that I was writing for fun, so why not write whatever was the most fun? The furthest I got was about 80% of the way through a novel, well over a decade ago, and got stuck because I had no overall plan and painted myself thoroughly into a corner.
Which raises the question: do we need a map of Sequel Country to get any further? That’s what I’ll be thinking about next week, so please join me by subscribing using the button below.