the story so far

I keep getting lost on the road to Sequel Country

In 2018, I wrote a nice little self-contained short story of about 6 chapters. I liked the characters I’d come up with, and wondered what might happen to them next. In 2019 I wrote another chapter, continuing the story just to see what would happen, and it felt promising. I could see how the story could be novel-sized. But I also had several other ideas for novels, and dithered about which to put my energy into. In 2020, I decided it was my strongest idea, and wrote the rest of the novel which became Parallel Lines, and I spent 2021 and much of 2022 editing it. I had intended to go back to my other novel ideas – one of them, I had been working on for several years before 2018 – but now I felt like continuing and expanding the story of the novel. A sequel, in other words!

After a few months of feeling completely out of my depth, I started Sequel Country, a substack dedicated to novel-writing, especially sequel writing. I hoped to use it to tease out my ideas, and solidify what I knew. I wrote a 1000+ word column every week in 2023, covering most of what I know about writing fiction, including what I had learned on my MA in Creative Writing and what I learned from writing the first completed novel, as well as many other topics that interest me. The most popular columns were about Carrier Bag Theory, bi books and avoiding scary owls (opportunity cost).

Which was great, except I’d written ten times as much on substack than I had in my sequel, which had structural problems. So in 2024 I reversed this, writing short updates in Sequel Country less often, and pushing the novel forward to about 30,000 words. But as I progressed, I started to perceive further structural problems and put it aside during the autumn to make time for thinking, more reading, and another quick redraft of PL before sending out agent queries.

Now that I’ve got back to the sequel, I’m starting the third attempt. In the first pass, I tried to tell the continuing story of the two main characters from PL and two new ones. Nope: too many characters. (I’m currently reading Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna, and it suffers from the same problem: there are over a dozen characters, and by a third of the way through, none of them has had more than a few pages of story each, and consequently not one of them feels like a particularly interesting character yet.)

In the second attempt, I threw out half of the material I’d written and went back to the alternating point of view technique that I have used many times before, one old character and one new. Nope: the stories feel too separate and the old character doesn’t progress, as I wrote about recently in the sequel problem. So, to solve this, for the third try I’m throwing out another quarter of the material from the second attempt, and the new character will meet the old character before the end of chapter 1 – it seems obvious in hindsight – and in chapter 2 we will see what new problems face the old character now he has turned 30. Then as before, the stories will remain fairly separate until chapter 8, which used to be the chapter where they first met. I’ve had to rethink about half of the plot, too, to do this, but it was the half where I was mostly just hoping something would occur to me as I went along. It didn’t.

If this doesn’t work either, I’ll have to start again from scratch, or else abandon the attempt to write a sequel and just write something else. Perhaps if I do that it will be time to give up on Sequel Country too. Substacks mainly grow through other people on substack recommending them to their own followers, but as far as I can tell nobody has ever recommended Sequel Country... yet. So feel free to, or if you have a reason not to, please let me know - constructive criticism and comments are welcome here.