Ways Forward
Five approaches to sequel writing
Thanks for joining me again on the road into Sequel Country. Having surveyed the borderlands, it’s time to press on towards uncharted territory. This week I’m going to survey a number of possible paths forward which I’ve thought about (and in some cases gone a little way along) while trying to write the sequel to my own novel Parallel Lines.
Building on last week’s discussion of examples of successful sequels, I can think of about five possible approaches which a writer might adopt when sitting down to write a sequel.
The first is to just carry straight on with the story. Last week I mentioned Tales of the City; the first sequel carries right on, although the lives of the main characters all start to progress in different directions. The first book ends at Christmas and the second starts at the new year, and Maupin uses a clever device to reintroduce his two primary characters: they write lists of new year resolutions which tell the new reader a lot about them. If you say nothing about the existing characters, a reader who picks up the sequel may be lost as to who’s who (I’ve certainly had this experience myself); but explaining too much is tedious, especially for the returning reader. Clearly, a key goal of writing the first few chapters of a sequel is to find a way of balancing these two conflicting needs.
A second path is to continue the story with the existing characters, but to pick it up after some time has passed. For an example, I read a novel last year called The Strawberry Thief, which I bought without knowing it was a sequel. I had only previously read one of Joanne Harris’ novels (Five Quarters of the Orange) and I was in the mood to read something set in rural France ahead of a holiday. I was several chapters in before I deduced that it’s a sequel to Chocolat, which I had seen the film of but never read. Chocolat wasn’t mentioned on the front or back cover, and though the adult narrator introduces herself right away as a witch, that wasn’t a prominent feature of the film. Apparently Strawberry Thief is the third sequel, and occurs many years later. The opening chapter is cryptic, talking about the wind as though it were a character, while the narrator muses on a number of people who are evidently important to her, some of whom don’t appear in either the first novel or in this sequel but would be familiar to readers of the other sequels. Doing it this way was a bold choice, and at the end of the first chapter I had no idea what was going on, but one thing it successfully did was bridge across the gulf of time between itself and the earlier books, and establish the facts that the narrator has been “forty years a witch” and that her daughters are 21 and 16, which would otherwise be difficult to introduce naturally, in dialogue or third person narrative. Getting across gaps in time in a narrative is always tricky, and I’ll return to that topic soon.
A third way (and perhaps the most common) is for the sequel to add in some new characters. I mentioned Changing Places last week; while the original book tells the story from the point of view of the two professors, and sometimes of their wives, the sequel Small World begins from the point of view of a new character, Persse McGarrigle, who almost immediately meets Swallow and Zapp. Later, there is a series of scenes each from the point of view of a whole cast of academics who will keep meeting each other at international conferences, each of whom is sympathetically and intimately drawn (with one odd exception), but who also each represent a mode of literary criticism. From there, the novel takes turns to follow McGarrigle, Swallow and Zapp as they repeatedly encounter the rest of the cast while they move forward on their personal journeys. This is comedy, and they are all very obviously engaged on grail-like ‘quests’, but it is also a masterclass in story-telling from multiple points of view.
The fourth choice would be to focus on new characters, with the old ones seen only through the eyes of the new. I mentioned Winter Holiday last week which does this very well. Because we’ve previously seen inside the returning characters’ heads, there’s a delicious sense of knowing something the protagonists don’t. A returning character could be an antagonist, too, helping the reader to understand their motivations or history withough needing to go into their point of view in the sequel. But I think there is also a risk to this technique: the new characters need to be the most interesting, otherwise the reader might find themself wishing the writer had just written another book from the most interesting returning character’s point of view.
The fifth strategy I can think of is not to use any returning characters, but to provide continuity though the setting, the ‘universe’ in which it takes place. This is common in scifi – I used to read some scifi when I was younger and I remember Larry Niven using this approach in his ‘known space’ stories. This technique is much more often used in scifi and fantasy, rather than the contemporary world which is what I’m interesting in writing about. But it can be applied to fantasy versions of the modern world. In fandom these days it’s common to use the second part of ‘universe’ to mean a world with its own consistent rules and history, as in ‘the Buffyverse’ which is a version of the modern world but with vampires and magic. Another work in which it’s made clear that the same rules and history are present can then be read as a sequel, even without any overlapping characters. That said, one or two characters might appear if only as cameos, to please fans of the previous works. Fandom calls this ‘fan service’ but it isn’t new in literature.
For my sequel to Parallel Lines, since it’s set in a realistic (lightly fictionalised) version of the modern world, the last path doesn’t really work, since without returning characters it wouldn’t be recognisable as a sequel. I also ruled out the second option, because one of the key things I want to write about happened in the early 1990s, right after the end of PL. But to explain how I evaluated the other options, it will be necessary to understand the important features of PL, so I’ll talk about that more next week.
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