Welcome back to Sequel Country, exploring what it’s like to write a sequel to your novel. This week I’m going to focus on the topic of what a novel actually is, because it seems like a good thing for a novelist to understand! This subject is like a vast forest, with many regions that contain very different trees and wildlife, but let’s just try and get an overview of its shape; we don’t need to map out every tree.
My first experience of novels was having them read to me at bedtime by my father at an age when I was still mostly reading comics and picture-books myself. Soon I was devouring two or three childrens’ novels a week from the library in the neighbouring village, and I’ve gone on reading novels ever since, without ever thinking much about what a novel actually is. What eventually got me thinking about it was doing an MA in Creative Writing not long ago. A lot of dry academic words have been written on the subject, but never mind that, the core idea is interesting and could be useful.
The consensus definition of the Novel is that it tells a fictional story, in prose, of one or two main characters, in intimate detail (we find out something of what they’re thinking and/or feeling), in a realistic way – realistic in the sense that the main characters are realistically-drawn people, with a mix of virtues and flaws, behaving as real people might. This definition is broad enough to cover all sorts of books of a certain length (English Novels are typically about 40-180 thousand words, mainly because that’s the quantity you can conveniently bind in a single book). Robinson Crusoe (1719) is widely considered the first English Novel that meets this definition, though of course other cultures produced great literature that would meet this definition long before that. Since then the Novel has diversified into many recognisable sub-species, including romantic novels, thrillers, crime, sci fi, fantasy and the Graphic Novel. Some push at one of the boundaries of the definition above, but rarely all of them at the same time; for instance Mrs. Dalloway frequently switches point of view, sometimes into a minor character who is never seen again, instead of following a single protagonist – and yet the story keeps returning to the title character and it is her who is subtly changed by the end of the story.
That’s the content that defines a Novel – but as well as content, to make a psychologically satisfying story, you also need some structure. In Into the Woods, John Yorke makes a compelling case that psychologically satisfying stories inherently follow a five-act structure, and that this works, like fractals, at every level. I certainly found this idea useful when writing my Novel Parallel Lines, which has five distinct parts, and I did think about the three main parts as each being a five-act story in its own right. You also find a lot of talk about three-act structure, which is a simplified version of exactly the same thing. But while I like how this structure can be used as a tool to think about story structure (in Novel form or for that matter in other media, as Yorke shows), I think it would be a mistake to think of it as a rule. Like the idea of the Hero’s Journey, it’s a useful tool for reasoning about stories, not a recipe to be followed slavishly (unless you want to be a Hollywood screenwriter, in which case you have no choice, hero’s journey it is).
An idea I came across in the MA (I think in one of Lars Iyer’s prose workshops) was that every Novel, at least in the age of postmodernism, is a reinvention of the Novel form: not just a novel story, but a novel way of telling it. In other words, every Novel tells its story in its own unique way.
This actually sheds light on one of the problems of writing a sequel. If every Novel is a reinvention, how can a sequel be the same as its predecessor – and if it is, is it really a Novel (given that novel itself means new)? How new can you (and should you) be?
The literary novel, in particular, seems to feels a strong need to tell its story in a genuinely new way. I used to think that literary vs commercial fiction just meant character vs plot driven, but a lot of people think of literary fiction as “high art,” perhaps being better art acting as a kind of consolation prize for not having big sales – anyone who has big sales has clearly “sold out”, unless they win a literary prize. In fact, many prizes promote this kind of view, like the Booker, whose panel always includes literary critics and academics who tend to be impressed by the most novel approach to storytelling, no matter how dull the subject matter. I think this is why literary fiction writers almost never write sequels: they feel pressure to be seen to come up with something new every time. (Footnote: in over 50 years, only three sequels have ever won the Booker prize, all from well-established authors.)
For myself, while I like the idea of doing something new, I’m drawn to writing commercial fiction because my main motivation for publishing is that I want to find an audience for what I have to say. I want to get the word out. I have never read a commercially published novel set in modern Britain (since 1967, say) with a bisexual male protagonist who has same-sex relationships and doesn’t have to die or be redeemed! They say write the kind of book you want to read, and that’s what I want to do, because it’s missing from the market and our culture.
So I want to write contemporary stories, with realism, and one aspect of that is that not everything ties up neatly at the end, because life isn’t like that. Which nicely opens the door for sequels. (I actually have some other stories that I want to tell, contemporary stories but with elements of magic realism – but “that’s another story”!)
In the end, that’s all there is to a sequel. If it has the content and structure of a novel, it’s a novel. If the plot follows the plot of a previously published novel, or the characters are recognisably the same characters as the previous novel but its events are in their past, then it can be read as a sequel. What I’m really wrestling with is what makes a good sequel. Next time, I’ll consider some sequels that I’ve read (nothing obscure), and see if that illuminates what makes a good one and whether there are any patterns to follow. Don’t forget to “tune in” next week – the easiest way is to subscribe using the widget below.