TOTW: Readers, Writers, and the Challenge of Sequels
There’s a lot of worry, angst, and expectation for readers and writers tied up in that one little word, “sequel.” If we love a story (as reader or writer!), it’s natural to want more of it. But what form should “more of the story” take? Some sequels take years to arrive - some come more promptly but take a toll on the poor author, who had years to write Book One and now must churn out Book Two at record pace. Sometimes a book the author always thought would stand alone turns out to have a sequel in its future: how to find another story that has heft of its own and still connects smoothly to the book that came first? Ack!
Readers have sequel worries, too. Sometimes we readers love one book with all of our hearts, but the sequel(s)? Not so much. That can be painful, certainly. (Then again, sometimes later installments of a series outshine the first book: see Ozma of Oz, #3 in the series, not to mention that other great #3-in-a-series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). Then there’s the awful business of waiting for a sequel to come out….. Anybody remember how slowly the years passed between Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000)? For that matter, 2000-2003 felt pretty long, too (that was the wait between J. K. Rowling’s Goblet of Fire and The Order of the Phoenix). And (switching to adult fantasy for a moment) don’t get me started on the really endless endlessness of the wait for the next book in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series: A Feast for Crows left us hanging in 2005, and by gum, it’s 2010 already, folks, and no release date yet for the next one.
Here’s the important thing: waiting feels longest when a book ends on a cliff-hanger. The ending of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass heads my list of most cliff-hangery cliff-hangers of all time: “So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.” But, but, but . . . where do they go? We had to wait for book two. A book that ends with its heroine literally walking into the next story is what we might call a - wait, let’s make a little chart:
Books and their Sequels: A Typology
1. The One-Big-Story Series. The end of a volume is more or less like the end of a chapter. Left hanging? Yes, you are. Waiting for the sequel? Painful. What you do if a later volume isn’t as good as the first one? Squirm in misery: if it’s One-Big-Story, it’s hard to pretend that bad book three never happened. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is One-Big-Story (but with a good book three). Harry Potter becomes One-Big-Story in its later volumes. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is One-Big-Story. Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy became One-Big-Story by the end of the second book.
Most series aren’t quite as One-Big-Story as all that. Many are more like a
2. Stone-Skipping-Across-the-Water Series. You’ve been to a lake at some point, perhaps? The stone makes a little arc, bounces against the lake’s surface, makes another little arc, bounces again, makes a third little arc, bounces, arc, another bounce, arc, bounce, arc, bounce, glub. In these series, each book has an arc of its own. When you finish, you can say “ah” and sit back in your chair for a moment - even if you see more story will be coming. Rick Riordan does a good job of this in the first couple of volumes of the Percy Jackson series, and I think the first few Harry Potter books have that quality as well. You couldn’t really call these books “stand-alones,” but they can kind of balance on their own for a moment.
Even more independent are the books found in a
3. One-World-Many-Stories Series. These stories sometimes can stand alone, but are enriched and deepened by one’s knowledge of the other books in the series. I’d put the Narnia books in this category, as well as the Edward Eager books, the Earthsea books of Ursula K. LeGuin, just about everything Madeleine L’Engle ever wrote, and, more recently, books like Kristin Cashore’s Graceling (2008) and Fire (2009). Sometimes the follow-up book in such cases is called “a companion novel,” because sometimes it’s more of a “sidequel” than a sequel or prequel.
All right, then, let’s say you’re a writer. You write a book. You write it as well as you possibly can; you put your heart into it; you revise it forty-eight times. You write it as a “stand-alone” because you know that standing alone is probably its fate, and in any case you don’t want to frighten off publishers with too much optimism. But maybe, secretly, you have ideas about other things that could happen to these characters in the future.
And then it turns out, late in the game, that a sequel might be possible.
How do you do it?
Do you try to make the sequel a fully satisfying book in its own right? But how possible is that, really?
Do you acknowledge the events of book one in book two? Did you have the chance to plant some seeds for book two in book one, or do you have to go through that book one now with a magnifying glass, looking for little specks that might be seeds?
If you want to acknowledge the events of book one, how do you do that without, ahem, committing the dreadful crime of info-dumping? (Backstory never seems to come off as lightly as we might want, does it? “Matthew recalled that trouble with the unicorns last fall” - hmm, somehow not so great.)
How do you write chapter one of book two? No, let’s make that a real question instead of a hypothetical: Writers, how did you do it? How are you doing it? How do you hope to do it? Have you got any tips?
Readers, what do you think writers should keep in mind as they sweat their way through Ch. 1 of Bk. 2? Do you want a sequel to stand alone? Is a cliff-hanger a plus or a minus? And how much info, exactly, can be dumped in your lap before the book hits the wall?
Inkies of all stripes, let’s figure out the secret ingredients of a really great sequel! What are some of the most satisfying sequels or series books on your shelf? What kind of “sequel” do you, as reader or writer, prefer? What tricks do the best writers use to bring us back into their fictional world and get the new story moving? What really goes into producing a good Chapter One of Book Two?
Readers have sequel worries, too. Sometimes we readers love one book with all of our hearts, but the sequel(s)? Not so much. That can be painful, certainly. (Then again, sometimes later installments of a series outshine the first book: see Ozma of Oz, #3 in the series, not to mention that other great #3-in-a-series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). Then there’s the awful business of waiting for a sequel to come out….. Anybody remember how slowly the years passed between Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000)? For that matter, 2000-2003 felt pretty long, too (that was the wait between J. K. Rowling’s Goblet of Fire and The Order of the Phoenix). And (switching to adult fantasy for a moment) don’t get me started on the really endless endlessness of the wait for the next book in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series: A Feast for Crows left us hanging in 2005, and by gum, it’s 2010 already, folks, and no release date yet for the next one.
Here’s the important thing: waiting feels longest when a book ends on a cliff-hanger. The ending of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass heads my list of most cliff-hangery cliff-hangers of all time: “So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.” But, but, but . . . where do they go? We had to wait for book two. A book that ends with its heroine literally walking into the next story is what we might call a - wait, let’s make a little chart:
Books and their Sequels: A Typology
1. The One-Big-Story Series. The end of a volume is more or less like the end of a chapter. Left hanging? Yes, you are. Waiting for the sequel? Painful. What you do if a later volume isn’t as good as the first one? Squirm in misery: if it’s One-Big-Story, it’s hard to pretend that bad book three never happened. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is One-Big-Story (but with a good book three). Harry Potter becomes One-Big-Story in its later volumes. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is One-Big-Story. Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy became One-Big-Story by the end of the second book.
Most series aren’t quite as One-Big-Story as all that. Many are more like a
2. Stone-Skipping-Across-the-Water Series. You’ve been to a lake at some point, perhaps? The stone makes a little arc, bounces against the lake’s surface, makes another little arc, bounces again, makes a third little arc, bounces, arc, another bounce, arc, bounce, arc, bounce, glub. In these series, each book has an arc of its own. When you finish, you can say “ah” and sit back in your chair for a moment - even if you see more story will be coming. Rick Riordan does a good job of this in the first couple of volumes of the Percy Jackson series, and I think the first few Harry Potter books have that quality as well. You couldn’t really call these books “stand-alones,” but they can kind of balance on their own for a moment.
Even more independent are the books found in a
3. One-World-Many-Stories Series. These stories sometimes can stand alone, but are enriched and deepened by one’s knowledge of the other books in the series. I’d put the Narnia books in this category, as well as the Edward Eager books, the Earthsea books of Ursula K. LeGuin, just about everything Madeleine L’Engle ever wrote, and, more recently, books like Kristin Cashore’s Graceling (2008) and Fire (2009). Sometimes the follow-up book in such cases is called “a companion novel,” because sometimes it’s more of a “sidequel” than a sequel or prequel.
All right, then, let’s say you’re a writer. You write a book. You write it as well as you possibly can; you put your heart into it; you revise it forty-eight times. You write it as a “stand-alone” because you know that standing alone is probably its fate, and in any case you don’t want to frighten off publishers with too much optimism. But maybe, secretly, you have ideas about other things that could happen to these characters in the future.
And then it turns out, late in the game, that a sequel might be possible.
How do you do it?
Do you try to make the sequel a fully satisfying book in its own right? But how possible is that, really?
Do you acknowledge the events of book one in book two? Did you have the chance to plant some seeds for book two in book one, or do you have to go through that book one now with a magnifying glass, looking for little specks that might be seeds?
If you want to acknowledge the events of book one, how do you do that without, ahem, committing the dreadful crime of info-dumping? (Backstory never seems to come off as lightly as we might want, does it? “Matthew recalled that trouble with the unicorns last fall” - hmm, somehow not so great.)
How do you write chapter one of book two? No, let’s make that a real question instead of a hypothetical: Writers, how did you do it? How are you doing it? How do you hope to do it? Have you got any tips?
Readers, what do you think writers should keep in mind as they sweat their way through Ch. 1 of Bk. 2? Do you want a sequel to stand alone? Is a cliff-hanger a plus or a minus? And how much info, exactly, can be dumped in your lap before the book hits the wall?
Inkies of all stripes, let’s figure out the secret ingredients of a really great sequel! What are some of the most satisfying sequels or series books on your shelf? What kind of “sequel” do you, as reader or writer, prefer? What tricks do the best writers use to bring us back into their fictional world and get the new story moving? What really goes into producing a good Chapter One of Book Two?