Happy Preptober! It’s officially Nanowrimo Prep season, and I’ve got some fun stuff planned this month as we approach what I fondly think of as the writerly holiday season. This year is going to be a fun milestone for me: I’ll be writing the first draft of the final book in a series I’ve been working on since 2017. Every other book in the series has started life as Nanowrimo novel. Currently they all sit in various stages of revision and chaos, ranging from “an alpha reader has seen it, and it’s approaching a state of coherency” to “this is a disaster which is missing several critical scenes and must never see the light of day.” Once I have a rough draft of the final installment, however, I’m going to start revising book one for eventual publication. Yay!
(Also, this will be my 13th Nanowrimo, so as a Swiftie, I’ve got a real good feeling about this.)
In honor of this exciting time, and because all this is very fresh on the brain at the moment, I thought I’d talk a bit about how I approach writing a sequel, since it’s a little bit different from my approach to drafting a brand new story from scratch. It’s a little more challenging, because you’ve got all this pre-existing material to take into account. But at the same time, some things are easier, because that very pre-existing material gives you more to work with.
Oddly, throughout all the years I’ve been writing novels and all the ways my general process has changed since I was a middle schooler doing this instead of my homework, the way I approach sequels hasn’t really changed much. Either that means I’m so catastrophically wrong in my approach that I’ve become blind to just how wrong I am as some kind of twisted coping mechanism, or it means I’m doing something right. You can let me know what you think. In the meantime, let’s talk about how to write a sequel!
Leverage pre-existing material
Like I said, the stuff you’ve already written can either be the bane of your existence or your best buddy, and here’s a great example of the latter case.
When you were writing the last book, you probably ended up with a folder full of trimmings – especially if the book has been revised. I don’t know about you, but I always end up with this weird little collection of scenes that I either cut out of revisions, or that I wrote as test scenes before I started but which didn’t end up finding a home in the book itself. Often, I’ve found that these scenes have a remarkable tendency to find their home later in the series. Like, they did work, they were good, just not where I originally put them.
I actually had this happen to me just the other day. I found a great dialogue exchange that ended up getting cut from an earlier book in the series, but is going to fit beautifully in one of the later installments. In its new home, one of these line that was a total throw-away filler line before (which I probably would have ended up cutting even if I’d left the scene in place) now reads as foreshadowing for a massive plot twist that I hadn’t even thought of at the time I originally wrote this dialogue. And I didn’t even have to do any work! It was just laying there, collecting dust! Score!
So go back through your cut content and discarded test scenes from previous books in the series. You never know what kind of buried treasure you’re going to find.
Watch out for repeat characters (& character arcs)
Ah, the temptation to add new characters in a sequel. We’ve all been there. But wait – do you really need that? Because you know, you have lots of characters at home, too. Maybe you should play with those first before we go getting you any new ones.
Before you add anyone new, ask yourself what they’d be doing there, and do some perusing to see if you already have someone in your cast who might be able to fill that role. This is something it’s common to consider when you’re drafting up a new cast of characters for the very first time, but it’s something folks sometimes neglect when they’re thinking about adding new characters to a sequel. (It’s me; I’m folks.) And hey, maybe you do need that new character. But after all the times I’ve fallen prey to Shiny New Character Syndrome, I can tell you, I strongly doubt it.
This goes for character arcs too, and you see this all the time in a very specific place: TV. How many times have you been watching a show and realized they’re just putting this character through the same exact drama in a different skin over and over again to drag out the show, or drum up conflict as an excuse to keep this character around? Don’t let it happen to you! Before you start writing, plan out your character arcs, and look back at the character arcs from the previous book before you do so. Make sure nobody is re-learning the same lessons they were supposed to have learned in the last book. The irony of this is that the better your character arcs were in book one (i.e., the more effectively you convinced the reader that the character did, in fact, learn that lesson), the more dire the consequences of this pitfall will be.
Give your characters new problems to chew on – new areas in which to grow. Life never runs out of new areas for us to grow into as real people, so why should fictional lives be any more simple?
Outline a little more
When it comes to first drafts, I’m a bit more of a discovery writer than an outliner, but I always find I need to outline a little more heavily when I’m writing a sequel. For one thing, you’ve got a lot more plot to deal with. You not only have to write a story that is cohesive with itself, but one that is cohesive with a whole other book. You’re writing something that both has to stand on its own, and function as the next installment in a much larger story. It has to tie up loose ends it didn’t create, escalate conflict that’s already there, further develop characters who’ve presumably already had a satisfying arc and found some semblance of closure, and pay off foreshadowing that was planted so long ago you’ve probably forgotten you even wrote some of it (ask me how I freakin’ know, go on).
The point is, you’re not building a house from scratch – you’re adding a second floor, a back deck, and an in-ground pool, and even if the original house was built by a pack of blind, demented monkeys snorting drywall dust and flinging poop at the rapidly-crumbling walls, you probably shouldn’t embark on the renovation without at least a rough map of the property.
So, make an outline. And if you didn’t outline the last book, start by doing that first. You’ll benefit immeasurably just from having an easily-to-skim, cohesive, beat-by-beat summary of the previous installment. At some point, you’ll want to look things up, and you won’t want to sift through a 50-100k-word manuscript looking for the name of that one random side character, or the number of miles you said it was from the village to the wizard’s tower.
Remember to zoom out
I’ve alluded to this already, but it’s an important enough point that it bears repeating on its own: always keep in mind that you aren’t just writing a book. You’re writing the next installment in a much, much larger story – basically a really huge chapter. And when you write a chapter, yeah, it’s smart to consider it as its own little unit. You want to make sure it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, that your characters don’t feel stagnant within it, that it’s paced well, etc., etc. But you never lose sight of the fact that it’s part of a larger whole.
Sequels are the same way. Yes, they should have their own stories and their own cohesive arcs. But take the time to back up and look at the series as a whole. Ask yourself if the whole story, viewed as a complete unit, is cohesive and narratively satisfying. Where do the characters start and end up, and what journey do they take to get there? Where are the bumps in the road – how are they paced? How does the conflict escalate, and where does it peak? Where are the major beats of the story as a whole – the inciting incident, the midpoint, the low point, the climax? What kind of overall story structure does it follow, and does that structure hold together?
This, ultimately, is how readers are going to view your story. Think of your favorite series, and how, despite the fact that you probably have a least favorite book in it – one you don’t re-read as often as the others, or that didn’t captivate you in exactly the same way, or where a character did something you felt like was really stupid – you still love the story as a whole. Think of that wonderful feeling of awe you get when you think about how much effort and planning and strategy must have gone into creating this massive, sweeping tale that goes on for thousands and thousands of pages.
That’s you, friend. That’s what you’re doing now. Writing books is fun, but writing sequels is magical. And remembering to take that occasional step back is where that magic starts to happen.
Happy writing!