I’m currently writing the sequel to the Ballad of Iron Percy.

Writing a book is hard. I learned this the first time through. It requires a sustained commitment and constant effort over an extended period of time. You have to have the discipline and determination to keep writing long after the Muse decides her own work is done – she doesn’t like to stick around in one place for too long and you need to keep working when she decides to find someone else for a while. I found it was a process that took several months of prolonged effort, but I also found that I could do it. I can write a book!  Huzzah!

But can I write a sequel?

I’m trying now, and I’m finding that sequels present a very different challenge. Normal books have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You introduce your characters in the beginning, you develop them and have things happen to them in the middle, and you tie things off nicely (or not so nicely) in the end. That’s the progression for basically every story ever told. Sequels are no exception to this, except, well…

You can’t spend the beginning of a sequel introducing the characters, because they are already familiar characters. If your first book was any good, your readers will remember them and what you put them through. You have less freedom in defining the beginning of a sequel, because it’s already been done in the first book – at least in part. I suppose that’s not entirely true – you can start with new characters in the same setting, or you can keep the characters but lose the setting. You have to keep at least some of the old elements, however, or it’s not really a sequel. It’s a standalone novel.

I’m around 90,000 words into the second book in my sequence right now, and I’m hitting a few snags this time around that I haven’t had to deal with in writing the Ballad. Admittedly, part of it is my insecurity and the fact that I’m still just past the Wannabe Stage. Even though I’ve written one book, I’m not fully convinced of my ability to do another.

First was the problem with my narrator. My original intention was to write three books, each one with a different narrator, keeping the same group of characters. There was nothing wrong with this idea, exactly. It fit decently well with the plot as I imagine it. I even did quite a lot of work on the second book using another character as a narrator – 50,000 words or so, that is.

But it didn’t quite work. This is because, in my opinion, Pandemona makes a kick-ass narrator compared to the other options. That she has such a unique and alien voice makes her stand out as interesting to the audience, at least compared to my other characters. I eventually decided that I needed to have her as the narrator if I wanted to play to the strengths of the story, and needed to come up with a way to do that. My instincts as a writer were screaming at me to start over. Unfortunately, in this case, trusting my instincts meant discarding an awful lot of work. ‘So it goes,’ as the Trafalmadorians say.

It was a pretty major false start – one that took me months to recover from. But the ideas were still good, the characters were still there, and I still had a story to tell. All I needed was the motivation to get started again.

Next hurdle came in the form of structural differences and self-imposed limitations. The story I wanted to tell begins basically where the last one left off, so I needed to use the same characters with the same setting. The backdrop – something that takes a considerable amount of wordage to set down in a first or standalone novel – was already defined before I began. This is fairly standard for a sequel. In my experience, authors approach this reality in two ways. They can either (1) assume that the reader has read book one and truncate or omit character reintroductions, or (2) reintroduce everyone and everything as if writing a standalone novel.

The first method immediately makes the book unfriendly to new readers, who won’t know who the characters you introduced in the first book are. The second method is not as friendly to the people who bothered to read the first book, as they will know your darlings already and won’t need to learn about them from scratch.

Some rehashing is, of course, necessary – I hate it when an author releases a new book in a series, but it’s been so long since the last one that I don’t remember the characters anymore and can’t read the sequel without first consulting wikipedia. This can be done similarly to the way you did it in the first book, but you have to be on guard against repeating yourself. Your constant readers are probably the last people you want to annoy. For the most part, I went with Method 1, though I will probably include a brief prologue to help people remember the story and characters.

Now, why is this a challenge? The Ballad was my first novel, and in it, the main story is fairly well defined in the first chapter. I was starting fresh and could begin the tale pretty much anywhere I wanted, so I chose the spot most appropriate to pique the interest of the audience and get ‘em hooked. I did not have the same luxury in picking my start point for Book II. I didn’t have a story hook to start with beyond ‘What happened next?’ On its own, ‘What happens next?’ is not sufficient to keep interest, I think. I needed something more – something cool, unique, and interesting enough to make this a standalone story.

I couldn’t count on the setup itself to be a hook. Relying on my ending to do the job for me was not sufficient – while it’s a good ending (though I am obviously biased), and it’s one that I could build a sequel off of, it’s not one that begs for it. Fortunately, this did not require another false start and a massive rewrite. Even so, the slight difference between the beginning of a standalone novel and the beginning of a sequel threw me for a while.

In all, I’m finding that ’slightly different’ describes my whole experience writing this book. A lot of it is the same as it was the first time – sometimes the writing comes easy, sometimes it’s hard. I do a little bit every day, using the same method I did to write the Ballad. I’m working slower this time around, but that’s not because of lack of inspiration or stuff to say. Rather, it is because I’m no longer a student and need to pay my own way in the world, and writing doesn’t help me pay the bills yet, so I have to devote much of my time to Real Life work.

I still worry.

The reasons for it are simple. I’ve written one book. I think it’s a decent one, but it is still just one. ‘Can I do another?’ is a question constantly at the forefront of my mind as I write. ‘Can I write a compelling sequel?’ is also ever-present. I expect this is common for writers, especially writers at my stage of development – just past the Wannabe Stage, as I said.

I also strongly expect that it’s not the sort of thing you get over as your career progresses. Ah, well.