Repeating Myself by not Repeating Myself

Series books, sequels, are per­haps more com­plex to write than read­ers think. Yes, cer­tain things are giv­en. For exam­ple, if you’ve estab­lished that your con­tin­u­ing pro­tag­o­nist has blue eyes, they are going to remain blue in sub­se­quent books. But the fact that there are things that must remain con­sis­tent demands that things also be dif­fer­ent, oth­er­wise why write a sequel? In oth­er words, cer­tain things must be a giv­en, even as oth­er things must not be a given.

At the moment I am writ­ing a new Pop­py book. There are already six in print, and the cur­rent project is not real­ly a sequel. Rather, it fills a gap in the over­all arch of Pop­py’s sto­ry. It will indeed become Book Two in the over­all sequence, reveal­ing how Rag­weed and Pop­py met. But then the books were not writ­ten in sequence to begin with. Pop­py, the book, was writ­ten first, with no inten­tion of doing a series. The first in the series (as it stands now) is Rag­weed, and it was writ­ten a good while after Poppy.

I sent a draft of the new book to Bri­an Flo­ca, my esteemed illustrator/colleague. He is also a writer, a good one, and our process of col­lab­o­ra­tion has always been to share my text for his input. Along with some spe­cif­ic, pro­duc­tive sug­ges­tions for changes, his response was encouraging:

I don’t know if you had to work to find those voic­es again—Poppy’s, and Rag­weed’s, and Lung­wort’s, etc.—or if they seemed just to be there wait­ing there for you.

In fact, for the Pop­py books I have been lucky. Over the years the Pop­py books have been writ­ten (almost twen­ty-five years!) I’ve always been exceed­ing­ly fond of the char­ac­ters. Being fond of your char­ac­ters can mean you know them, hear them, which makes the writ­ing so much eas­i­er. It’s like vis­it­ing an old friend—I’m sure you have had the experience—you may not have seen them for years but you just jump right in with the friend­ship, the talk, the fondness.

All the same, when I took up this narrative—how Rag­weed met Poppy—I had no pre­con­ceived notions as to how it all hap­pened. I had to find my way. But know­ing the char­ac­ters so well sug­gest­ed ways of telling the sto­ry, their sto­ry, as it were.

As not­ed above, I am work­ing on anoth­er sequel, an exten­sion of Mur­der at Mid­night and Mid­night Mag­ic. Even here, the chrono­log­i­cal order of the books was reversed. Mur­der at Mid­night was a pre­quel to Mid­night Mag­ic. The cur­rent book is prov­ing hard­er to write, as it has tak­en time to get into the char­ac­ters with­out sim­ply repeat­ing the ear­li­er books. Here, so to speak, I’ve had to strug­gle to renew the friend­ships. I am mak­ing progress, slowly.

Writ­ing the Crispin series was a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence, inso­far, as when I first thought of the sto­ry of Crispin, I con­tem­plat­ed a mul­ti-vol­ume tale. From the begin­ning I sensed what I was going to do.

That said, the fourth and final vol­ume, has nev­er been written.

In sum­ma­ry then, the writ­ing of a series, can, on the sur­face, seem rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple. In fact, it’s a com­plex process. My guess is that if you have been suc­cess­ful in cre­at­ing full char­ac­ters, you do best when you let them tell the ongo­ing sto­ry. I just watch and record.