Writing a sequel...sort of

If you are determined/blessed/lucky enough to get that first novel published, there is a question that will you hear repeatedly in the following months.

"Are you going write a sequel?"

This is not an unreasonable question, in a generation that has read seven Harry Potter books, will (eventually) read seven A Song of Ice and Fire books, and sat through eleven Star Wars movies.

But not every book needs a sequel, and even some that could have a sequel should not have one. When I finished The Pride of Central, I felt that the story was a self-contained narrative and did not need a second part.

Several of my readers disagreed. Some wanted to see what the baseball players did in the years to follow. Others wanted to know if the sports writer and the fashion designer every got back together.

I understood why my readers wanted to know that, but I never developed a full story following either of those plot threads. So when The Jewelry of Grace started to form in my mind, it was a completely separate story.

At first.

Then I realized that, while The Jewelry of Grace was a separate story, the story that was taking place fit in well in the same geographic location as The Pride of Central. They could take place in the same "universe", though a few years apart.

So I found myself not writing a sequel, but a spinoff. That word - spinoff - can make someone picture sitcoms (think of Cheers leading to Frazier) but the idea works in the literary field, too. In my case, The Jewelry of Grace's primary characters are newly introduced in this story. But it events of the story still take place in Central Pennsylvania, often in Lebanon County, just like The Pride of Central. And there are two returning characters from the first book - though I won't say quite yet which ones they are.

The driving plot elements of the first book, the baseball team's success and the players' individual growth, do not drive the newer story. So it's not a sequel. But there are elements that connect the two stories. That's the most comfortable setting I could make for The Jewelry of Grace.

I hope it is also a comfortable setting for readers as well. They will already be familiar with the location and notice a couple familiar faces, but at the same time will spend most of the novel reading about new characters with new goals, desires and challenges.

So if you hear "Are you going to write a sequel?" more times than you can count, don't let the pressure to continue the same story get to you. But if you find that your second story can relate back to your first story in a natural way, grow your own literary universe with it.

Next week: When your main character is not the hero