Writing book sequels can be a really good endeavor, especially for new authors that want to increase the number of their readers and keep them interested. A sequel will help you settle into the genre you’re writing in. The characters and the world are already familiar to your existing readers and to you as well, which might make it seem that writing a sequel will be a peace of cake. However, sequels can be really tricky – especially if you’re writing a trilogy. You don’t want the second book to feel like a filler, something to stand in between the first and the last book. You want the sequel to be better than the first. Below, we’ve gathered several ways you can achieve this.
1. Know your story
Some stories can be told in one book, some can be told in several. Before you begin to work on a sequel, you need to take a really good look at your story and decide whether the story can and should be continued in a sequel. Did you leave any loose ends? Can the characters grow more? Can their relationships grow? If you answer yes to these questions, then you can continue the story in a sequel. However, this doesn’t mean that if your characters got a happy ending in the first book that you cannot continue the story. Change is constant, and your characters can always grow.
2. Plan ahead
If you’ve written the first book with a second book in mind, then you need to plan ahead. Writing a series, even a two-part series can be tricky if it’s not properly planned. Maybe you prefer to write by the seat of your pants and dislike planning ahead, but, when it comes to writing series, you need to plan at least the major events of the plot for each book. Each sequel needs to be its own story within the major ongoing plot. It has to stand in as its own book, with its own subplot within the ongoing plot.
3. Beware of plot holes
This is where planning ahead becomes really useful – it helps you avoid plot holes. Another way to avoid plot holes is to keep track of all important information about your book – the world, the characters, the major events of the first book, and the consequences of those events. This will help you keep track and not make mistakes, because to an avid reader, even a minor mistake in a character’s name will stand out.
4. Recap the first book
You have to recap the first book for your readers – to remind them of your characters, major events of the first book, and your protagonist’s goal. However, don’t write a summary that feels forced and unnatural (a normal, real life person wouldn’t think about a certain period of their life in such a manner). Follow your protagonist’s thoughts instead – he/she will know the right time to think about a specific person, and the event that may or may not have been connected to the individual. The best way to proceed would be to treat the first book as backstory – important in adding dimension and motives to your characters and helping the major plot in moving forward, but slowing down the pace of the story.
5. Avoid cliffhangers
A cliffhanger can make or break a book. More often than not, the cliffhanger will anger your readers rather than increase the excitement for the next installment. There are two major reasons for this: first, because it’s been done so often that it’s rarely a surprise to the readers, and second, the sequel needs to be its own story, and have a proper ending. When you’re writing multi-part series, or trilogies, every installment represents a part of the journey. At the end of the installment, a specific part of the journey is over, but there is more to come. This is why you should avoid ending the sequel with a cliffhanger, unless the cliffhanger is vitally important to your story and does represent the end of a specific part of your protagonist’s journey.
Image credit: Dan Taylor on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0
Georgina Roy wants to live in a world filled with magic. As an art student, she’s moonlighting as a writer and is content to fill notebooks and sketchbooks with magical creatures and amazing new worlds. When she is not at school, or scribbling away in a notebook, you can usually find her curled up, reading a good urban fantasy novel, or writing on her laptop, trying to create her own.