How not to Start Book2
The last month has been a journey along a writing learning curve on how to open the second book of a series. To my discredit, I took a cue from movies that often involve time jumps without much (if any) explanation. For example, Star Wars, A New Hope, ends with their heroic triumphant ceremony. The Empire Strikes Back opens with the main characters already on the rebel base of Hoth. What happened in the interim? Subsequent novels and comics filled in the roughly 3-year time gap, but the original Star Wars trilogy leapt forward without providing much sense of how much time had passed or what had happened. But with books, I’ve learned the hard way that kind of time-jump is problematic.
Initially, I had a 6-month time jump between the end of book1 and the start of book2. I visualized what happened during that time, and it felt like a different kind of novel than the rest of Star Fall, and that it would take somewhere between 50-90 pages to tell the tale. Book2 was already at my target length. I considered the idea of writing a novella for the missing period.
My first mistake was that even with the time jump, I should have written it out. If I had done so, perhaps I would have incorporated the events more seamlessly into the “official” story. Plus, I would have developed a better grasp of what actually did happen during that time versus imagining it in my overtaxed brain.
But the bigger mistake is that with the time jump, I found it difficult to provide the necessary context in what was included in the official story without relying on backstory. The result was too much telling versus showing which left the reader with a sense of something missing. The narrative pacing was off. Despite the inclusion of backstory, there wasn’t enough of it to fill in the context (yet there was also too much!). The editors were not happy.
That led to my next mistake: I tried to condense the time gap into a single chapter to limit the number of new pages. The editors were even more unhappy! The chapter didn’t flow, the narrative didn’t make sense, there was still a lot of telling, and a lot missing. In effect, my “something” was worse than nothing.
At that point, I waved the white flag. I went back to the drawing board, and I wrote out the time gap without worrying about the length I was adding to the overall novel. The process created 5 new chapters running almost 60 pages. In doing so, in letting the story that needed to be told unfold naturally, I discovered that what I had imagined in my head was quite different than what I had created on the pages. Many flaws in the original first chapter (now chapter VI) came into focus. Assumptions that I had made around the unwritten events no longer made sense. The process also deepened my understanding of the main characters, and I see the threads of this understanding reaching all the way to the last page. There is a payoff for the set-up in these new chapters already existing in the novel as written.
The overall process of redoing the start of the novel has taken about a month. It’s another setback to my timeline of getting it published, but the novel is far stronger for the extra effort. The editors are happy, and I’m grateful for their pushing me on the matter—the editors cared enough to say, this isn’t working.
Onward Ho!
