Seeking New Information About Writing

Whenever I have a new writing task ahead of me, when I’m writing something new to me, the first thing I do is seek information from writers who have traveled that road before.

There’s a benefit to searching out tips and hints from others who have already been there, done that, whatever that is you’re doing at the moment. It’s important to learn from others, sit at their feet, and listen to what they have to say about their experiences, their mistakes, and their successes. Yes, like Luke Skywalker learning from the wisdom of Yoda (I’m not implying that all writers are small, green, and heavily wrinkled—though I can think of a few that fall into that description).

I learned to open myself up and not become stifled when writing a first draft by reading Natalie Goldberg and Anne Lamott. There’s a ton of information out there—countless blogs, articles, and books—about how to write a novel. But what do these experts say about writing the second novel in a series?

What About Writing the Second Book in a Series?

There’s a fair amount of information about how to write a second novel that is just a second novel—in other words, unrelated in any way to the first novel. An unrelated second novel can and should be written in a different style, with different characters and different situations.

For myself, I found an unrelated next novel easier to write than the second novel in a series. Her Dear & Loving Husband wasn’t my first novel, you see. Victory Garden and Woman of Stones were both written prior to Her Dear & Loving Husband. Since each novel was completely different (different historical periods, different situations, and different characters), I could approach each book in a fresh way and not feel tied down by expectations created by previous stories.

A second novel in a series, on the other hand, is a completely different animal. It should have the same style, the same theme, and a related plot. Often, though not always, it has the same characters.

How do you give readers what they love about the first book while keeping them guessing so they’re surprised by characters they’ve already come to know and hopefully love? That’s the million-dollar question when it comes to writing the second book in a series.

One reason I struggled when I began writing Her Loving Husband’s Curse was that I couldn’t find much information about the problems specific to writing a second novel in a series. With a lack of any hard evidence about what works and what doesn’t, I felt like I was largely on my own.

Still, I struggled through, missing the sage advice I relied on whenever I encountered a new writing challenge. From the few sources I found, one common theme that echoed throughout was how the second novel needs to be “the same but different.” 

A while back Joanna Penn’s excellent website The Creative Penn featured an interview with Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris, authors of the London steampunk novel Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. I’m paraphrasing here, but one of the aspects of writing a series they talked about was that each book should have its own story yet there should be an over-arching theme that ties the pieces together.

They also mentioned having a dangling plot thread which shows readers that there’s a larger plot leading them through the books. This advice helped me think of the books in my trilogy as being part of one larger story. This way the theme should be evident throughout all the books in a series, and the plot should feel connected since it follows through each subsequent book. If you’d like to read or listen to the interview with Ballantine and Morris, click here.

What Have Other Writers Done With Their Second Books? 

Then I looked to see what other writers have done with their second books. This tip is obvious, though it didn’t occur to me right away. I’m a little slow sometimes. Try reading the second book in several series from different authors to see how the authors handled the transition from book to book.

I chose to read the first and second books if I hadn’t read the series before since I wanted to see how the author moved from book one to book two. How much information from the first book does the author use? How does the plot flow from book one to book two, or were they seemingly unrelated or only loosely related? How do the characters change and grow? What is the common thread that binds the stories together?

For myself, I only looked at novels that featured the same characters in each book since my series features the same cast. If the plot in book two seemed unrelated to the plot in book one, I tended not to like book two as much, but that’s simply my personal taste.

Okay, so when we’re talking about writing the second novel in a series there might not be a ton of information out there, but we can always look to see how some of our favorite authors have handled the situation in their own series.

One of the things I love about being a writer is how we all learn from each other. So let’s keep learning!