When teachers tell young writers to “write what you know,” I think this is what they mean. Writers should find inspiration in their backgrounds and passions. It doesn’t mean to write only about the things in which you’re an expert. If that were the case, how would we have stories about interstellar travel? Or monsters? Or superheroes? I mean, how many superheroes do you or any of your friends know? But we all know how it feels to wish we could be superheroes. Stories are about vicariously fulfilling the wish.
Writers often talk about how long it took to write their first book (years) and how comparatively little time it took for their second (weeks to months). This was certainly true for Winston Chase and the Theta Factor. Book 1 stumbled through its many drafts in about six years. Book 2 made it through three major drafts in under one year. Book 3 was even quicker.
People say other things about sequels, too, many of them negative. Sequels are almost always inferior to first installments, right? I have a theory about this. If you’re familiar with the “hero’s journey” concept (if not, check it out on Wikipedia), the hero begins in his or her everyday, mundane world. Something happens. Some external force knocks the hero out of his/her ordinary existence. Usually after an initial refusal, the hero chooses to pass through a threshold into the otherworldly realm of adventure.
The hero’s journey works like magic on first books. (If you look at my three-act, hero’s journey spreadsheet for Winston Chase 1, that threshold is when Winston leaves his sleeping mother in their motel room. He literally crosses the threshold…and then trips over Shade.) In sequels, though, where the story continues and evolves from book to book, the pattern breaks. The hero left that mundane world back in Book 1. Even if Book 2 starts in the same place, the hero is no longer the same person. The hero has already gone from being a nobody to, well, the hero. We lose that transformation and reader discovery in Book 2. I believe this inherently weakens sequel narratives. Book 2 then has to build up new complexity and conflicts in order to enable a big, satisfying Book 3 — or wherever the series ends. The longer the series, the harder it is to maintain that emotional scaling.
Said differently, it’s no accident that I have two references to The Empire Strikes Back in this book. Wink wink.
Finally, you might be interested to know that Winston Chase and the Theta Factor originally had a different conclusion. What used to be the ending sequence of Book 2 became the opening six chapters of Book 3. Book 2, as it exists now, ends on an emotional note much like the ending of The Empire Strikes Back. (No, I didn’t plan it this way. It only fell into place once everything was written and rearranged.) The good guys have taken some heavy losses, and the bad guys have clearly…you know, struck back. But the good guys survived and will go on to fight another day. There’s a tiny emotional upswing in the last scene.
I’m not going to spoil it for you, but my hunch was that, had I kept Book 2’s original ending, there would have been rioting in my Amazon reviews. If you thought Council Crest was intense, just wait.
Hold on — was that a big tease for Book 3? Mwahahahaaaa! See what I did there?
Seriously, though. Thank you, most excellent reader, for continuing with Winston. He’s on the ride of his life, and I’m very grateful that you’re sharing the journey with him. I’ll catch you back here at the end of Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh.
Bodhi St. John
November 2018
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