I’m currently attempting to knock out the rough draft of the as-yet unnamed Dreadnought sequel. It’s much harder to get the words out this time than the first book was. This is not the first time I’ve faced this problem. When I attempted to write a sequel to Necessary Cruelty, I encountered a very similar issue. I’m trying to decide if it’s a common cause, or a symptom with more than one possible genesis. NC2’s outline is a structural mess, and that might have played a part in gumming up the works, but Dreadnought 2’s outline is much tighter, with a much stronger cause-and-effect through-line. Still, I find it difficult to make headway.
I’m beginning to suspect the problem is that I’ve not sold either manuscript yet. Writing a book takes a lot of effort. A lot of effort. It is basically a full time job on top of my other full time job. I was able to write Dreadnought in six weeks flat in large part because I was unemployed at the time, but it was still hundreds or thousands of hours bent at my keyboard in intense concentration. When I reach the end of a heavy day’s writing, my chest feels tight and anxious for a good hour afterwards. The kind of focus needed to draft fiction doesn’t come easily, and I don’t unclench from it without effort.
And that’s just the effort. It doesn’t even begin to describe the emotional obstacle course I have to run to get something that big produced and polished. Elation, fear, excitement, frustration, and despair are all crammed up right next to each other during a day of writing. On a good day, more positive emotions than bad during the writing process itself. But the other ones tend to pop up when things are going slowly, or when I read back on what I’ve written and decided I don’t like it.
Writing is strenuous. It leaves me physically weary. It’s not a small amount of effort we’re talking about here.
And sequels? Sequels are harder.
In the first book of a series, I’m blazing new ground. I can do almost anything I want. A sequel has to pick up from its predecessor in a logical place, and it can’t confuse the reader, either a new reader or someone who is continuing from the first book. This makes the beginning of a sequel difficult, because there are a lot of pacing problems that need to be overcome. That can be fixed with outlining though, and I am a fervent convert to the outlining camp. I write, and rewrite the skeleton of my book two or three times before I even start on page one. So I’m not convinced that the problems I have writing sequels comes from the narrative constraints of being a sequel.
I think it’s something that’s harder for me to fix. I think it’s because I’m not sure the effort is worth it. You see, when I’m writing a new book, it hasn’t failed yet. It hasn’t been considered by a dozen+ agents and rejected. But by the time I’ve got my ducks in a row well enough to start work on a sequel, its predecessor has (in both cases where I got far enough to try) failed to get any professional traction. That is perhaps not the best way to think of it, but I’ve never been a particularly sunny person so there you go. So by the time I’m drafting a sequel, there’s that voice in the back of my mind asking if this is just wasted effort. If maybe I should try drafting another Book 1 and see if that is finally able to sell.
So there it is. The hardest part of drafting a sequel is worrying about the first book’s lack of success. I’m still not sure how to get around this problem, except to keep going and try to force my way through.