Christmas Creche and Second Novels!

Look at that, it's Friday! No idea how that came about.

I've got Joanne Phillips here today, but first up, some exciting news: today is the launch of The Christmas Creche! What the heck is a creche? It's one of those strange words I never heard until I moved to the UK, and it a nutshell, it means nursery or daycare. Fellow chick-lit author Michele Gorman had the wonderful idea of creating a virtual creche, where authors with Christmas book babies could keep their little ones for safekeeping. I'm pleased to say there was space for my rather precocious Mistletoe in Manhattan, along with some other great reads by Michele, Carole Matthews, Scarlett Bailey, Belinda Jones... and the list goes on!

And now, over to Joanne!

Second Novel Syndrome

Like that difficult second album for musicians, second novels are tortuously hard work to write. A first novel has to do a lot, of course, but there is a wonderful unknown quality about it. Readers have no expectations – you are new, exciting, untried. But your second novel? Oh boy, do they have high expectations of that! And if there’s one thing even more pressured than writing your second novel, it has to be writing a second novel that is also a sequel ...

Of course, Talli knows all about sequels – Construct A Couple was a wonderful follow on to Build A Man, and she very cleverly managed to give her characters new challenges while keeping them true to all we had learned about them in the first book. Construct A Couple could easily be a standalone novel, and that is what I’m hoping for with my sequel to Can’t Live Without.

But ... it’s not easy. The trouble with being consistent is you can find your characters simply doing the same things over and over. Yawn! Finding enough challenges to keep two star-crossed lovers apart might be possible for one book, but two? Tricky. Creating conflict when you’ve already done the whole happy ending thing in the first book? Tough work. Here’s a list of must-dos for a second-novel-stroke-sequel:

·         Be better than the first book – more exciting, more emotionally powerful, more, more, more!

·         Carry on logically from the first book, without seeming contrived. You can’t, for example, spilt your couple up by sending one of them off climbing a mountain in Africa if you never mentioned an interest in climbing in book one!

·         Keep faith with the tone/style/language of the first book – for example, parts of Can’t Live Without are written in the first person, and as much as I would love to drop this technique for the sequel, I can’t.

·         Give enough background for new readers, without treading over old ground and boring returning readers. Can’t Live Without’s plot revolved around the aftermath of a house fire – I have to mention this in the sequel, but to what extent?

So, my advice to a new novelist about to embark on their tricky second novel – don’t make it a sequel. Wait until you have a bit more experience under your belt, like Talli, before you take on this particular challenge. Writing is hard enough as it is! But I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.

 Joanne Phillips lives in rural Shropshire, England, with her husband and daughter. Since leaving school she’s had an eclectic career, working as a hairdresser, an air hostess and a librarian. She now writes full time. Find out more about Joanne’s writing and books at http://www.joannephillips.co.uk; Twitter: @joannegphillips; Facebook; and check out her novel Can't Live Without here.  

Thank you for the kind words, Joanne! 

Have you ever written a sequel or experienced second-novel syndrome?

Have a great weekend, everyone.