What I Learned From Writing My First Ever Sequel
Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak comes out tomorrow, and it's the first sequel I've ever written. And what I learned from writing it is that — drum roll please — sequels are hard.
The failure mode for a sequel is, "The same ride again, but bigger and higher stakes." Which... can get old really fast. I always felt like a good sequel should be an amazing surprise, giving you something new that builds on everything you might have loved about the previous installment. There's a reason why The Empire Strikes Back and The Wrath of Khan regularly top people's lists of movie sequels, for example.
I've thought a lot over the years about what makes a good sequel, and here are some things I decided:
A) It's way better to introduce new situations right off the bat, rather than just playing out the situations that were already in motion in the first book.
B) A sequel is an opportunity to explore stuff you didn't get to the first time, but also a chance to make the world bigger and maybe less straightforward than what we originally discovered.
C) Nothing is ever really over — but it's a waste of time to relitigate conflicts that were settled the first time around. At the very least, old conflicts need to have a new dimension if they're coming back again.
In general, the watchword for a really fun sequel probably should be "new." Things should feel brand new and surprising, rather than purely a return to the familiar.
My initial plan for Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak was to do a pretty conventional sequel. Once again, Tina would be the POV character, and we would follow her and her friends as they went to the Royal Space Academy together. There'd be classes, with nice teachers and mean teachers, and we'd learn more about what it means to serve on board a starship. Tina would become aware of some conspiracy to exploit some kind of flaw in the security of the Royal Fleet, which the Compassion could use to turn the tide in their endless war. But of course, nobody would listen to her, and she and her friends would need to investigate on their own.
That probably would have been a pretty fun book. Nothing wrong with a series of classroom challenges, along with the occasional field trip. I had loosely sketched out an arc that led to a big bodacious battle, with the Compassion probably scoring some kind of middle-book victory. And of course, our field trips would also tell us more about the big cosmic threat involving the Vayt and their mysterious ancient nemeses.
But the longer I worked on Victories Greater Than Death, the more obvious it was that I wasn't going to be happy writing that sequel. It just didn't feel different enough, after spending one book on a starship, to spend a second book training to be on a starship. And I was really hungry for something that might allow me to tell a different kind of young adult story with different motivations and stakes.
But also, during the revision process of Victories, it became obvious that I wasn't going to be able to shoehorn my entire supporting cast from Earth into going to the Royal Space Academy. I worked really hard, in the first book to create a supporting cast with a lot of different perspectives, motivations, and ideals. And it didn't feel like I was doing them justice if they all followed the same path in the second book. In particular: Rachael really wants to be an artist; Keziah is interested in finding other solutions to problems, leading to a career in diplomacy; and Elza has become fascinated by all these stories about cyborg princesses who learn to connect their brains to artificial intelligences while wearing amazing couture.
I probably could have gotten away with jamming everybody into the Space Academy. Maybe after a year at the Academy you get to choose a specialization that would take you in the direction of your dreams. But I didn't want to wait that long to see these characters follow their own paths.
What finally made me change course, though, was a decision that Tina makes at the end of Victories Greater Than Death, which I won't spoil here. This felt like a logical progression based on everything that Tina had been dealing with in the first book, but it made me a lot less excited about spending a ton of time on Academy stuff. I decided that Tina could still go to the Academy, but that it wouldn't be the same kind of experience as I'd (or she'd) been expecting.
In some drafts of Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, we do still spend a lot of time at the academy. But it was never going to be a centerpiece of the book, and it got cut down a lot in revisions. Because there were other storylines that grew and took on more energy, and the Academy kept feeling like a lot of boarding-school storylines I had seen before elsewhere.
And at this point, it was obvious that Tina could not be the only POV in Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak. I nervously approached my superstar editor, Miriam Weinberg, and asked timidly if it would be okay to have POVs besides Tina's in this book. I was fully expecting to be told, nah, you gotta dance with them what brung ya. Or words to that effect. Instead, Miriam immediately replied, "Why does Tina have to be a POV in the second book at all? We already got a whole book of her perspective! Let's explore some other characters more." And thus, a plan was hatched.
We ended up with a format whereby Tina's POV is still represented in the book via diary entries and letters she sends to the other characters — and there's actually quite a lot of Tina's viewpoint in there. But she's no longer the center of the story. Which... also felt like a logical progression of the themes in the first book, which was all about de-centering Tina as the hero, and instead acknowledging that all of these characters are heroes in their own and have something to contribute.
This format allowed us to follow Rachel, as she embarks on a quest to get back something very precious that we discover she lost at the end of the first book. And meanwhile, we're following Elza on her journey through the princess selection program, where she has to learn more about the ancient AI gods at the heart of everything, while going on a spy mission to discover what the Compassion is plotting. Keziah, Damini, and Yiwei also have their own challenges to deal with, which we learn about secondhand.
Miriam's insightful comments were indispensable to helping me craft a sequel that felt truly new and surprising. A story that feels like a continuation of Victories, but also (Monty Python voice) something completely different. I was able to explore a lot of stuff that I only hinted at in the first book and answer the big questions without everything feeling too linear. And when it came time to write the third book, which I just handed in, all of the space I had carved out with the second book made it possible to tell a bigger and more seat-of-the-pants, skin-of-the-teeth adventure than the first two books combined. I really feel like this ended up being a trilogy that gets bigger, more heartfelt, and most of all weirder with each volume.
Another thing that changing the format of the second book allowed me to do: lean in to the fairy-tale aspects of the story a bit more. Most popular space operas have a hefty dose of fairy tales in them, going all the way back to Edgar Rice Burroughs and definitely going through Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy. Space operas have quests and magic and princesses and prophecies and all of that. With Victories Greater Than Death, I leaned a little bit more into the Star Trek side of the space-opera tradition — which does allow for meeting a whole lot of gods and encountering, basically, magic — but I didn't go full space fantasy.
With book two, the band-aid is ripped all the way off. This time around, there are palaces, princesses, cryptic warnings, enchanted objects, quests, and both gods and demons. Weirdly, including all that magical stuff made it easier for me to keep including real science in the story as well. I talked a lot with the immensely generous Katie Mack about all the astrophysics of my fictional universe — and particularly, how to resolve some of the big questions I had been throwing out there. This, too, felt very Star Trek: science alongside the inexplicable and the mythical.
I was determined not to write a space-opera sequel that felt too much like Empire Strikes Back, but in the end I think I dipped more than my toe into that swamp on Dagobah. Empire Strikes Back, simply put, is the gold standard of sequels, and a beautiful example of how to go darker and more personal, while revealing more of the world and expanding the perspectives. As to whether the third book has something in common with Return of the Jedi? I guess we'll talk about that a year from now.
My Book Tour
I'm going on an in-person book tour!!! I'll have more dates to share with you soon. Please please RSVP for these dates, so the bookstores can get an accurate audience count for safety purposes.
April 5: Booksmith, San Francisco, CA, 7 PM PT. In conversation with the astounding Nina LaCour (We Are Okay)!
April 6: Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, CA, 7 PM PT. In conversation with the heroic writer/bookseller Rob Crowther!
April 7: Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA, 7 PM PT. In conversation with the amazing Margaret Owen (Little Thieves)!
April 9: Anderson's Bookshop, Naperville, IL, 2 PM CT.
April 9: Writers With Drinks with guest host Baruch Porras Hernandez, San Francisco, CA. Featuring Isaac Fellman, Nefertiti Asanti, Daphne Gottlieb, Kar Johnson and Tanea Lunsford Lynx. 7 PM PT at the Make Out Room.
April 13 at 5 PM PT: Virtual event, hosted by Tubby & Coo's, Copper Dog Books, Old Firehouse Books, and Print: a Bookstore, in conversation with Mike Jung.
Hope to see you at one of these events. Stay tuned for details about my upcoming May events in Boston, NYC, and Los Angeles!