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Fantasy Writers (and an Editor) Speak Out Elizabeth Knox
| Elizabeth Wein | Philip Reeve
| Kenneth Oppel | Cheryl Klein
When I was halfway through writing Dreamhunter I realized that, for my own satisfaction, its sequel had to answer certain questions: What is the Place? Why is it there? What are the dreams? Also, it bothered me that I’d embarked on a story with two species of “magic” in an otherwise very naturalistic world: the Place, where dreamhunters go to catch their saleable dreams, and Nown, the servant made of sand, created by a family spell. The solution to this problem — that the Place was a Nown — supplied answers to my questions. I decided that the first book must end with the act that is a precondition of the whole story. When, at the end of Dreamhunter, Laura frees her sandman, she makes it possible for him to make his later promise: “I promise in the future to do more, to do — I know not what — to save whoever you love.” In trying to keep this promise Nown’s future self creates the Place, and dreamhunting, and Laura’s whole world. By the time I finished writing book one, I understood that I was writing a time travel story. I’d like to think that Dreamquake benefited from the fact that I was part of a project, initiated by the Royal Society, a collaboration between writers and physicists. I wrote an SF story for that project and, while reading about time travel and causality, I realized that I had to decide whether the Dreamhunter Duet was a “consistent universe” or “many timelines” story. I decided to make it look like a consistent universe story — in which what happens is what was always going to happen — up till the very end. — Elizabeth Knox
I really feel it’s important that each of my books stand on its own. That’s a personal preference. Part of the problem in writing the Mark of Solomon in general, and The Lion Hunter in particular, was that I realized as I was writing it that it could not be the stand-alone adventure I’d originally planned — Telemakos himself, as a realistic character in my mind, could not just pick up where he left off. He’d been too much altered (and as it happens, damaged) by the events of The Sunbird for me to blithely avoid reference to it. So I feel that The Lion Hunter, more than my other books, is a true sequel. The crippling injury to Telemakos’s body is a metaphor for, and a parallel to, the crippling emotional damage he has suffered: and, as Athena apparently “heals” him of the damage to his body (i.e., she hides his missing arm), so she heals him of the damage to his soul, proving the strength of love over fear, but he has to learn to cope with his new body and soul on his own to come full circle. That brings me to the issue of why the Mark of Solomon is two books rather than one. It was my editor’s idea at first, but it actually gave me a good way to contain the themes of The Lion Hunter within itself; The Empty Kingdom, the second book in the Mark of Solomon sequence, is much more about adolescence than anything else, more about Telemakos maturing in knowledge and temperament than about healing. I resisted splitting the books at first. I hate a cliffhanger ending (it is the chief flaw of The Empire Strikes Back). And, while I hated the idea of writing a book that is dependent on another, I saw that I really had two different overarching themes here. And really the only place to split the story was at the cliffhanger. I figured if I was going to do it, I’d better not be wishy-washy about it, and really make it serious. My favorite of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass, is a cliffhanger (almost literally!), but it’s still got its own interior integrity and enough closure that it could stand on its own even without the existence of the rest of the trilogy. I aspire to that. — Elizabeth E. Wein
When I wrote Mortal Engines, I had no plans at all for sequels, and tied up all the loose ends that I could see, so when I did come to write the next book it took a lot of thought before I found a story which would move the characters on in interesting ways. (I started about sixteen different versions, and completed two or three, before I came up with Predator’s Gold.) But, being wiser by then, I allowed for the possibility of further sequels, so Infernal Devices and the last one, A Darkling Plain, came more easily (in fact they started as one book, but I was having so much fun that it grew too long, and had to be split in two). In A Darkling Plain, in particular, I quite deliberately tried to find echoes of the first book, revisiting some of the same places and sometimes re-using fragments of text from Mortal Engines. It’s nice to be able to reflect on the previous books, and spend more time with themes and characters which maybe got skimmed over the first time through. On the other hand, it’s important to have an ending, too, so the story definitely finishes in A Darkling Plain. — Philip Reeve
Many people think writing a sequel is easier than writing an original
stand-alone work. — Kenneth Oppel
In a planned-out trilogy or series, particularly in fantasy, a good sequel has to accomplish many things: maintain and grow the characters and have a good standalone plot for just that book, while expanding the central plot of the series and raising the stakes of the whole — and all of it should be linked to the thematic concerns the author is trying to explore (which shouldn’t be a rehashing of the themes from the first book). It’s tremendously difficult to balance all of those elements, and it requires that an author know beforehand not only where the story is going to go but what he or she wants it to accomplish character-, plot-, and theme-wise — all especially hard for authors who like to see where the story takes them as they write. But when an author can do it, as Philip Pullman or J. K. Rowling did — well, the results speak for themselves. — Cheryl Klein, editor at Arthur A. Levine Books
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