Writing a sequel – Kate and Cecy

Alex asked “how you felt about the stand alone getting a sequel with the Kate and Cecelia books. I think you did an amazing job with escalation with these books, but did you have a hard time creating the right level of escalation?”

Well, for starters, “getting a sequel” isn’t quite the right phrase. The first Kate and Cecy book, Sorcery and Cecelia, was put out by Ace/Berkley, who were not all that thrilled about the book at the time and most definitely did not want a sequel. So the book pretty much died, the first time around. Fast forward ten years…and the book has not only refused to die completely, but people are bidding over $100 on eBay for copies. Of a paperback.

So Caroline and I went to our agents and said, “What can we do with this?” And our agents said, “It’ll be easier to sell if there’s a sequel.” So we started writing the sequel, and sold it as a two-for with the possibility of a third.

The hard part about writing it was that The Grand Tour was so different from Sorcery and Cecelia. The structure of the sequel was pretty well locked in by the first book, both in terms of the alternating viewpoints and in terms of the setting — I suppose we could have skipped the story of the trip, but it would really have felt like cheating. And since the characters were all in the same place, we couldn’t have them write letters to each other, the way they had in the first book. We had to come up with an alternate conceit.

Also, Sorcery and Cecelia had the basic Regency Romance novel to use as a template for both plot and incidents. With The Grand Tour, we didn’t have a model to riff on. Most Romances don’t have sequels, and if they do, the “sequel” is really about other characters who were minor players in the original book, and the original couple(s) are treated as minor characters in the sequel. We wanted to keep writing about Kate and Cecy.

But the real problem with the sequel was that Sorcery and Cecelia was incredibly easy to write because we weren’t writing a book. We were playing a game. It ended up becoming a book, but we didn’t actually know that until the last few letters, and by then we were on the downhill run to the end. But we knew from the get-go that The Grand Tour was no game…and it made a difference. With Sorcery and Cecelia, we were perfectly happy to throw things in pretty much at random and see what happened, because the story didn’t have to come to any sort of conclusion (most of the other letter games that either of us have played just kind of ran out of steam after a while, usually in mid-plot). The Grand Tour needed to be going somewhere, which made us both a lot more self-conscious about what we were having happen.

The other big problem was that Caroline’s and my writing processes are almost pure opposites. She’s the sort of writer who can’t talk abut work-in-process; I’m the sort who likes to talk about it all the time to anyone who will listen. She doesn’t do plot outlines; I do (and then ignore them…but that, too, wasn’t as possible with this book because if I strayed too far from the sketchy plan we’d come up with, I’d throw her off). She generally underwrites in the first draft and then expands it in the second; I’m a rolling reviser, fixing previous scenes and chapters as I go forward, so by the time I’m finished with the “first draft” it usually doesn’t need more than a few tweaks. And so on.

Working out the plot and the “escalation” was fairly easy, compared to all that. Especially since, as I said, we didn’t have a template to riff on. About all we knew was that we did not want to do the thing you see in so many long-running TV shows, where they string out the romantic tension for years, then let the couple get together, then immediately try to regain the romantic tension by making the couple have a major misunderstanding or disagreement. Given that we were not doing that, we had to come up with something else to hang the plot on. Which we did, but it took a while.

So I’d say that in Sorcery and Cecelia, we paid more attention to the emotional/romantic plot as the main storyline, while the adventure part was more just the vehicle for making it happen. In The Grand Tour, we reversed that to some extent. Note that this is my analysis long after the fact, and not anything we consciously decided or verbalized at the time. It also doesn’t have a lot to do with the reader’s experience of the books. And Caroline has her own take on things, which obviously isn’t always the same as mine.