On the Challenge of Writing a Sequel to a Twenty-Year-Old Novel

At the end of my 2005 novel, The Bright Forever, a man named Henry Dees leaves his hometown, the fictional Tower Hill, Indiana. He leaves because he’s haunted by guilt over what he didn’t do to prevent the death of nine-year-old Katie Mackey, a girl he was tutoring in the summer of 1972. He also leaves because he knows too much about the vigilante justice levied against Katie’s killer.

He drives away from his home on a clear day at the cusp of autumn. He keeps his eyes on the horizon, believing if he keeps moving—if he drives, long enough and fast enough—he’ll eventually come to “the edge of the world, that point where land rises up to meet sky,” and he won’t be able to stop. He’ll float out into all that blue, and just like that, he’ll be gone.

When I wrote the final sentence of the book, I had no idea where Henry Dees was going or what would happen to him when he finally arrived. Nearly twenty years after the publication of the book, I had to write another novel to find out.

The resulting book, The Evening Shades, opens in the fictional Mt. Gilead, Illinois:

He came in September just as autumn was beginning in earnest. The nights were cold, and some mornings frost slicked the grass and the rooftops. The people of Mt. Gilead went about their business under cloudless skies—all that blue above them—and they did their best not to think of the winter days to come.

Sections of The Bright Forever come from the collective consciousness of Tower Hill. I wanted to use a similar narrative strategy in The Evening Shades, a book we might call a follow-up or a companion piece if we’re wanting to avoid the word, a sequel. I’d never written one, but Henry Dees wouldn’t leave me alone, and I finally gave into my curiosity.

I quickly realized I had much to learn about writing such a book. My first challenge was to make The Evening Shades a novel that could stand on its own without readers having knowledge of The Bright Forever. I wanted the books to be independent of each other while also finding points where they touched.

In other words, I wanted readers to be able to experience The Evening Shades without having read The Bright Forever, but I knew some of the events from the latter would have a significant impact on the former. I found myself re-reading The Bright Forever with an eye on the aspects of its narrative that would form an important backstory for The Evening Shades.

At the same time, I was aware that I didn’t want to include too much from the first book. I didn’t want to feel I was writing that book again. I wanted to augment the plot of the new book with the right details from the previous one. I made my decisions based on what information applied pressure to the characters and their stories in The Evening Shades.

But first I had to create a new story for Henry Dees. I couldn’t just have him mulling over what he’d experienced in The Bright Forever. Enter, Edith Green, a never-married woman in her middle years, who rents a room in her house to Henry Dees and becomes the subject of gossip in Mt. Gilead.

Edith is carrying her own secret. Just prior to meeting Henry, she pledged $500,000 to the local public library, money she doesn’t have, just so she could feel appreciated.

An odd romantic couple, their story provides a good deal of narrative momentum through what I call the dramatic present of the novel. Will their romance last? Will they be successful in what for each of them is an attempt to avoid what they fear most—the revelations of their secrets and their heretofore lonely lives?

Of course, as we all know, any narrative approaching paradise is deserving of threat. No one or nothing is safe. In a sequel the backstory presented by a previous book can become instrumental in complicating what’s underway in the second book.

We must have a final obstacle on the way to Henry and Edith’s hard-won happiness. Otherwise, the path to resolution is too easy. Remember the secrets Henry and Edith carry with them? It’s time to put them to use.

As William Faulkner reminds us, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” For a sequel to be successful, an unresolved thread from the first novel is often necessary. What happened to the man who killed Katie Mackey, a man who got bailed out of jail one night and disappeared never to be seen again?

That’s the unresolved thread of the story that’s unfolding in Tower Hill while Henry and Edith’s life together seems headed toward paradise in Mt. Gilead. When Henry’s past life bumps up against his present life, everything is set in motion toward the novel’s climactic end.

Writing a sequel is like having a long-term visitor staying in your house. That visitor can seem like a stranger at first, a stranger who, after a while, begins to become familiar.

The risk with a sequel is it becomes too familiar to the first book and tempts you to spend too much time with that book to the point where it overshadows the new book you’re writing. The balance between the two can try your patience.

How many times did I have to dive back into The Bright Forever to remember exactly what happened and when it happened, so I could choose only the most necessary events to make a part of the backstory that ultimately threatens the happiness between Henry and Edith? How many times did I have to avoid repeating myself?

Countless times, so many times I often wished for an easier way, but I kept going because Henry Dees had called me to give him my attention. He wouldn’t leave me because there was more of his story to tell, and I couldn’t leave him because I was the only one who could tell it.

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The Evening Shades by Lee Martin is available via Melville House.