Sequels

I want to start with something basic, but something which many writers invariably don’t know about, and that is the sequel. For this I am indebted to Jim Butcher, and his blog here. I would suggest reading the whole thing, but I have a few notions I want to develop sequels differently than he does, although this post is mostly repetition.

All stories can be thought of as a line of bricks, which have been mortared together. The bricks are scenes (which you’ll hear me talk about often) and the mortar between two bricks is a sequel. Thus, quite obviously, sequels are the transition between two scenes in a story. However, simply calling them a transition, which I have seen people do before, doesn’t do sequels justice. In fact, I don’t particularly like the brick and mortar analogy, because in some works, the sequels are actually longer than the scenes are, but it will do for our purposes now.