When you don’t remember what you had for lunch two days ago, it’s easy to imagine that bringing back characters from a book written seven years ago would be a challenge. This might be true for authors who write solo, but for us as collaborators it’s a little different. When you write with a partner, you have someone who knows the story and the characters as intimately as you do, and that means that you also talk about these characters with each other. As real people. As in these are people we both know and discuss as if they exist. Even seven years on.
But…the prospect of bringing them back to life on the page and creating a sequel to The Last Mrs. Parrish was a daunting proposition. At book events, we were so often asked if we were going to write a sequel. We typically answered with a “you never know” but had no intention of actually doing so. We occasionally talked about Daphne, Jackson, and Amber and what they might be doing as a fun exercise, but that was as far as it went. We thought their stories were finished. And as many have embraced the first book, we wanted to ensure that a sequel would live up to the original. The last thing we wanted to do was let our readers down. Perhaps that is part of the reason it took so long to write a sequel…it needed time to percolate.
In 2020 we wrote The First Shot, a novella prequel to The Last Mrs. Parrish which chronicled Amber’s back story–her pre-Bishops Harbor life–following her from Missouri to Colorado to Texas, and we discovered that Amber had a lot more secrets than even we knew. A new character emerged from this novella, Daisy Ann Briscoe. It was love at first sight—Daisy Ann is a fierce, passionate, and resilient woman who we felt deserved her own story. Daisy Ann was the spark that ignited our desire to revisit the story. It suddenly felt as if all the characters were crying out for another walk on, and we began to seriously consider writing a sequel.
Once we got past our initial apprehension, bringing these characters back to the page was one of the most rewarding writing experiences ever, not to mention fun. It was like reuniting with old friends.
We thought we knew the old characters inside and out––the way they thought, the way they spoke, their gestures–– but they surprised us. Their goals and desires had changed. It was a fascinating process to see where they would take us.
The introduction of a new set of characters in Dallas gave the story enough newness to keep the work from feeling stale. Our original characters had to interact with new people, travel to new places and deal with new challenges. We couldn’t rely on the elements that made the first book so popular, and we needed new complications for the characters, different from what they’d faced before, but as, if not more, compelling. And so, the old story became part of the new story.
As we wrote the final sentence and sent the book off, we had time to sit back and reflect on why we write and read sequels. What is it about a story or a character that makes us want to know more?
Sequels abound not just in books, but in movies and television as well. Think of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and her follow up The Testament. Or Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. Who among us didn’t wonder what happened to Offred and exactly what/who Rosemary’s baby grew up to be? We now have a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Percival Everett gives us the story of the enslaved Jim, in his new novel James. Perhaps not a sequel, per se, but a picture of the real man behind the façade.
In television Cheers birthed Frasier, Breaking Bad – Better Call Saul, Game of Thrones – House of Dragons. In film we wanted more and so, we lapped up The Empire Strikes Back, The Godfather Part II, Toy Story 3, The Dark Knight. And so many others. All driven by character. The ones we love and the ones we love to hate. We want to know what they’ve been doing since we last met them. What outrageous or fascinating things are happening in their lives that we are no longer privy to and want to be part of?
How often have you read a book and wondered what became of that special character, what the trajectory of the rest of their life was? What happened to Frankenstein’s monster? We never see him actually commit suicide. What if he changed his mind and decided not to kill himself after all? What happened to Elizabeth Bennet after she and Mr. Darcy wed? Did they have a long happy marriage or…?
And so, we came to see that it is most often a character who drives our desire to know more, to know just how things turned out for them in the end.
And now the question is, have our characters reached the end of their time in the sun…or will their stories continue?
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