When Characters Won't Leave
It seems I’m never ready to put characters aside once I’ve found them.
I’ve written sequels to Second Heaven (A Different Life) and The Tarnished Eye (White in the Moon) and I am currently working on a sequel to my novel Errands.
These characters live on in my dreams, not to mention my everyday life. They are important to me, and they occupy a place in my mind that I can go to at will. Somehow they’re able to go on with their lives whether I’m tending to them or not. As with friends one seldom sees, they have experiences, they win, they lose, and they make decisions without any input from me. I love to catch up with them years down the road, jump on the train, and ride with them to the next station.
The only exception seems to be Ordinary People -- which is the one I hear about. “This one needs a sequel. It’s the one you are known for, and people want to find out how things were resolved.”
But what if a story feels complete as it is? Maybe Calvin and Beth do get back together... maybe Conrad and his mother eventually reconcile... maybe he goes to college and has a roommate that reminds him of his dead brother… who knows?
Whatever I was trying to say in that novel evidently got said the first time around and I don’t have the level of curiosity required to warrant putting out that kind of energy to discover what happened to them next.
I often talk with my friend, Rebecca Hill (that's us in the picture), with whom I wrote Killing Time in St. Cloud, about collaborating on a sequel to that novel, but we never seem to be in the same place at the same time. Metaphorically, that is. Although she lives in Colorado and I live in Minnesota, that isn’t the problem; it’s more a matter of sparking the flame and agreeing on subject matter. Charlie and Marty are married now, with an infant in their care. What are they gonna do? Start a detective business? Solve another murder? Who’s gonna babysit?
Last summer Rebecca read Robert Massie’s Peter the Great, and was all set for us to do a screenplay together, but somehow I couldn’t latch on to the high that she was getting off the material.
The same thing happened before I wrote The Tarnished Eye. I tried to get her fired up about the story, based on a true crime that happened years ago in Michigan, but it didn't interest her. So I decided to write it myself.
Sequels allow people to live another day.
Maybe that’s the appeal in them for me. I have friends in my life that I met in grade school, and we’re still close.
I always liked Peter Ustinov’s take on this subject: “They’re the ones who got here first.”
More power to them.
