by Joseph Lallo
The career of an author, if all goes well, will span decades. And much as we might like to tell ourselves that we’ll be following a strict release plan, carefully considered and plotted out just as precisely as our stories, life doesn’t always follow the outline.
Chances are good that any author who’s been at it long enough will have at least one project that’s been simmering for years, either in an unfinished state or begging for a follow-up.
It’s hard enough to write a story while its elements are fresh in one’s mind, but how do you get back on track when the last time you thought about that setting was months or years ago? Who can you talk to in order to get yourself up to speed? What should you prioritize in your re-briefing?
As someone who has had to do it more times than I care to admit, I’ve developed a bit of an aptitude for it, so let’s get down to business.
Out of my head and into yours
One of the big secrets of writing is that a story serves an entirely different purpose for a writer and a reader. In short, I write a story to get it out of my head, and you read a story to get it into yours.
Thus, once that transaction is complete, it stands to reason that the person with the firmer grasp on the events and details of the story is the reader, not the writer.
So, if you want to find an expert on your stories, look to your fans. They, almost by definition, have read your story more recently than you did.
The pros of this method should be obvious.
Pros:
It greatly narrows down the facts and elements you’ll need to brush up on by highlighting the things that stand out to a reader.
It also gets the decision making out of your head, which can be downright necessary if you built a story on hidden knowledge that you have (because you’re the author) and the readers don’t.
I’d wager that a large proportion of plot holes exist because you forgot to tell the reader something, and this will catch that.
Cons:
It’s not a flawless system.
Quite often, particularly if you only discuss it with one or two fans, you’ll get a biased account of your own story. We all have favorite characters, and if you take the recollections of your fans as gospel, you might end up with a heap of notes that suggest the previous book was all about their favorite parts of the tale, rather than something more balanced.
Also, though their enthusiasm is likely to have recorded some of the most emotionally resonant scenes in an almost word-for-word state, you can’t be certain their memory is flawless.
Basically, use their answers to your questions as a guideline and cheat sheet, but always double check the specifics before writing on from them.
There’s always recruitment
The Plan B version of this method, for those without an existing fanbase or those working on something that doesn’t have any releases yet, is to tap, recruit, or hire someone to read your story and summarize it for you. This can be a friend, a fan of one of your other works, or a writing partner.
You may be tempted to use AI for this purpose, but I’d advise against it.
AI has all of the same flaws a person might have, with the added bonus of not having a way to follow up with it to track down the source of these errors.
The only thing worse than getting facts about your own story wrong is knowing that those bad facts came from a computer that doesn’t even have the ability to feel shame for leading you astray.
For the Rest of us
Not everyone is lucky enough to both have enthusiastic fans and have access to them.
More to the point, sometimes the story you’re picking up isn’t a sequel to something the fans have read, but the second half of a story that they’ve never even gotten a glimpse at.
And budgets often don’t have room to hire someone to do the job.
Thus, as fine a resource as a fandom can be, you’ll still end up spending most of your time doing your own research.
To make sure your time is well spent, it’s best to have a system.
The goal is to get all of the information you need, and to do it quickly and efficiently. The faster you get the information of the old, the faster you can start writing the new.
Study Up
For better or worse, if the information you need about your story isn’t in your head, or in your reader’s head, there’s only one other place it can be found, and that’s in the books themselves.
You’re going to have to re-read your stories.
Now, for some, this is no big deal. But it is an astonishingly common trait among authors to feel anything from discomfort to utter repulsion when faced with their own writing. For many years, reading or even hearing my own words made me cringe. I’ve largely gotten over it, but it was a process.
Better Heard than Seen
If you can read your own stories without trouble, you can skip ahead. For the rest of you, here’s what worked for me with regard to clearing the obstacle of my own psychological response to my past prose.
Listen rather than read.
If you have an audio book, great, listen to that. But that’s a luxury. More to the point, if you have my particular flavor of brain malfunction, hearing someone else read your writing is even more torturous than reading it yourself.
The loophole through my own hangups turned out to be robots.
If a text to speech system is spitting my words at me, I can tolerate it so much better than if I’m reading it or someone else is reading it to me. Plenty of ebook readers have a “read aloud” option.
Note: If you’re looking for a recommendation, Google Play Books is the one I use. It’s relatively simple to upload your own writing as an epub, and then it’ll happily read the words back to you.
It’s not a sophisticated performance, but it’s serviceable, and it frees up both of your hands for the next step.
Take Notes
Once you’ve selected your favored means of ingestion, you’re going to have to make sure that you keep track of the key data you’ll need. If you have an outline for the next book, or the rest of this one, a quick read through of that should give you a checklist of things to brush up on or dig out of the archives.
A few key points that are always helpful.
Who’s telling the story here?
You’re going to want to soak up the voice of the book.
- How was the narration?
- What was the point of view?
It’s an aspect of your writing that’s immediately obvious upon going through even the first few pages, but I’ve known more than one person (myself included) who has come embarrassingly close to continuing a series that was primarily in 3rd person limited with a first person sequel.
Who are these people?
Beyond the framing and structure of the story, you’ll want to take some notes of the characters. Even if you had the foresight to do a character profile for each of your key players before you started writing, a good story will see its characters growing and changing along the way.
Watch some long running shows that have different writers for different episodes, and now and then you’ll see the telltale signs of someone working from a character sheet that was just a smidge out of date.
Don’t fall into that trap. Be aware of where your characters in their personal journeys.
Remind yourself of any verbal or physical distinctiveness that’ll need to be carried forward or reestablished, and update (or create) any biographical notes to include the relevant events that have taken place in recent history.
Somewhere between Point B and Point C
Though it’s a touch obvious, it should not be left unsaid: you’re going to want to figure out where you are coming from and where you are going to in the larger arc of the story or the series.
Again, this is simpler if you’re working from a previously created outline. Then it’s simply a matter of mapping the previous plot beat to its position in the notes. If you’re pantsing your way forward, it will be less a matter of figuring out which step you’ve reached and more a matter of determining which steps should follow.
In this case, you’re not just reading the previous entry looking for a milestone, you’re plotting a trajectory.
- Does the story have momentum?
- How do you maintain it?
- Does the story have direction?
- Where does it lead?
If your story has neither direction nor momentum…
You probably have bigger problems, but at least you can assess the firm ground you’re standing on before taking your wild leap forward to get things rolling again.
There are those loose ends...
This is a point that warrants focus, because it’s the point that I personally have tripped over far too many times.
What are the dangling threads that need to be tied up?
Even if you have excellent notes about your previous books (or your previously written portion of this book) to fall back on, it’s startlingly easy to forget you’d put Checkov’s Gun up on the mantle and then completely forgot to fire it.
As you go, ask yourself:
- What mysteries are unsolved?
- What character arcs are unresolved?
- Is there a villain who vanished without a trace?
- Is there a sudden appearance that has not yet been explained?
Particularly if you’re looking to finish up not just a sequel, but a series, you need to be sure that anything that’s left unresolved is an intentional omission, because leaving the audience hanging by accident is a bad, bad feeling for both you and your readers.
This is all doubly important if you didn’t have an outline.
Some past version of you was brimming with ideas and had started laying the groundwork for them. But “present you” probably lacks that context, so be very mindful of every little clue you come across.
You’ll either be recreating the state of mind you were in when you started, or you’ll be using those elements as fodder for fresh new ideas.
Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail
If you’ve been following along thus far, you should have a fairly comprehensive list of key character traits, key plot beats, and general trajectory for the story.
What you should do now, before you write another syllable, is save that set of notes where you can find it.
Just because you’re pulling a pot from the back burner and cranking up the flame doesn’t mean it’s not destined for another hiatus before it finally finishes stewing. The better you document your information and intentions now, the faster this whole process will be later.
Now go get ‘em, tiger!
Coming back to an old series or dusting off an old project can be a daunting task that threatens to prevent the story from ever reaching completion. But as long as you come at it with a plan like the one I’ve described, it doesn’t need to be insurmountable.
Like most things in the world of publishing, it can be done slowly, piece by piece, and you can usually find someone who is willing to lend a hand. And when all is said and done, you get to clear off a spot on your backlog, and your fans get that sweet, sweet closure.
Isn’t that worth the effort?
Have you run into any of these issues when you revive old projects? What have been your biggest stumbling blocks?
About Joseph
Joseph R. Lallo hails from Bayonne, NJ--the fabled birthplace of George R. R. Martin. He has written dozens of novels and novellas, including the international bestseller The Book of Deacon and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series. In addition to writing, he has helped run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson. Find Joseph and his books on his website at bookofdeacon.com.
Top photo purchased from Depositphotos.
