Meredith Mansfield, Author

For a writer, there’s very little more difficult than starting a sequel. You have all these characters, settings, and issues that have already been introduced to the reader–probably over the course of a couple of hundred pages. Now you have to reintroduce them at the start of the sequel, with at least enough information for the reader not to get lost.

It’s risky to assume that your reader already knows these things because they’ve read the first book. Ultimately, you can put Book 2 on the cover in pulsing red letters and someone will still pick up the sequel first. You have no control over that. And you don’t want that reader to be so lost that they put your book down and decide that they don’t want to read anything else by you. So you want to supply enough information for that reader to be able to grasp who everyone is and what’s going on. But how?

Probably the easiest thing is to write a short synopsis of the first book, providing the necessary information. Unfortunately, most readers will just skip that, anyway. The next option is to try to introduce the information as it’s needed, but without making it seem like an info dump. Easier said than done.

In BLOOD IS THICKER, at least I only have to start with two of the characters and add the others as the story goes on. I got lucky. That’s the natural starting place of that story. The start of the sequel to MAGE STORM won’t be too bad, I think, though there will probably be more than two characters. In THE IGNORED PROPHECY, sequel to THE SHAMAN’S CURSE (assuming I ever get back to rewriting those), well, there are a dozen or so characters all in the same place. I’ll have to find some way of introducing each of them, and the setting, while trying to get the story started. Yikes.

It’s a delicate balancing act–enough information without slowing things down to a standstill and boring the reader before the story even gets off the ground. I have to say, I haven’t seen an example I can hold up as the absolute gold standard. At least, not yet. Have you?

Also, new chapters of FIRE AND EARTH and BLOOD WILL TELL are available on wattpad. (Only one more chapter to go in FIRE AND EARTH.)