Falling in love with characters again is a 'MUST' to write a sequel.

When you spend six years with the same characters, you form a relationship with them. In the beginning, it's so exciting--like a new romance--you can't wait to be with them again, you miss them achingly and you truly feel like they are real people. 

A table that looks like a stack of books.

When your drafts start falling into the 12-20 range, they don't quite make you vomit but almost. It's as if the bile rises to the base of your windpipe and sits there like a lump of 'ugh'. Finding the boost to move past that slug in your throat means--like in a long-term relationship--rediscovering the love and connection you have with those characters.

In my novel Worthy, I never ever felt that way about Sarah or her barrister, what's his name? (Can you believe I wrote a 384-page novel and can't remember the name of one of my key characters? The writer's mind is a bizarre maze.) Jeffrey Maddox, that's him!! Love that character! But, that's partly because he came to me so easily and he spent a shorter time in the book than others. He is also very funny and sneaky smart, though he plays dumb to get info out of people.

The King Canon Reading Challenge Continues...

Ah, Carrie...

Scarred and Scared
Stephen King's first published novel -- 1974. I was six when it came out. Yes, it scared the shit out of me; not because I read it when I was six, but because I watched the movie when I was sixteen.

[insert shudders]

I might as well have been six. That movie blew my mind with horror. I'd convinced myself that I could never read Stephen King books or see any more of his movies.

My Favourite Style of Novel
Little did I know that Carrie was an epistolary novel, one of my favourite styles.

A King 'Konvert'
Consider the time I've lost. It would take me how many years to read another Stephen King? Let's see...about 20 years before I read Dolores Claiborne, not realizing who the author was until I got into a few crunchy bits. I loved it!! I especially loved the way King made Dolores the only speaker in the entire book--brilliant! Nevertheless, I now had the license to continue reading King, though I still hadn't searched his back-list until this spring (Mar.26, 2016: Stephen King Did Too Good A Job)--such a scaredy cat. Instead, I'd read more recent novels like these:

• Under The Dome
• 11/22/63
• Mile 81 

Still no movies, though. Too visceral!

The King Canon Reading Challenge
So, in two and a half months, I've read:

• The Shining, King's 3rd novel, -- incredibly-done, couldn't read it in the nighttime when I was home alone--typical for me.
• Carrie, his 1st, --so simply horrific, takes bullying to unheard of heights, long before the 2000s and 
• Now I'm in the middle of Different Seasons, a collection of 4 novellas, 
• Namely the first: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, (sub-title: Hope Springs Eternal) more commonly known as the movie title: The Shawshank Redemption.

 

Using Questions As A Form of Character Development

"Could you be expected to behave as a thinking human being when your hand was being impaled on red-hot darning needles?"

That question is brilliant! Can't you feel the angst, the impossibility, the urgency to escape the heat. That question is one of two that Stephen King's character Jack Torrance asks himself in The Shining, as he tries to question how could resist alcohol and his demons from taking over. 

Here's the next question:

"Could you be expected to live in the love of your nearest and dearest when the brown, furious cloud rose out of the hole in the fabric of things (the fabric you thought was so innocent) and arrived straight at you?"

There is so much anger, so much helplessness and a surrendering of perceived power that spits out of these type of questions. In fact, in the end, they are rhetorical in nature, and yet, what an effective way to expose a character to his readers.