The challenge of writing a second novel - why getting published isn’t always all it cracked up to be
© A Hammoudeh
Producing a second novel, like producing a second album, is a very different challenge to producing the first. After years of writing to your own specifications, in your own time frame, and with your main anxiety being whether your work will ever be published, now you have the new challenges of an expectant readership who demands that your second effort is at least as good, if not better than the first.
For many writers this pressure is enough to make them crumble, which is why second novels often arrive on book shop shelves much, much later than hoped for, if at all.
As an aspiring author you may imagine that being paid to write, makes the whole thing a lot less stressful. But if you believe what successful published writers say, that is definitely not the case.
Finding time to write
Finding the time to write is one of the major issues. You would think that once you’re a full-time, professional writer, writing would be the priority, but once you’re a success you’ll be in demand. Television, radio, online and print media interviews will all eat into your valuable writing time, while the publicity circuit of book signings, talks and other literary events take you away from your lap top, notebooks and thoughts.
No wonder so many published authors are nostalgic about their time of writing before that fateful day when their first book arrived on the shelves of Borders.
Award-winning children’s author Geraldine McCaughrean understands this only too well. “It’s a bit like remembering the sunshiny days of childhood,” she says. “These days there are so many poxy interviews, emails, school visits and ‘matters arising that I never get a chance to write at all. I have finally crawled to the end of the next novel, snatching the odd opportunity here and there, but it wasn’t a happy experience.”
Performance anxiety
The bigger the impact of your debut novel, the higher the anticipation will be for the second. No wonder so many authors only ever produced one book. In fact, many of the greats have had more books written about them than they ever wrote themselves. Wuthering Heights was Emily Bronte’s only novel, while Anna Sewell never wrote another book after Black Black Beauty. Harper Lee stopped at To Kill a Mockingbird, and JD Salinger was presumably crippled by the success of The Catcher in the Rye, to the extent that no novels followed this American classic.
For some, ill-health and short lives were the culprit, but for others, performance anxiety may have kept the words from flowing.
Living up to expectations
As soon as a new writer catches the public’s imagination, they are inevitably pigeon-holed. We expect our favourite writers to produce more of the same, only bigger and better. If they stray from their genre into previously uncharted territory, we feel at best disconcerted, at worst betrayed. Due to this, second novels, however well-written, often bomb.
Monica Ali suffered from this phenomenon. Brick Lane, her award-winning first novel, told the story of a young woman from Bangladesh trying to make sense of life in London. Her second novel, Alentejo Blue, while equally well crafted, seemed to speak in another voice entirely, telling the stories of the people living in and visiting a tiny village in rural Portugal. Readers buying Alentejo Blue expecting more of the type of writing they’d found in Brick Lane were unimpressed, and though the book sold well enough, compared to the hugely success of Brick Lane, it languished.
This is such a common issue that The Times Online ran a feature about it in March 2009, listing ten second novels that couldn’t match up to their predecessors. These included Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon, which followed the bestselling The Lovely Bones, and Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, which followed Jane Eyre. It’s not that anything is wrong with these novels, simply that they didn’t fare well when compared to the first novels by those authors
Second chances
But there are exceptions. Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s most beloved novel, despite the fact it came after Sense and Sensibility, while Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children shone in comparison to his first effort, Grimus.
So it is possible to produce a second novel that out-shines your first, providing you overcome lack of time, performance anxiety and the expectations of your readers. In fact, the best approach may be to write two or three novels before attaining literary success with your first. Perhaps there is an upside to all those rejection letters after all.
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