Our publisher Marty, Michael, me, and my neck during a recent afternoon in Brooklyn.
Despite our (as well as some others’) better judgment, Michael and I recently began working on a sequel to our forthcoming novel, From the Campaign Trail or Thereabouts. Both of us possess the troublesome quality of becoming easily bored out of our skulls, and if we go too long without a project to wrap our minds around, we’re likely either to go insane or smoke ourselves into oblivion.
We’re only just in the prewriting process now, and I can’t help but think back on the last time we were here, three years ago, planning our first book. This time around, by virtue of experience, we’re a lot more intentional in the way we’re weaving the story together. At the risk of recklessly mixing metaphors, we’ve seen the terrain before and have a better sense of how to avoid false starts and dead-ends (not that we still haven’t seen a couple). We’re also a lot more ambitious in the scope and complexity of our storytelling. Since the first book takes place during the last presidential election, we were able to use the historical events of the campaign as a kind of skeleton to hang our narrative on, the election cycle having a kind of natural arc to it. It isn’t until a little later in the novel, once the characters and their world are more clearly defined, that the fictional drama starts to propel the plot, rather than the headlines of the day. The sequel, albeit still a satire, doesn’t hinge as much on real-life events, not least of which because we’ve all developed communal short-term memory loss. Our world-building and character development has reached an extent to which the fiction can fill the “shape” of the novel, and the cultural and political satire organically comes to the forefront through this frame. It’s rewarding to spend this much time with a set of characters. We’ve kind of internalized the voices of our protagonists, Harold and Pattie, and generating their dialogue has become almost a knee-jerk impulse, one which risks getting us in trouble in the many situations where sarcastic asides are unwelcome.
I have noticed, in our sophomore effort, a loss in the feeling of magic and serendipity that pervaded the writing process of our first novel. Not having any clue what you’re doing carries a side-effect of alluring mystery. Unplanned story developments will reveal themselves to you with a feeling of divine inspiration, and you possess years of stored anecdotes and relationships you can transpose into the story. Experience and intentionality can be a double-edged sword. On the other hand, we’re still early on in the process of writing our sequel, and it’s probably delusional to think I have such a sense of control over it. So, I look forward to the magic and mysteries we’ll eventually encounter.