Sequel Conflict

For all our griping about stories being too saccharine and sweet, truth be told, we really want to read happy endings.  When we get invested in characters, we want them to end up happy, usually no matter what that happiness means.  We like seeing Luke Skywalker get a medal for blowing up the Death Star, Harry Potter end up married to Ginny Weasley, and JeffreyChilds take Dewey Belasco to task for his bullying.  This gives us closure on the story and means we no longer have to worry about the characters we care about.

Unfortunately, happy endings can make sequels seem…mean.

Stories rely on conflict to move them forward, and happy endings remove that conflict.  That’s all well and good if the story you told is truly the end, but you need to blow up that happy ending if you want to write anything else in that universe.  And that can upset readers.

This is where writers get into trouble.  In looking for ways to create new conflict in established stories, we sometimes go way, way, way overboard.  We’ll think, what if we kill off this fan favorite?  What if the paradise they found is about to die?  What if those characters we put together in a romantic way in our last story are actually brother and sister?

In other words, our own imaginations can sometimes end up messing up our stories.  Readers want new conflict, but they rarely want the emotional investment they made in the last book to be completely upended.  One of the problems with the new Star Wars trilogy, for example, is that the characters we cheered as they achieved final victory in the original trilogy all became losers down the road.  Han Solo is a deadbeat dad who abandoned his wife.  Princess Leia couldn’t hold together an alliance against the remnants of the Empire.  Luke Skywalker, far from becoming a Jedi Master expounding wisdom to a new generation of Jedi, became a grumpy old bastard who hid from everyone at the time they needed him most.

As writers, we have to be very careful how we handle sequels.  I myself have fallen into this trap as I’ve written novels following my first ones, and they need rewriting partially because of that.  I can’t destroy the hope I gave in the original, for it will destroy my audience when they come to hate me.  And yes, an audience’s hate for an author is very real sometimes when they kill major characters.  So create conflict, but do it delicately, or the biggest conflict will be between you and your readers.