Sequel Shorts

The thing about short stories is that they are, by their nature, self-contained.

Good short stories, or at least the kind of short stories that people will read and therefore the kind that stand a chance of someone wanting to publish them, are complete. They’re a whole plot crammed into a short word count, with beginning, middle, ending, characters – the whole shebang. You can pick up an anthology or magazine and get the full story experience from each featured author.

And unless you’re publishing your own anthology, this is necessary. Readers of a literary magazine or anthology are, as a general rule, going to see this one example of your work and that’s it. Your work needs to stand alone and stand alone well: no big dangling threads, no unsatisfying conclusions. It’s not an extract of a larger work, it’s a work in its own right – and as such it almost always needs to be a complete, one-off experience.

Well. Almost always.

I’m not talking about authors like Andrzej Sapkowski, who slot all their short stories together and turn them into full novels, or those who put together whole anthologies of their own, semi-related works. I’m talking about just writing a sequel. A second short story in the same universe as a previously published one, following the same characters or the same environment. It doesn’t get done often these days, and for the core good reason that if you write a follow-up story and get it published, there is no guarantee any reader will have read the first one.

In your own anthology or publication, that’s not a problem – the first instalment can simply be placed on the preceding page. If you’re a regular writer for a more specialist publication, like White Dwarf or the Black Library in general, then your odds are better too: your audience is going to be more specialist and more likely to have read earlier instalments too. But even then, you can’t just write a sequel in the way one might write a sequel book. If you write ‘Book 2’ on the spine then people are going to look for Book 1 first. If it’s a standalone short, they’re far less likely to know – especially if this is their first dip into your universe.

To mention Warhammer 40k again: Dan Abnett has written many a short story for his Inquisition series, short adventures set between the main books, and he writes them exactly how this sort of story should be written: completely standalone. If you’re already a fan of the series then you’ll get much more out of them, because you’ll know what’s going on – but there are only one or two I can think of that wouldn’t make sense, by and large, as somebody’s first read. (And those ones were written specifically for omnibus editions of the books to fill in gaps, so that’s excusable.) You can pick up ‘Missing In Action’ or ‘Backcloth for a Crown Additional’ and just enjoy them as space detective stories in their own right, no matter which of the several anthologies they’re printed in you’ve bought. They tie into a larger narrative but without needing the rest of that narrative to work.

But if, like me, you lack the degree of support that one of the Black Library’s star authors has to work with – if you’re beholden to individual submissions to individual magazines, if you’re on your own – then how does one write a sequel or expansion to an existing short story?

For the most part, you don’t. And if you do, you approach things very carefully. I cannot assume that anyone has read my previous work. I have to assume the opposite, in fact. Pretty much everything I write – with the exception of deliberately marketed series stuff like the Boiling Seas – has to be a gateway into my writing. It must stand on its own and do so well if I want to have a hope of enticing a reader to pick up something else I’ve written. Which I do, very much. That’s half the point of doing any of this.

So when I have several actually quite good ideas for a sequel to a story I’ve already written – which I have – I’m going to have to go about writing them properly. Even if they are sequels in terms of plot, they can’t be sequels that rely on reading the first story. They need their own hooks, their own complete plots from start to finish. If a character shows up for a second time then they need their own full introduction within the story, or at least one that doesn’t rely on reading the last one. A little reference here and there is fine – but they can’t be essential.

But of course I can’t just rehash the same introductions as before, because if a reader who has read the previous story comes along, I need to provide them with a fresh experience. I can’t restate all the same technobabble that’s already been established – I need new ways to approach the older things. I have to balance accessibility for new readers with innovation for the old ones.

Even if one of these stories were to end up in the same publication as the previous instalment, there’s no guarantee anyone will remember the first one, especially how long ago it will have been published. If they even get published. But there’s never any sense wasting time worrying about that when I could be spending that time writing.

In short: writing a sequel short like this is a massive challenge, with perhaps even less guarantee of success than writing already has.

I can’t wait to get started.

After all, either I find success and the standalones find their own homes and their own readers, or in a few years’ time I just slap them all together, write down the implied connective tissue to string them into one narrative, and I’ve got myself another novel. Win-win!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to once again Research some Science to see if this idea would even work…