When Alex London was a fourth grader and an aspiring cartoonist, he couldn’t even draw the same character twice. So how was able to write a sequel to his much-loved thriller, PROXY, which obviously includes many of the same characters as the original book? In this blog post, Alex breaks down the process of writing GUARDIAN, and how, even for those who fear repetition, creating a sequel can be pretty cool.
When I was in fourth grade, I really wanted to be a cartoonist. I would draw all kinds of funny pictures and make up clever captions, but I could never get past single panel jokes. I couldn’t pull off a comic strip, let alone an entire comic book, because I could never reproduce the same character twice. No matter my intentions, the characters always looked different when I tried to draw them a second time. I never mastered the art of reproduction. I suppose it’s the same for me now as a novelist, as I consider GUARDIAN the sequel to PROXY that I never intended to write.
When I finished PROXY, the story of two boys from opposite ends of an unjust society where the poor take punishments for the rich, I was proud of the book. It was the kind of action-packed, philosophical cyberpunk thriller I’d always enjoyed reading, and I felt the story had gone where it needed to go.
But the characters wouldn’t leave me alone.
I may have thought I was done with them, but they weren’t done with me. There was more story left to tell; their journeys weren’t yet complete.
But I knew I didn’t want to write PROXY again. Heck, I couldn’t if I tried. Like Heraclitus said, you can’t step in the same river twice. I would never be able to reproduce the structure, the emotional arc or even the world of PROXY again and I didn’t want to. I had no desire to write the same book twice, however good it would be for my personal author “brand.”
It’s a terrifying thing to do, to break what people love so you can build them something else.
And this is the challenge of a sequel. As a writer, unless you want to be stuck reproducing variations on the same story over and over and over again, you have to take what you’ve painstakingly built over hundreds of pages and months, if not years, of work, and break it apart. You have shatter it and see where the pieces fall and what you can do with them. Some pieces will be more resilient than others, and those core shards hold the links to the previous work. But the pieces that turn to dust, they need to be built new and they may not be recognizable to people who loved the first book in the series. It’s a terrifying thing to do, to break what people love so you can build them something else.
I hope, in GUARDIAN,the ‘something else’ I’ve built matters to readers as much as PROXY has. There is still action and danger and the stakes are probably higher for the characters in GUARDIAN than they were in PROXY,but it is not the same. The characters have grown, have changed; their wants and their needs are different. The events of PROXY have changed them, permanently, have broken pieces of them. Some of them, to paraphrase Hemingway, are stronger in the broken places. Some of them are not. There are new characters too and minor characters who become major and vice versa. There’s a terrifying new bad guy. He gives me nightmares.
As an author, I was grappling with different questions in GUARDIAN than I was in PROXY. I didn’t want to revisit the questions of debt and justice I explored with Knox and Syd last time around. I wanted to explore other ideas ---forgiveness; how ideology, even when it comes from a humane place, can be destructive; and how justice untempered by mercy can be as terrible as any tyranny. I wanted to explore how, in spite of the brutality and indifference of a violent world, people are capable of finding love, friendship and kindness in each other.
I hope readers will enjoy exploring all these ideas with Syd and the rest of the characters this time around, in their new circumstances. And of course, things are gonna get crazy. It’s still a thriller after all, and once the plot gets moving for Syd and his friends, well…there will be bruises.
