GUEST POST: J.T. GREATHOUSE / On Second Books, and New Points of View
If you're new to the series you can check out JT's previous post, exploring the world of the Sun King HERE and grab yourself a copy of the book. It is so rich and detailed, a completely sensory reading experience unlike anything I had been reading at the time and book two has amped the stakes up ten fold. Revolution is coming and the Gods are lurking in the shadows.....OOFT! (and once again the cover art is sensational)
So without further ado...over to TJ:
On Second Books, and New Points of View by J.T. Greathouse
Writing the second book in a series is a daunting task. It often calls for writing a book on a far shorter timescale than the first (in my case three years for The Hand of the Sun King vs. one year for The Garden of Empire). There are new structural challenges to consider. How much of a refresher on the events of book one will the audience need? Is it necessary to re-explain worldbuilding details, and how much can you rely on your audience remembering information from book one? How much can you expand the scope and format of the series (with new point of view characters, for example) without losing what your audience loved about the first book? Most difficult of all, how do you balance these concerns with the artistic vision for the book on its own, and the series as a whole? With all of this complexity to puzzle through, it’s a wonder any of us decide to write multi-book series at all.
In my case, I knew from the moment I finished the first draft of The Hand of the Sun King that I wanted to expand it into a trilogy. Wen Alder’s character arc had reached a resting point, but there were too many unanswered questions and thematic issues left to be dealt with to end the story there. More, I wanted to explore the Sienese empire from other points of view, through the eyes of people whose perspective on the empire differed from Alder’s in interesting ways, both to further elucidate his character by contrast and to expand on how this world and the conflicts within it were understood within the story.
While I waited for beta feedback on The Hand of the Sun King, I hashed out a plan for two sequels, The Garden of Empire and [redacted]. The third book in the trilogy, the name of which I am keeping under wraps for now, was always clearer in my mind. It had a definite conclusion, layers of thematic complexity to deepen and develop the themes introduced in Sun King, and the promising seeds of plotlines for Alder and a few other point of view characters that I was really excited to explore.
From the beginning, The Garden of Empire was shrouded in fog-of-war. An uncertain battlefield I knew I needed to cross and which had some definite features visible through the haze – new characters and dynamics that would need to be introduced (or reintroduced), certain events that needed to transpire to set up the third book, thematic throughlines from Sun King which could use further exploration – but which felt more nebulous than Sun King ever had.
As a light-outline discovery writer (on the architect / gardener scale, I’m probably about 80% gardener) I approached this problem by diving right into a draft. Alder’s story for The Garden of Empire – or rather, Foolish Cur’s – was easy enough to find, as was one of the new point of view characters I decided to introduce (which remains the least changed from the first draft!) but as I progressed, the fog of war grew thicker rather than thinner. By the end of the first draft, I was faced with a tangled, overlong, overly complex novel which gestured at a lot of big ideas without doing anything particularly interesting with any of them, and which missed some great opportunities for drama along the way.
Fortunately for all of us, and largely thanks to some excellent advice from my agent and the support of my tireless beta readers, as well as my own masochistic willingness to rewrite half of a novel in two months, I managed to untangle the mess, burn away the fog, and find the story that I needed to tell. That work produced a version of Garden that I’m extremely pleased with, which stands on its own as the war novel I wanted to write while bridging into the far stranger third book in the series, which has been much easier to write.
What follows will be a brief discussion of the planning process for The Garden of Empire and differences between the first and third drafts of the book, which include major structural and point of view differences, as well as a discussion of how I made the decisions that led to those changes. I will try to minimize spoilers, but it’s impossible to talk about these things in anything but the vaguest, least interesting terms without giving a few things away. If you’d like to go into The Garden of Empire completely blind, with nothing spoiled, stop here and come back after you’ve finished reading the book.
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SPOILER WARNING
The Garden of Empire was always going to feature new point of view characters. I knew from the planning stage that this would be a controversial decision. First, because I knew these point of view characters were not going to be in the first person, as Alder’s narration was in The Hand of the Sun King and would remain in The Garden of Empire, but in third person limited. Mixing the distances of your point of view – moving from first to third or, god forbid, second person – is regarded by many as a cardinal stylistic sin nearly as horrendous as switching tenses! (Though, it should be noted, many authors have done this before – N.K. Jemisin of most recent note – so I am by no means blazing a trail here) Second, this choice would be controversial because I knew, or at least hoped, that readers would be attached to Alder’s narrative voice from the first book, and there was substantial risk that people simply wouldn’t connect to other points of view in the same way. No one’s thrilled when a series they’ve been enjoying ignores their favorite character to focus on some random nobody on the other side of the world, particularly when that random nobody isn’t anywhere near as interesting or plot-relevant as the character they actually like.
But this was a decision I made from the start, and one I was going to stick to, even if my agent or editor hated it (or so I told myself – neither of them did hate it, so we’ll never know how stubbornly I might have held out).
The question was never whether there would be other point of view characters, but who those characters would be.
I wanted these pov’s to accomplish four things, in order of importance:
1. Approach unique angles on thematic ideas I was interested in exploring. I’m a firm believer in the idea that literature lives and dies, artistically, by thematic resonance. The events of a story should, when taken together, try to elucidate or provoke questions about the human condition. This is a very pretentious way of saying that this book was going to be about some capital-t Things and the new point of view characters needed to be people who would have opinions on those things.
2. Provide a different perspective on the ongoing events from Alder’s perspective, with different experiences of magic, different relationships to the empire, and different geographic locations. I wanted to try and give a fuller picture of Sien, of the magic in this world, and of the world itself than Alder could deliver alone.
3. Be, on at least some level, as interesting as Alder to me. This is sort of intangible, but I’m very much a character-driven writer, and if I was going to spend a not insignificant segment of a reasonably long novel with these people, I needed to find them intriguing. And, hopefully, this would translate into readers finding them interesting too!
4. Play some kind of crucial role in the plot of the book, such as it was, and in the plot of the series as a whole. For some authors, this would be the #1 concern, but I’m much less of a plot driven writer than I am a character and theme driven writer. Nevertheless, whatever was happening to these characters needed to maintain the momentum of the story.
With these criteria in mind, I started brainstorming characters who could hypothetically serve this function. First to come to mind was one of my favorite characters from book one, someone who it would be easy to place him in a geographic region that would play a central part in the plot of book three, and someone with a position in Sienese society that could offer a perspective somewhat similar to Alder’s while being different enough to potently highlight some thematic ideas at play in the series. This point of view character wound up being the easiest to write in the entire book, requiring the fewest substantial changes from draft to draft, so I’ll say no more about him to minimize spoilers.
For the third (and, in my thinking at the time, final) point of view character, the process was not so straightforward. Many characters sprang to mind as having potential, but in the end I narrowed it down to two: either Oriole’s younger brother Pinion or Atar the Winddancer. Pinion seemed like a good option because I knew he would be a point of view character for book three, while Atar made sense to me because she was prominent in book one and I wanted to revisit the An-Zabati, see how they were doing, and introduce a new character from their corner of the world who would be prominent in book three. (You can see how the balancing act of a second book is challenging; it wasn’t enough for either of these characters to be interesting on their own, I had to justify their inclusion as part of the bridge from The Hand of the Sun King to the end of the trilogy) In the end I settled on Atar, mostly because at this point in the story Pinion would have primarily an antagonistic role and I didn’t have a clear idea for an interesting character arc for him before the events I had planned for the third book.
With all of this in mind, I started writing, and by halfway through the first draft I knew that something wasn’t working. My first draft document is full of comments, particularly in Alder and Atar’s sections, lamenting how I felt a scene wasn’t working, or wondering what I could do to make a moment more dramatic, or if there was any other sequence of events that could serve the same narrative purpose as one which had turned out profoundly boring in the telling. Also, the draft was almost 150,000 words long which, while not nearly as massive as some fantasy door stoppers, was outside the scope of what I had planned and almost one and a half times the length my publisher was expecting me to deliver.
In my second draft I did the best I could to address these problems, but there was still a nagging feeling that the book was broken in some undefinable way. I chalked those feelings up, at least in part, to the fact that I had written the book at a breakneck pace in the middle of a global pandemic while teaching full time – none of which are particularly conducive to a satisfying creative process. I was open about my misgivings with my agent, however, and asked him for any suggestions, particularly with an eye toward anything I could cut.
He came back with dozens of comments, a page of notes, and one sharp but useful observation – the Atar segment of the book wasn’t working for him at all and seemed to distract from the overall story rather than add to it, to the point where it needed a complete rewrite.
During our conversation, I raised the notion of adding Pinion as a point of view character and removing Atar, and my agent expressed quite a bit of enthusiasm for the idea – in my notes I have an instruction from him to “write the f–k out of it,” which may or may not be a direct quote – which was enough for me to pull the trigger, even though the book was only a few months out from deadline at that point.
This left me with a problem, though – without Atar to introduce this new character from her corner of the world, how would I incorporate them? They would play a vital role in book three, both narratively and thematically, and it didn’t feel right to spring them on readers without any mention or introduction before that point. I’ll leave you to read The Garden of Empire to find out for yourself.
What followed was a spring and summer of frantic revision, cutting out a third of the novel and entirely replacing it, while also streamlining and refocusing elements of Alder/Foolish Cur’s story based on my agent’s suggestions and my own new ideas to heighten drama, tension, and thematic clarity. At the end of the road, I turned in a book that I, my agent, my editor, and early reviewers all seem happy with. In particular, I’m thrilled by the decision to introduce Pinion’s point of view in book two, as doing so has made his section of the third book stronger than it ever could have been otherwise.
END SPOILERS
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Ultimately, writing The Garden of Empire was as much of a learning experience as writing The Hand of the Sun King, if not moreso. It stretched my skills and taught me things about structure and point of view that had never occurred to me before, and which I doubt I could have ever figured out without an experience like this. I’m very pleased with the book as it has turned out, in part because of the hard road it took to go from broken first draft to finished novel. I hope you find it as satisfying to read as I found it satisfying to write.
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