I am currently in the process of writing a young adult novel and the sequel. This is my first novel, and I'm a little stuck with where to end the first book and pick up with the second one. A big focus of the story is the protagonist meeting her spouse, getting engaged, and then married. I know for sure that I am going to end the first novel before the engagement, but their relationship will have definitely picked up steam. How much time normally elapses between the end of one novel and where the sequel picks up? I'm thinking that I'm not actually going to showcase the engagement in the sequel, but it will be part of the story as the character reflects back on that event.
There is nothing "normal" about writing. Finish your first book whenever that story ends and begin the second book whenever the next adventure starts. Seriously. If it is too hard to know where one story ends and the next begins, you might have a single book instead of two.
It really just depends on when the next thing in their life happens. I've written a sequel that started a mere months after the first one end and another that took place 10 years later.
Start the sequel when the next crisis hits. Since you see them as not yet engaged at the end of Book 1, the great question of Book 2 could be where their relationship should go. What genre is this? That makes a difference. In my romantic suspense series, my protags overcome the villain and get engaged at the end of the first book. In the second book, their engagement is threatened by the return of an old boyfriend, who through no fault of his own gets them involved in a terrorist plot in the second half. If this were a romance only, the crisis would have been the threat to the relationship and I could have wound it up with the wedding, or before. But with the suspense element involved, the true threat has to be to their lives at the hands of the terrorists. Book 2 starts about three months after the end of Book 1. Salient events in the interval I have the characters refer to in conversation and memory.
That's a good point. There is a crisis about the relationship, so I think I'll end the book there and leave the reader hanging. It's young adult fiction. The next book will reveal that they ended up together and deal with the challenges they face in early marriage.
The advice I hear most often from published, especially trad published authors, is to make your first novel able to be a stand alone work, even if you intend to make a series. Whatever crisis they face in book one needs to be done in book one. The reasoning behind this is a publishing house is taking a gamble on you so they are going to buy rights to that one book, not a series, until they know you are going to sell. Once you become an established and successful author, you can leverage your position to sell an entire series because the publisher knows they are going to make money on you. I do have a question about this being YA which is usually defined as 12-18 year old readers. Reading about a pair of 30 year olds getting married would probably be scraping the very top of the YA reading category and completely non relatable to a 12 year old.
Wouldn't that be New Adult? Or am I misremembering the name of it? Here we go, from Wiki: New adult (NA) fiction, also rendered as new-adult fiction, is a developing genre of fiction with protagonists in the 18–30 age bracket. Is it just me or are things getting categorized to death?
The general rule is that kids want to read about characters a few years older than they are. Which makes sense because, you know, big kid stuff. So 8 year olds want to read about 12 year olds, 10 year olds 14, 15 wants 19, etc.
Nope, it's not just you. What puts the fire blight on my apples is that the designations keep changing and weren't consistent across the industry to begin with. Maybe I'll start writing Geezer Fiction for 60-70 year olds who want to read about centenarians.
And here I thought it was because modern corporations are run by boards of directors rather than individuals (individuals are smart, in groups not so much) looking to create all kinds of new financially successful categories. I remember John Irving saying he loved writing the way he did until it suddenly got put in the brand new category called Literary Fiction and there were very specific restrictions and expectations put on his work that were never there before. It restricted the creative freedom that allowed him to do those kinds of stories so well. With new categories come new restrictions, and all the open spaces in between are disappearing. It used to be an author could just write what they wanted to write. Edit— @Catriona Grace Doh! Somehow I thought you said it WAS just me! My bad!
Meh, I wouldn't leave the reader hanging. Wind up the first book satisfactorily. Otherwise your readers will hate your guts. You can always leave questions open, but answer the one you opened the story with.
Not necessarily - the classification depends on how its written and who its targeted at... although a lot of YA fiction will have teenage protagonists there are also books written for teenagers that have adult protags... and indeed books written for adults that have younger protagonists
