On the problem of book two

The first book has a murder in it. This is not, on reflection, a surprising feature of a mystery novel, but it does present a logistical problem when you come to write the second one: you have already used your murder. You have to find another.

This is, roughly speaking, where I am now.

Brainstorming a second novel is a different kind of work from brainstorming a first. The first one had the advantage of pure invention — nothing existed, so nothing could be wrong. The second one has the disadvantage of everything that already exists. Cresthollow Bay is there. Iris Mallory is there. Otto Calloway has already made his opinions about the Tuesday reading group abundantly clear. The Anchor serves the same lamb stew. None of this can change, and all of it must be taken into account.

What I am currently doing, in the technical sense, is keeping a notebook and staring at it. There are index cards. There is a certain amount of walking. I have, at various points this week, sat in front of a large piece of paper and written a single word in the middle of it and then drawn an arrow to nothing at all.

The questions I am turning over are these: What has Cresthollow Bay not yet shown me? There is an archive I barely touched — the town’s history goes back further than the first book needed. There are characters I glanced at and moved on from. There is the question of what Iris actually does when she is not solving something, which is a question I am not sure I answered properly in the first book and which I suspect matters rather a lot in the second.

There is also, somewhere under all of this, the beginning of an idea. It has the quality of something glimpsed at the edge of vision — present enough to be interesting, not yet solid enough to be written down without frightening it off. I have learned, with some difficulty, not to push at this stage. The idea will arrive when it is ready. Or it won’t, and I will have to push after all.

More news when there is some.

— V.