When the Wild Calls by Nicola Penfold
We welcome Nicola Penfold to the blog today, sharing insights into writing a sequel!
On writing a sequel by Nicola Penfold, author of When the Wild Calls.
When the Wild Calls is out now and is the sequel to my debut novel Where the World Turns Wild from 2000. The first book has been doing well – not a runaway bestseller by any means, but used consistently in schools and still receiving a steady stream of word-of-mouth recommendations. Since that first book, I’ve been off creating two other stories – a glittering futuristic coastal world of rules and secrets in Between Sea and Sky, and an ecological ghost story set in an Arctic wilderness in Beyond the Frozen Horizon. But coming back to my sibling duo, to Juniper and her little brother Bear, for this latest novel was particularly lovely. It was a return to something familiar: characters I’d already brought to life; a world I’d already done the heavy lifting for. It was also a book that, fingers crossed, had a ready audience. Certainly, in school visits, I’ve been asked countless times, ‘what happens next?’
There is however a certain anxiety, returning to a story that seems to work well already. You don’t want to mess that up. What if, for example, it was precisely the open quality of the ending that had kept the book alive in readers’ minds? In schools, classes have written their own extra end chapters and plotted sequel ideas. I don’t want to shut this down! Or what if the follow-up simply fails to live up to the original, and is just a diluted, insubstantial appendix to its predecessor? There’s no point writing a sequel just to answer readers’ questions. It has to be a story in its own right, offering something new, with its own story arc and resolution.
These were things that preoccupied me, but the pull of that world and the characters wouldn’t go away. It felt they deserved something more. I had after all written Where the World Turns Wild intending for there to be a second book. My publisher had just thought, wisely I’m sure, it was worth finding out whether the first would sell first.
After being given the greenlight for a follow-on, one thing I decided from the outset was to tell some of Etienne’s story too. Juniper was the protagonist (first person present tense) for the whole of the first book, but this one is dual narrative. Etienne, 14, is Juniper and Bear’s best (indeed only) friend in Where the World Turns Wild. He plays a part in their escape from the city, but, not having the disease resistance they do, he’s left behind. His story ends there, trapped in the city that’s like a prison. It’s something that pains Juniper throughout the rest of that novel, because she knows Etienne craved freedom and wild things as much as they did. Book two, When the Wild Calls, enabled me to go back to Etienne, deep in the city, and discover through him how things had changed there since Juniper and Bear’s departure. If book one was about escaping into the Wild, book two had to be about rebellion. It wasn’t enough to have got Juniper and Bear to safety, this time things had to change from the inside. The rewilding had to reach the city too and Etienne was in the right place to show that. He could be part of the uprising.
Another thing that concerned me was having another journey. Juniper travels back to the city, for Etienne and for her beloved grandmother Annie-Rose. It couldn’t be a journey back-to-front from that first one, it had to be more succinct. Yet it’s a significant chunk of the story, I couldn’t fly over it either, or the balance would be all wrong. I ended up making it as much an interior journey for Juniper this time, as an actual, feet-pounding and blistering real one. She has to face up to what’s ahead: the darkness and brutality of the city, her guilt at dragging her dad into this undertaking, her worries for discovering the fate of her grandmother and best friend. And all the time, with Etienne’s point of view, we know Juniper’s journeying against the clock. Time is running out.
One last comment about seasons, something I always like to think about when I pick my next read! Where the World Turns Wild is set in autumn. My other two novels are set in summer (Between Sea and Sky) and winter (Beyond the Frozen Horizon). I was pleased this time to fill the spring gap and write When the Wild Calls just as the world is waking up from its winter sleep. To Juniper and Bear, the Wild is more beautiful than ever.
When the Wild Calls is written by Nicola Penfold and is published by Little Tiger.
