The first novel was born when a burst of inspiration met a Masters in Creative Writing deadline. But Sharon Lam has found everything from self doubt to Adam Sandler will get in the way of the second book.

It is impossible to write a second novel. After all, you just published your first novel, then realise that “just” is actually three years ago, and you haven’t done shit. That’s not to say you haven’t thought about another novel. Not during the first year, of course. The first year after publishing a novel you can rest easy, you owe the world nothing, it’s 365 days of long-haul flight mentality. More Pringles please. Yes, an Adam Sandler movie does sound great right now. A little known but completely true fact is that with each ISBN to your name, you get one year judgment-free where you can watch as many Adam Sandler movies as you want and your cred won’t go down. Even if you don’t like Adam Sandler movies, you may as well watch them now while you can, so you do.

The second year you stop rewatching Big Daddy and relearn how to read. You look for literary seeds. While you’re looking for your phone, you’re also looking for your new novel. Is It In My Bag – it’s not there, she thought, she had to find it… before The Others find it. On the Floor – it’s about surfaces… the surface of life. In the residual glow of debut novel delusion, every idea seems good. The best one you have is about a government development which becomes delayed after the construction site becomes plagued by birds so the government makes birds illegal. Yeah, you think, this is great. It’ll write itself. Another year passes. It hasn’t written itself. And while it’s not exactly birds, the government has made boars illegal. You’ve procrastinated so long that life has imitated art before you even made the art.

So now here you are, in the third year. You feel that your single published novel was a fluke and are worried that if you try to write a second you’ll prove yourself right. After all, you arrived at your first novel by rolling down the path of least resistance at the time – you didn’t want to get a job, so you applied to writing school. It worked, you were accepted and bought yourself another year, another Master’s degree, two in a row, which unfortunately you did not get for the price of one. You have no tertiary sanctuary now, there is literally no external reason to write another book. 

“The obvious difference is that all the heat and light and pressure of our MA year at the IIML is missing,” Clare Moleta, author of Unsheltered (2021), writes to you. You worked on your first drafts of your first novels together in the same cohort. “The community, the deadlines, the constant exposure to craft and ideas… without that collective engine, a book is just one more thing you’re trying to fit into your life, on your own. A writer I admire told me recently that he reckons, after the first one, writing novels is mostly willpower.” 

That’s the thing about a second novel — you’ve already done one. Who climbs Everest twice? “And when you finally get to the end, you think, OK, now I know how to write a book. But actually what you know is how to write that book. It doesn’t take care of the next one,” Clare writes. She also mentions that she started her second novel while revising her first novel, and finished the first draft a couple of months ago, a process of four years vs eight months. 

You ask some other novelists who have written and published not only a second novel, but thirds, fourths, sixths. Brannavan Gnanalingam, most recently of Slow Down, You’re Here (2022), tells you that his second attempt was a “dud”, and a “failure in all respects”. And so he “threw it in the bin. Moved to Paris. Chatted to writers. And wrote my actual second novel in the second person with much more purpose and precision.” This would become You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here (2013), which Brannavan also says is his favourite. His discarded second novel, “is never to be seen/read again, and if anyone tries to publish it Harper Lee style after my death, I firmly and on the record state, I disavow it.” 

Murdoch Stephens, most recently of Down from Upland (2022), wrote his second novel under a pseudonym. He writes that this “took me out of writing a traditional novel structure and allowed me to write through the voice of a character. Just to be clear: I wasn’t hiding behind anonymity, but was creating a world through the voice of a character-as-author”. Murdoch also wrote “a PhD, an academic book, tonnes of articles including for The Spinoff, and then a popular non-fiction book really helped me think through writing as a broad vocation.” 

Everyone’s words are reassuring to you. You realise how disconnected from people you’ve been, and how that’s also an important part of writing. Writing a second novel isn’t impossible, it just takes time and work (ugh!). But false starts, traversing other mediums, a change in tools, are also part of the process. Perhaps in your three years you’ve already begun without knowing it. And now you have some solid tips. You will first knock out that “modern” (see: unsellable) children’s book you’ve been sitting on, move to Paris, and start writing under the name “Adam Sandler”.

Then all you need is a new idea, since you’ve scrapped the illegal bird idea because it’s not as fun in illegal boar reality. It’s hard to think of an idea though when nothing has really ever happened to you. You are Charlie Bucket’s grandparents who stayed in bed, Holden Caulfield’s unnamed cousin, the not that hungry caterpillar. Of course, it’s fiction, everything is made up. But there needs to be a bigger truth behind the stuff you make up, otherwise all you’re writing is an episode of the Big Bang Theory. You’re aware that whatever truth you’ve mustered throughout your cushy life was already milked and re-milked for your first novel. Perhaps you need to actually live more first? But how do you do that when you don’t have any incentive to steal a top government document, nor some kind of cursed medallion, nor are you the doppelganger of an Italian popstar? 

However you find an idea, you can then start writing. Originally you wanted to finish another novel in your twenties but time is running out, so maybe you should just wait for your thirties. Or forties, so it starts with an even number? Maybe you’ll have outgrown TV and sleeping by then. You also still need to get through what they call “severe depressive episodes” where for weeks at a time you can’t even see tomorrow. And perhaps you should also clean the toilet and do the laundry first so you won’t have distractions later. And then once you’ve done that, all you need to do is just sit down for half an hour each day to work on it and wait for the rhythm and habit to kick in and soon you’ll be writing for an hour or two a day but not right now because you’re a bit sleepy and you need to catch up on post-episode discussions about your shows on Reddit.

Above all, it still feels impossible to write a second novel because the sieve-wielding person in charge of collecting water from the well of potential is once again out to sabotage you. You think they’re being protective, preventing your failure by preventing your attempt. That person is of course, you, and you can’t just go and murder them because you’d be killing yourself as well – wait! That could be a novel! And then you realise that it already is, and Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote it 176 years ago.