Writing duologies

They trick me every time

I used to think that writing a duology must be easier than writing a trilogy. After all, they’re only two books, rather than three!

But now, having (mostly) completed my second duology, I’m certain I was wrong.

I can’t speak for other authors, but my experience with writing duologies has gone something like this:

• First book — fun. Not easy, because writing is never easy, but relatively few crying days.

• Second book — emotional crisis, how do books, starting over, wondering if it’s too late to make it a trilogy, starting over again, why are books, wondering if it’s too late to declare book 1 was a standalone even though it had a cliffhanger ending, multiple crying days.

That was the process with THE ORPHAN QUEEN and THE MIRROR KING. And sure enough it was the process with NIGHTRENDER and DAWNBREAKER.

Okay, DAWNBREAKER didn’t require a ton of starting over, at least, but that’s because I caught it early and did the rewriting before I finished the first draft.

I don’t have any scientific evidence to back this up, but I think at least part of the challenge of duologies comes from the structure.

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With trilogies, the structure is simple.

You have a beginning, middle, and end.

The first book is a beginning. The second book is a middle. And the third book is an end.

And in each book, you have a beginning, middle, and end.

In duologies, you have . . . a beginning book. And an end book.

The middle of the story is in the second part of book 1 and the first part of book 2. The end of book 1 is your midpoint. The beginning of book 2 is still your midpoint, just the other side of it.

But each book still has to have an identifiable beginning, middle, and end.

It makes my brain hurt.

This is how I usually wind up backing the opening of book 2 all the way to the ending of book 1 — so I can just write the other side of that moment. You can see it clearly in THE ORPHAN QUEEN and THE MIRROR KING. In NIGHTRENDER and DAWNBREAKER, it’ll be a little less obvious, since there are multiple points of view. But it’s there.

Obviously this won’t stop me from writing another duology one day. As hard as the second books are, I still like the structure of the series. And I like that readers don’t have to wait years and years to finish the whole story.

I’m sure that next time I start one, I’ll point to DAWNBREAKER and explain to my agent that that book didn’t cause me to have a breakdown on the phone with my editor, eat half a cheesecake in complete despair, and reconsider whether I would ever write anything again. (Looking at you, THE MIRROR KING.) So clearly I learned something that I can carry to a new duology! And she will pretend to agree with me, even though she’ll be remembering all the effort it took to wrangle DAWNBREAKER into shape.

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Have you written a duology? How do you feel about them? And is the second one always just unreasonably hard for you, too?