Justine
asked
Sally Green:
When you started Half Bad, did you think at that time that it would be a trilogy? I always wonder how much of writing in trilogies is a product of publishers and marketing departments these days. It isn't that I mind having more books to read (not at all). Or is the trilogy something that you, as a writer, had in mind as you were writing. If that is the case, why?
Sally Green
Hi Justine, Good question.
When I came up with the idea for HALF BAD I did think it would be a trilogy from the start. This was well before I had an agent or a publishing deal. I can't really comment on what publishers or marketing departments want except that, as far as I can see, they want great books whether as stand-alones, trilogies or a series of seven-plus books.
My initial idea for HALF BAD was to show how perceptions can be wrong: I wanted to write the whole of the first book from the point of view of White Witches, showing them to be the goodies; then the second book would completely reverse that, and Nathan would go over to the Black Witch side and we'd see things from their point of view; and then the third book would somehow bring it all together and we'd see that neither side was all good or bad.
This sounded fine to me in theory but as I wrote HALF BAD I found that I couldn't keep to that initial idea and wanted to mix the perceptions up in the first book. But I still had the idea of the story arc for the three books (the arc of what would happen to Nathan) and I've stayed with that.
Sally
When I came up with the idea for HALF BAD I did think it would be a trilogy from the start. This was well before I had an agent or a publishing deal. I can't really comment on what publishers or marketing departments want except that, as far as I can see, they want great books whether as stand-alones, trilogies or a series of seven-plus books.
My initial idea for HALF BAD was to show how perceptions can be wrong: I wanted to write the whole of the first book from the point of view of White Witches, showing them to be the goodies; then the second book would completely reverse that, and Nathan would go over to the Black Witch side and we'd see things from their point of view; and then the third book would somehow bring it all together and we'd see that neither side was all good or bad.
This sounded fine to me in theory but as I wrote HALF BAD I found that I couldn't keep to that initial idea and wanted to mix the perceptions up in the first book. But I still had the idea of the story arc for the three books (the arc of what would happen to Nathan) and I've stayed with that.
Sally
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Dec 26, 2014 10:36AM · flag