DES MURPHY

. . . isn’t easy.

Love, Law & Anarchy evolved over several years, beginning out of a desire to write something but without any clear idea of where it would go. Along the way many drafts, characters and plot lines were abandoned, probably totaling more than the finished novel. I’ll admit that it wasn’t always easy to keep motivated to carry on writing – there were plenty of other distractions and demands on my time – but at some point something happened which energised me.

I had been working at developing the characters, in probably a piecemeal way, and was still seeing them as something like plot devices, details that may still be cut out if they didn’t work. The characters, however, didn’t see it that way and took control of the process, refusing to be expendable. They had, to me anyway, become so real and well rounded, that I felt that I had an obligation to them to write their lives into being and at the same time to have respect for their wishes and feelings. It really was a strange but very enjoyable sensation. There were times when I found myself thinking ‘No, Mike won’t like it when he finds out what I’ve got going on in his office’ or ‘What’s Sophie saying to her friends about being put in a tiny office with a smelly dog and a boss who’s always in the pub?’. Even though I knew of course that they were created entirely by me they still felt like real people with real lives outside of the story.

So, to come back to why writing a sequel isn’t easy. The process is entirely different. There is much less scope for evolution since the events in the sequel have to relate to the original and are in some ways constrained by the general form of the original. The characters already exist, any new ones have to be as fully formed as the others, and they all already have expectations and objections as to what they will be made to do. It’s an equally enjoyable experience and I’m really looking forward to finding out just what the f**k they all get up to!