The Promise of a Series: Writing the Book Uncle Trilogy
When Jenn Bailey contemplated a chapter book series about a character she’d only intended to write a single picture book about, she asked herself these questions:
Was my character big enough? Did he have more (and more) to share about himself? And in a unique way?
I worried that Anil, the third of my trio of characters from Book Uncle and Me, who needed to be the subject of Book 3, would be tough to pin down. When I wrote him as a secondary character, first in Book Uncle and Me and then, more than ten years later, in Birds on the Brain, I had to admit that what I had on my hands was a lad of few words.
So I reread the first two books to understand what I already knew about him and to get a sense of what I’d need the writing of this third book to reveal. I found that Anil is:
a karate enthusiast
an early believer in the promise of solar energy
quiet, tries to avoid conflict when he can
follows rules
likes to take his time thinking about things
Finding an inner contradiction in a character you’ve already written feels like a gift, as if you knew more than you realized you did. Here I had a boy who was both a martial arts practitioner and a peacemaker. He took his karate sensei’s injunction seriously: “Best fight, no fight.” And he wasn't too keen on drawing attention to himself. It was why he’d fallen so easily into the role of helper and friend to Yasmin in Book 1 and Reeni in Book 2. It was also why they found it so easy to overlook his ideas and opinions in order to advance their own. He was easygoing enough that mostly, he let them.
Now I had to find a storyline that would force Anil to look outside himself, as Book Uncle’s woes had done for Yasmin, and the unexpected nesting bird had done for Reeni. And for that I had to turn back to Anil.
To return to Jenn Bailey’s framing of this series challenge, did Anil have more (and more) to share about himself? It turned out he did.
It turned out that in learning to speak up and speak out, he also had to learn to listen, and he found out about second chances—getting them, but also giving them.
And I turned to the setting. Book 1 is in and around the kids’ neighbourhood. Book 2 made me create a pathway between two apartment buildings and led me to the rooftops of both. Now, by taking Anil on a field trip and placing him on a seashore that needed a cleanup, I found out more about him. I could pretend I was along for the field trip and was observing him, a kind of imaginary plein aire sketching trip, if you will.
I noticed that this kid whose karate enthusiasm gave order to his world also had a latent capacity to embrace new ideas that didn't fit with his. He could be generous when others around him were dealing with problems outside his own experience. The old Anil might have shut them out. By the time I was done with The Sunshine Project, the new Anil had learned a thing or two about chasing down opposition and confronting it.
Working with the Indian edition of the book led me to an interesting perspective. Where Julianna Swaney leaned into Anil planting mangrove saplings on the seashore, Indian illustrator Chetan Sharma saw karate as a part of Anil’s spiritual development and was determined to make sure that aspect of him found center stage on the cover. In truth, I hadn't thought of Anil as having a spiritual element to him, but I loved finding out that the illustrator felt as strongly about my character as I did. I kept this element of Anil in my mind as we worked on the very last copyedits of both editions, more or less simultaneously. It really helped him grow.
A trilogy promises connections between the books. I did my best to refer to events in Books 1 and 2 without the storyline being dependent on them. It also promises an ending. It’s possible the ending of this book, with its wildly flying seed-clusters on the beach, and the children running with the wind in their faces, has a meaning I didn’t understand when I wrote it. Maybe those unruly seedheads are a metaphor for the children’s lives as they run off the page. Who knows? I’m just the writer.
