Stop With the Cliches!

Sucky Sequels

I'm sure we all read an amazing Wattpad book and thought boy, I wish there was a sequel, and what do you know, there is- BUT it resorted to being cheesy and packed with cliches!

1) Pointless Sequel.
We've all seen this in Wattpad books or movies or even TV shows having series sequels, yeah those are real if you've never heard of them.

The first book had a great ending that was satisfying and everything was answered, so why author do we need another book that doesn't add anything to the first story?

Obliviously that's not the case for all Wattpad books or movies, some of those things were designed to have sequel(s) because the plot is complex and one book isn't enough to solve it.

Getting back to why some sequels are pointless, not only do they absolutely add nothing for the first story but nobody asked for it! I say if the first book left room for a sequel do a sequel, if not don't do it.

2) It's boring, bad, and uninspired.

Believe me when I say this, most Wattpad books aren't that great but I can tell you there are plenty of good ones out there as well, but when you continue a book with a sequel your sequel must live up to the name of the first book, or be even better!

Having an original plot for a first book and doing pretty well on with a thousand views is awesome, but writing a sequel for it will automatically make it so it gets less views because not everyone wants a sequel to a perfectly good book.

What makes a sequel boring, first of all predictability makes a book super boring not just sequels!

Take the The Little Mermaid 2 for an example the plot was That Ariel's daughter wants to be a mermaid so she goes to a sea witch and gets's turned into one, but by doing that she puts everyone and danger so now she has to clean up her mess, sounds familiar? Well that's because it was the Plot if the Little Mermaid but reversed! You know what's going to happen: Fun adventures with cute forgettable animals, fuck up big time, have big battle scene that's not as thrilling as the one in the first movie, win because of plot armor, everyone's happy.

Also, zero conflicts makes a story very bland! Every chapter there has to to be an issue the characters are trying to solve, if it's all just fun and games, there's zero stakes which bores your audience away!

Stories have subplots that affect the overarching plot to keep the audience interested, use them wisely.

What makes a sequel bad and uninspired is relying on cliches I'll mention now.

3) New love interest in town.
Can't anyone have a perfectly fine way to end a book of the lovers being happy? Why throw them in some genre in the next book that is basically some ho or mean trying to claim the lover boy, that's disgraceful.

4) Stupid relationship drama.
This is so irritating. I read a book where a guy was a dragon but he loved a human girl how could turn into a dragon but he couldn't turn into a human, so he found a way to be a human so they could be together and she had the nerve to get mad at him and say he knew how to be a human but refused to! The female was so stupid and self centered that there was literally a sequel so they could actually date only for her to be a stuck bitch and not talk to him for five chapters when if she hadn't let her pride keep her from listening the poor boy wouldn't have suffered!
5) Misunderstandings in friendships
We all understand this one, a contrived way to incite drama for the sequel.

6) When the sequel is so bad now you hate the first book when you didn't initially.

I'm so serious about this cliche. I read a Wattpad book that had a good story about a kidnapped victim being stuck in his basement with two other girls trying to please him so he doesn't kill them. There was a critical error concerning the kidnapper's motivation but at the end of the day I liked the book and found it insightful with good lessons about how not everyone is treated fairly in life.

THEN, there was a sequel.. I read the description and I was unhappy that the synopsis was so cheesy it was unbelievable! The cover wasn't as impressive as the first and something didn't feel right, I ignored the sequel until my curiosity got the best of me since the kidnapper in the first book escaped in the end so there was a great opportunity for a thrilling sequel that would nicely draw the story to a nice close.

I was so wrong!

The sequel took a lonely mentally ill kidnapper into a fucking cartoon super villain. He kills almost everyone in way easily! He even kills two police officers! They didn't have guns because they're in England, but still! That is insulting that law enforcement highly trained professionals didn't even put up a fight in the slightest! They literally get killed within a few paragraphs!

There was so much plot armor around the kidnapper that he virtually gets away with everything until the final two chapters and the book was mostly in his perceptive which made everything worse!

Meanwhile two of the survivors of the first book come back and try to fight the serial kidnapper/killer! They go back to his basement without any problems sneak knives and a gun down there to literally fight him as if they could take him on!

He corners the two of them but his new friend who is on the survivors side shoots the kidnapper to death during the throw down that shouldn't have even happened!

What made the first book good was that it was realistic and humanized each character even the kidnapper, but here any sense of dignity the first book had was thrown out the window in the second book.

The second book's epilogue added insult to injury! I won't get into that but basically the second book was so bad I hated the original because that's where the idea of the sequel started.

That's all for today don't forget to add your own experiences with terrible sequels if you'd like.