backstory and prequels

[marycatelli]

One thing you really can not evade with prequels, even if you kept things on a personal level.

And that is -- the backstory you already have plotted out.  Suppose you gave your hero's mentor a tragically murdered wife.  And then you do a prequel about the mentor.  You have to put in the wife.  And you have to murder her.  And while you can evade the matter, you really ought to develop her and make her sympathetic and have it be as tragic as you hinted at.  Because in the backstory, you only hint at things that will be much more dramatic, and excruciating, in the story itself, but we want the full scale of it that would justify the effect of it on the mentor, later.

Or the villain treacherously attacked his own men when he realized they would not support his revolt.  That will establish him as a villain of the first order of magnitude.  In the prequel, however, you have to show it in action.  And develop the betrayed men as characters so we feel the extent of the villainy.  And not give them any means of escape that preclude the events in later books -- and, in order to establish the depths of his villainy, probably none at all.  If you do that, you will have done the aesthetically correct thing, and I will approve, even if I want to murder you.  But if you wimp out. . . .

For some reason, the one point at which writers wimp out is when they depicted a character in an unhappy marriage.  In the prequel, you have to show how the character came to make such a stupid match.  I have yet to read an aesthetically satisfying book in which I was convinced that, yes, the character -- the same character we see in the latter books -- really did marry such a ill-suited spouse.

Comments

[lwe.livejournal.com]

As it happens, I've just been dealing with this -- I got an anthology invitation where the theme would be perfect for a prequel to my current series of novels. There are several references to a court scandal that seems perfect.

Except turning that scandal into a satisfying story is starting to look very tricky.

I have yet to read an aesthetically satisfying book in which I was convinced that, yes, the character -- the same character we see in the latter books -- really did marry such a ill-suited spouse.

Have you read C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series? Because he confronts this issue head-on. Having given Hornblower a horribly unsuitable first wife, he did not shirk showing how the marriage came about when he wrote the prequels.

So I'm not sure whether you haven't read it, or whether you found it aesthetically unsatisfying.

[marycatelli]

Unsatisfying.

In fact, as I recall, the very scene where they became engaged, as the end of one book, did not ring true to me.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What you say about the unhappy marriage, I suspect it's because the writer is stuck having to portray what will turn out to be a bad decision, but make it seem from the character's point of view like a reasonable decision, while not letting the readers be screaming at him. It's a part of the prequel that has its resolution in the next book (i.e., the book set further along the time line but written first), and yet, you want to make the story as independently satisfying as possible so.... as the writer, you have a big problem. For this book, the match must seem reasonable, but with hints of the problems that will make it an unhappy marriage further down the timeline.

One solution would be to make the plot that you cover in the prequel encompass the person realizing that they've made a big mistake.

Why do you feel like murdering authors who fulfill the requirements of a successful prequel?

[marycatelli]

Because they have done terrible things to nice people. And they have let the villains get away with it.

[marycatelli]

On realizing they've made a big mistake -- that might be a little tricky to turn into a satisfying if unhappy ending.