Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

Prequels are dangerous because you are boxed in by what went before. Sometimes even when it's long before, so that things don't have to go to hell in a handbasket to start up the sequel.

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Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
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A good rule. But it does raise the question of exactly how medias you want your res.

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Sometimes, of course, you're not boxed in.  Because you deliberately left a mystery about what happened.  Did the hero escape the tower's fall?  (And is that gray-bearded man him?)  Who really murdered the man that Jack was executed for killing?  Which prince really had been named the king's heir?

And those are exactly the ones where prequels are most intensely craved among the fans -- and which bring the greater danger.  Leaving aside disappointing fans who wanted it to go the other way, there is the aesthetic problem of stripping the mystery away.  There was, after all, the reason why you put in there in the first place.  (Or so I hope.)  It can add a tragic doubt and uncertainty to the characters' surroundings, and so make all their choices that much more difficult.

The first problem is making the resolution of the mystery as dramatic -- no, more dramatic, than the mystery itself.  A common problem with books, but here, the mystery has had more time to build and take on significance.

And the resolution at the end of the book doesn't have quite the potential to cast a retrospective light on the events of the books that came chronologically after.  If Prince John really was the heir, it makes Princess Jane's followers' noble attempts to put her on the throne look less noble, that you know they were suckered by a con.

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.

is that they end by going to hell in a handbasket.

All right, that's a trifle hyperbolic.  A prequel that is not just a work set in the same world, earlier, but a book leading up to the events of the first work, and explaining how the gone-to-hell-in-a-handbasket situation that opened it came to be, will.

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