Apr 17 2009
Advice to Novelists: No Prequels
When you’re querying your book, please do not mention that you’re thinking about a prequel. Mentioning a prequel suggests that you don’t really know when the story starts. It also suggests that you might leave out crucial information so that you can use it for the prequel. Finally, I’d regard it as a warning flag that the chronology of the series will be confusing and hard to follow. Ick. If you’d like to discuss a prequel with your publisher, please do so after the first book has sold well.
It’s always best to start from the beginning. For example, the Dragon Ball saga goes from Goku’s childhood to him being a grandpa. Fans who grew up with the series feel like they’ve lived DBZ. An experience like that is eternal and timeless. Star Trek also did this, but the characters changed. George Lucas missed this opportunity and look how Star Wars ended up.
Also, another problems about prequels is that they (unlike sequels) are usually tightly limited by what the readers already know. For example, in Star Wars, we already knew that Anakin was going to go bad, that the Chancellor would become the Emperor, that Yoda would survive, that Obi-Wan would survive, etc. In contrast, a sequel has a lot more room to develop the series.
^true.
This is taken to the extreme in the new TV show Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Not only do most of the characters have invincible plot armour (with a few exceptions, making Ahsoka vs. Ventress fights interesting, and irritating me to no end when Jar Jar doesn’t die), but we have to try to accept Anakin as the hero, knowing full well that he’s eventually going to kill them all.
In the above case, you kinda have to wonder whether they’d get more people complaining if they ignored the films entirely or stuck to them. Unless they killed off JarJar, in which case everyone would be happy.
They need to stick to the films, no question. If they didn’t it wouldn’t be considered ‘canon’, which, at this point, it is.
But Goddammit, can’t they kill off Jar Jar? No! Instead, they devote entire episodes to him!
I think they need to stick to the films because otherwise it’d be too confusing and possibly traumatizing for younger viewers. “Yoda, get up. You’re not really dead. Yoda!?!”
Exactly. Although I wouldn’t mind ‘Jar Jar, don’t get up. You’re not really alive. Jar Jar!?!’
“Irritating me to no end when Jar Jar doesn’t die”.
Watch this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDHskF-DCnc
At some point there is a very funny segment about Jar Jar and Darth Vader.
I’ve written a couple of prequel-esque short stories for my story. I really don’t think I could actually put them in anywhere (since they mostly take place about one thousand years prior), but at the same time I like to flesh out the past and history of my story, and if I have a bout of writer’s block (though I know what I’m doing with my book, and the next couple, sometimes I have a hard time putting it into words).
Really, though, are short stories set in the past an issue? ‘Cause if they are, I’ve written multiple prequels.
“Really, though, are short stories set in the past an issue? ‘Cause if they are, I’ve written multiple prequels.” When you’re pitching a work, I wouldn’t recommend mentioning any prequels. I’d recommend crossing that bridge when you get to it.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be pitching those short stories. Nobody would really care about what happened a thousand years ago before knowing what’s going on currently. It wouldn’t even be necessary to read the short stories to understand what’s going on.
See, my book would pretty much explain it in a paragraph or two, so what the short stories are for is to tell it from the point of view of the ones who were there all those years ago. They bring a deeper understanding that can’t be described by someone giving a tidbit of a history lesson.
I think that bodes well. As long as the original work can stand on its own and you’re not pitching it with the prequel(s), there’s no way the prequel could affect the publishability of the original.