Dry old literary theory.
Sep. 5th, 2007 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseWell, at least I'm consistent.
Some time ago I found a solution to an embarrassing novel I wrote as a teenager whose broad plot outline and major characters had, nonetheless, become part of my Imaginary World's canonical history. (It was called A Lone Swallow and it was all about taking down a Bad King and his Badder Baddy-bad Lords. With a romance or two in the middle, and a Sleeping Prince, and an Invisible Princess stuffed in a tower.)
I made it the backstory of a novella set about three generations later*. (If you were one of the 22 people who actually bought a copy of the Jintsu text, that's the novella).
I seem to be doing exactly the same thing over again. This time, actually, I'm using the same character who does through a (different) bad novel (Actually this one was unfinished, but that's okay. Parts of it were like bad slashfic for the really kinky edge of the fangirl crowd. And I *don't* mean that in the nicest possible way.) I just had to move him to entirely the wrong continent, a few years on, while he's trying to put the pieces together when the pieces aren't even really there all the time.
This finally revealed what might be the exact problem with the two original works. They're set in the same country, three generations apart, yes. But, stripped of immediacy and the details of the characters, they're essentially exactly the same plot. Right down to the bloody dancing.
That's a few too many "The same things". Admittedly, the second, which has been tweaked and taken seriously rather more recently, grew more ambitious in theme and scope; it was meant to be what happens when a prophecy is derailed, badly, where the first was a typical Overthrow the Bad King. It's still polishing something I tried to come up with when I was fourteen and Melodrama sounded like a Good Thing.
Still. I'm just as glad they got relegated to backstory, and in different ways.
But I noticed something else; among my planned novels are the stories of the generation *before* and the generation *between*, as those stories are still viable living things without egregious melodrama, plot holes you could drive a truck through, and anachronisms that would make the truck look like it belonged there. (Also, they're not the same story.) Plus I have shorter works, finished and otherwise, filling in other sides. If I should finish all the others in publishable ways (Not gonna happen - something else is bound to go "clunk" and then go "trunk"), there will be these two lacunae in the story, filled out on all sides by other stories leading to them and from them, but never ever told directly. Because you just know that's the sort of thing people write literary papers about, and they just don't like answers like, "I did write it. I was fourteen. Nuff said."
(I started writing about the event, stopped for sleep. May post that tomorrow. Short version: mostly good. Not so sure about the harmless. I am now Herald, which They decided automatically makes me Evil. But since I'm not a Sith, They decided I was a witch -- Halloween and medieval susperstition kind, not Wiccan. Wearing my pretty cross didn't change Their minds, nor did proving I don't melt by swimming in the lake and sitting in the rain, nor the undeniable fact that I weigh more than a duck. And I refuse to throw myself on the fire. They, in this case, is mostly Tao_of_erec .)
Some time ago I found a solution to an embarrassing novel I wrote as a teenager whose broad plot outline and major characters had, nonetheless, become part of my Imaginary World's canonical history. (It was called A Lone Swallow and it was all about taking down a Bad King and his Badder Baddy-bad Lords. With a romance or two in the middle, and a Sleeping Prince, and an Invisible Princess stuffed in a tower.)
I made it the backstory of a novella set about three generations later*. (If you were one of the 22 people who actually bought a copy of the Jintsu text, that's the novella).
I seem to be doing exactly the same thing over again. This time, actually, I'm using the same character who does through a (different) bad novel (Actually this one was unfinished, but that's okay. Parts of it were like bad slashfic for the really kinky edge of the fangirl crowd. And I *don't* mean that in the nicest possible way.) I just had to move him to entirely the wrong continent, a few years on, while he's trying to put the pieces together when the pieces aren't even really there all the time.
This finally revealed what might be the exact problem with the two original works. They're set in the same country, three generations apart, yes. But, stripped of immediacy and the details of the characters, they're essentially exactly the same plot. Right down to the bloody dancing.
That's a few too many "The same things". Admittedly, the second, which has been tweaked and taken seriously rather more recently, grew more ambitious in theme and scope; it was meant to be what happens when a prophecy is derailed, badly, where the first was a typical Overthrow the Bad King. It's still polishing something I tried to come up with when I was fourteen and Melodrama sounded like a Good Thing.
Still. I'm just as glad they got relegated to backstory, and in different ways.
But I noticed something else; among my planned novels are the stories of the generation *before* and the generation *between*, as those stories are still viable living things without egregious melodrama, plot holes you could drive a truck through, and anachronisms that would make the truck look like it belonged there. (Also, they're not the same story.) Plus I have shorter works, finished and otherwise, filling in other sides. If I should finish all the others in publishable ways (Not gonna happen - something else is bound to go "clunk" and then go "trunk"), there will be these two lacunae in the story, filled out on all sides by other stories leading to them and from them, but never ever told directly. Because you just know that's the sort of thing people write literary papers about, and they just don't like answers like, "I did write it. I was fourteen. Nuff said."
(I started writing about the event, stopped for sleep. May post that tomorrow. Short version: mostly good. Not so sure about the harmless. I am now Herald, which They decided automatically makes me Evil. But since I'm not a Sith, They decided I was a witch -- Halloween and medieval susperstition kind, not Wiccan. Wearing my pretty cross didn't change Their minds, nor did proving I don't melt by swimming in the lake and sitting in the rain, nor the undeniable fact that I weigh more than a duck. And I refuse to throw myself on the fire. They, in this case, is mostly Tao_of_erec .)
