Writing Report March 18, 2020

At a certain point you just realize an idea is D.O.A. and bury it.  (Or leave it where you can find it and cut off big hunks of it for another story ala Frankenstein; we possess neither pride nor shame here, much less squeamishness.)

My Q’a story that I was working on since February resolutely failed to jell, and in looking over my latest draft I quickly figured out why:  There’s nothing original in it.

Now, by that I don’t mean either my other two Q’a stories are original ins the sui generis sense (heavens, no; I’m smacking you in the face with big slabs of Robert E. Howard and Karl Edward Wagner and Talbot Mundy all the way through), the but elements within them were unique to each story (Q’a and her weapon excepted, of course).

But my Q’a prequel is just too much of a reiteration of things and scenes I’d already done in “Q’a The Librarian” and my second as-yet-to-be-published story, sooooo…

…no… 

The problem with prequels is that they always undercut the original (looking at you, G. Lucas!).

My story’s setting and certain supporting characters and set pieces are okay, but the rest of it reads as a pale, lifeless imitation of Q’a, so I ditched it.

“Q’a The Librarian” starts us off at a low point in her life and forces her to make a choice that sets her on the path to the three sequels.

Backing up and doing a prequel is just wheel spinning; it leaves her at no better a position that when the story starts, and if a character isn’t going to change and grow, what purpose do they serve?

So as I’ve said oft times before, when you realize you’ve written yourself into a dead end, just give up and start afresh.*

I’ll get something else up on its feet this week, but I just don’t feel compelled to deliver hackwork just to say I wrote something.**

© Buzz Dixon

*  Some day I’ll elaborate on the difference between writing yourself into a corner, writing yourself down a blind alley, and writing yourself into a dead end.

** Actually, today I’ve written three fictoids after abandoning the Q’a prequel, despite being stalled on writing them since back in February when my longer story started going south.