Sequels and Prequels

[rowyn]

When I think about "seeing more" of my favorite characters or settings, I always want to know: What happens next?

Although I've read, and watched, plenty of prequels, part of me is always a little disappointed by them. I don't want to know what's gone before. I don't want to see the edges of the story filled in, to see what was happening to those characters when the camera was following this character. I want to move forward, to get the answer to And then?

In a similar vein, I dislike it when authors give spoilers for their own works. Diana Wynne Jones, dearly though I love her work, does that way too often. She'll have a first-person narrator who's supposedly writing this book after the fact, and keeps sprinkling in tidbits about how things turn out. Stop that! I don't want to know how it ends until it ends! Oddly, though, flashbacks within a text don't bother me, as long as it's not "three-fourths of the book is one long flashback".

Anyway, I'm curious now: how many other people feel the same way? When you've got a character you like, are you as happy to see a prequel as a sequel? Or do you prefer one over the other? What about the foreshadowing-by-sledgehammer that some authors like? How much do spoilers spoil it for you?

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

There's one instance where I like--and even require of most authors--foreshadowing: when the book's a tragedy. I don't like reading a book that looks like it's going to have a happy ending until we reach the end and suddenly everything goes to Hades in a handbasket and instead of happily ever after, everyone dies and life is pointless.

This is one of the reasons I am planning to never read another Douglas Adams novel.

Otherwise, I like sequels and prequels just fine, as long as there's enough story to be told during them to justify them.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

That's something I've struggled with in the past. (Okay, maybe "struggled" is too strong a word.) Back when I was in high school, I was obsessed with reading every science fiction book in the school library. (There weren't all that many, really. It was a small school.) It seemed like I had a really lousy streak; not every book I read had a tragic ending, but the majority of them did. And some of them were really wallowing in the angst, with Shakespearean pile-up-the-bodies endings. More than one of them ended up in the depicted or implied destruction of Earth and/or the human race, despite the best efforts of the heroes. (And, there seemed to be a common theme of "no good deed goes unpunished".) I think it was either just a phenomenal fluke, or else whoever was in charge of stocking the library had a really twisted sense of humor.

I wasn't too happy with those books. I didn't think highly of the author. But, still, it had an unforeseen side effect: When I finally read another book that ended up having a happy ending, it wasn't something I was expecting to be a foregone conclusion. It had been established to me that, yes, it is possible for a novel to have an unhappy ending, even when there are all the cliches that seem to point to the final confrontation in which the hero will at last prevail.

I didn't like the books with these particular unhappy endings, for various reasons (beyond just the fact that they ended unhappily) ... but they served a perhaps unintended purpose of making me appreciate a book with a happy ending as a little more special for the contrast.

Hmm.

For some reason, my logic reminds me of the stupid joke about the man who keeps hitting himself in the head with a hammer. When asked why he's doing it, he says, "Because it feels so good when I stop!"

[rowyn]

That's an interesting notion; I hadn't thought of it in that context before. How 'heavy-handed' do you like the foreshadowing in a tragedy to be? Some examples:

The Lord of the Rings has a basically happy ending, but there's ample foreshadowing to suggest things could go badly. I think Tolkein could have pulled off a tragic ending (say, sans Gollum's actions at Mount Doom) without much alteration to the lead-up.

Conversely, "King Lear" is famous as a tragedy, but at various points in time it's been played with a happy ending. If you've read the play, it's easy to see how this is done, because there's a point just before the end where all the major issues have been resolved and it looks like it's going to be a happy ending. The final tragic ending practically comes out of nowhere. ("Ran", Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of "King Lear", does a much better job with the subject material, IMHO, including foreshadowing the ending.)

I agree that it's frustrating to have tragedy strike from nowhere, on the one hand. On the other, I do like the idea that a book can go either way, too. I like that element of suspense, and there's something appealing about the idea that those characters going "up against overwhelming odds" can get overwhelmed, every now and again. And while I want that to be suggested as a possibility, I don't want the kind of heavy-handed this-is-how-it's-going-to-be foreshadowing that some authors use. (Page 10: "Oh, how terrible his fate will be in the end, our poor hero, but he does not know this now, as he enters nursery school.")

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I want characters to have challenges and hardships. I want them to occasionally suffer. But if all their suffering, if all the terrible things they endure and that scar them are all in vain, I want to know it from the beginning.

For me there's a big difference between instances of overwhelming within the story, and the entire story itself being pointlessly depressing.

How heavy-handed the foreshadowing should be depends on just how tragic the book's going to be. If the entire end is a downer, I want to know almost immediately. If the ending's just a minor sour note, then it can be a lot lighter throughout the narrative.

I have experienced first hand what readers do to you when your book ends tragically without warning. It doesn't matter if they say they like tragedy, it's pretty clear when they fling curses and pages at you that they don't like to be caught out with a "everything was meaningless in the end" ending. :,