The trouble with most of my Make This More Awesome! ideas is that they usually render a majority of previous work null.
I mean… right, this is by necessity going to involve a lot of in-depth examples so I’ll just put a cut right here for all of your sakes.
One of my old projects (generally referred to as Construct, I absolutely 100% suck at titles forever) has been suffering from… I don’t know how to describe it but it’s something that seems to happen a lot to older writing. It’s a tone problem, partially. They feel like… um… I don’t know if any of you have read Mike Resnick but I utterly loathe everything he’s ever done and it’s largely due to the fact that it feels like my old stuff that I’m trying to improve. And, you know, if I, an unpublished amateur, can tell that this is a flaw that needs correction then how dare you win countless Hugos for it etc etc etc.
I guess I could call it a certain shallowness. Hrgh. Um. I guess on the whole it’s a sort of overly practicalized speculative element? There’s fantasy or scifi but it’s without the sense of difference that it really ought to have. There seems to be a certain lack of ability on the part of the author to form a different way of looking at the world, so the speculative element just ends up as a thin veneer because they can’t write it as part of a fully realized universe.
I really, really hope that makes any sense at all.
So there’s Construct. Basically, these two people of indeterminate job description (I was having trouble with that even before I recognized the tone problem) stumble onto a power-struggle situation with a young girl as its unwitting focus, and one side of it has provided her with a creepy golem bodyguard (the titular Construct, who is MY FAVOURITE). And this has all been just sort of planted into an otherwise normal universe. Hence the tone problem: the Construct is genuinely complex and bizarre but he’s just sort of plopped into things and the excuses for him to exist are pretty poorly realized. The situation itself is still extremely shallow.
After I started the latest season of Doctor Who it occurred to me that if I copied elements of the Silence over onto him that would probably help to create the sort of atmosphere that I feel he really wants, but that’s clearly not going to do much for everything else. There’s still, for instance, Lizzie, his charge, who is largely unaffected by his presence and the fact that he’s been her sole caretaker for like two years. My initial intention was to imply that she’s developing mildly sociopathic tendencies, but in practical terms she still does things like tell the Construct not to kill people without reason, or grow up to have perfectly functional relationships, because again I wasn’t willing to fully explore what the actual consequences of the Construct would be.
I can fix that, though, maybe stretch out the timeline so he appears to her at five instead of eight, devote more time to fleshing out their relationship and Lizzie’s behaviour. But then - whoops! - now the original cause for his appearance is in question. The power struggle element was always pretty flimsy but now it’s flimsy in a way that’s directly at odds with the tone I’m trying to build. And the two interlopers also now don’t fit, their subplot is full of me pulling morality saves because I wasn’t comfortable with doing what my plot (weak though it was) would actually require.
So I’ve gone from having a pretty shoddy but still complete novel-length plot to having two characters I really like and fuck-all else besides knowing that the way I developed it all originally (finding elaborate excuses to showcase all the stuff I liked about the character concepts) is inherently flawed and therefore unusable.
Sometimes I get lucky. My recent revelation about RafeDraft was just that it needs a significant tone shift to justify the kind of scattered, Mechanique-esque narration that’s probably the only way to do it justice and stop me from hating everything, but even that requires completely rewriting a good 60k of existing manuscript and blargh. A lot of the problem is that I just don’t know right now how to create new stuff, my brain only wants to go back and edit and improve right now, and while that’s all well and good it’s also keeping me from actually getting to write anything.
