The terrible retcon.
Yup, today’s subject is retconning. When you write a series of stories – or books, even – that feature the same characters, you may well develop new ideas. You may look back and say to yourself: “I can’t believe I ever wrote such schlock. I wish I could go back and get a do-over. I can think of a million ways to make this story better.”
How powerful is the temptation, when writing the next instalment in the series, to do some retconning? To invalidate previous writings and present your bold new vision of your creation? Speaking for myself, I’ve been fortunate in that I tend to still like what I wrote a while ago later. That, and I know that retconning is a very dangerous thing to do.
When you retcon, you are in danger of destroying the whole continuity you spent so much time creating. That, and the enjoyment of your reading audience. Remember them, the audience? I know an author should write for themselves, first. But it behooves us to always remember that you are writing so that other people can read. Tick them off too much, and they’ll stop reading. That kind of takes the point out of the whole activity, unless you have no intention of continuing to be published.
Well. There are techniques that resemble retconning, but are not nearly so destructive. Showing the same events the audience has read about from a different angle can be very effective. An example.
Say that the first story or book tells the tale of a band of heroic adventurers, who fight their way through Goblin-infested land to reach the castle of the Duke of Doom, a man known to associate with monsters.
A later story could tell the story of a land of peaceful Goblin-settlers thrown into chaos and horror when a band of murderers appears out of nowhere and slaughters its way through the countryside in order to reach and assassinate the beloved Duke, founder of the Goblin lands. It’s interesting, it may bring the readers to view the story world in a new way – and if you do it well, you don’t need to contradict your previous work even once.
Don’t retcon. Don’t deconstruct your old work because you have new ideas. That’s what writing new and unrelated stories is for. Shaking things up is fine, breaking them and reassembling the pieces is not. I say this not just as an aspiring author, but as a fervent reader. Don’t. o_o