THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA IN THEORY (but not in practice)

So, why isn’t the book finished?

Simple.

The idea of a magic heavy book, while a good one, still needs a decent plot and character evolution. On the plot front, the actual story—lifted it must be clear from Sleeping Beauty—failed to have all the necessary ingredients. Basically, the problem came from trying to adhere too closely to the basic fairy tale rather than simply using the idea as a point of departure. Consequently, it suffers from too many stale tropes. The stepmother, for instance, is a staple of fairy tales but is so worn out in fantasy that I should have known it would bomb. But how else was I going to shift the Aurora’s curse from one of the “witches” (well, I reamde them into magicians, but it didn’t change the premise too much) to another person who had a motive to want to harm the princess.

Enter the wicked stepmother. You can see how cringeworthy this all became as the writing progressed.

As if that was the only problem, I also came to realise that the characters mostly were cardboard cutouts and lacked proper motivation for what they did. Not all, but enough to make me look sceptically at my cast. Why wouldn’t Marlein confront the source of Aurora’s curse with the king rather than sneak around the castle doing what, exactly?

There are other problems here, too. But I won’t elucidate these.

Now, it’s not all bad. I think the opening isn’t bad and it works fine (pace the above) until we get past the first plot point. But after that?

I put in a few too many poorly constructed and thought out plot points and characters. It would have been throwing good effort after bad if I’d actually finished it. But I did write quite a bit before I came to my senses and that is perhaps why I stopped and took a look around and the book stopped. Dead.

There is a positive lesson here. I know many others have written about failed projects. They end up in the writer’s bottom drawer, so to speak. They are part of the learning process and the honing necessary to produce a decent story with interesting characters that isn’t simply a tired rehash of old cliches from other books.

In my defence, I think all authors have to fail a bit; perhaps most of the time even. Why? You have to try things to see if they work. To paraphrase Edison: “I have not failed, I have found ten thousand ways in which it won’t work.”