A Question of Pacing - Trilogy or Quadrilogy - Cluttered Story
So I recently had a discussion with a reader and who pointed out a significant flaw in my work that I hadn't seen.
When I first started writing my series, I had a trilogy in mind - based on exploring an alien species and the world they live on as well as our cultural imperialism over them. Think Avatar but WAY more in depth and critical of humanity's flaws. Each was supposed to explore the culture, mores and point of view of one of the subspecies. Decent idea, right? Especially if I could tie a narrative together that, hey, they know a lot of things that we don't and maybe they don't like us treating them like savage animals.
The thing is, readers don't care about non-human perspectives, so the first book left the realm of exploring a culture and entered humanity's situation on their new world. And that's entirely what it is. The story is compelling enough, the themes strong and the characters are developing nicely.
The problem comes in the fact that it IS going to be a series and a totally human-centered book leading off a series about aliens (even if it is from the viewpoint of these human characters) seems... hokey. It seems as though I will be forcing a story into a spot where it is unnecessary.
Thus I hit my conundrum. Do I try to meld this story, powerful and complete as it is, with the first culture, thus touching off the entire quadrilogy, now trilogy's, narrative? Or is there not space in a single book for that? Do I risk losing people with an over-complicated book? Can two entire objectives exist in a single narrative?
TL;DR Halp please. I'm lost and frightened.
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1 answer
The thing is, readers don't care about non-human perspectives,
If you believe that, then why in the world would they buy your next three books? You have essentially told us that, you believe so strongly that you can't write a compelling story from an alien perspective, that you wrote an entire book from the human perspective instead!
The story you are "forcing" is the non-human stories you had hoped to write, but don't really believe in enough to write.
I suggest if you do anything other than publish the book you HAVE written, you revise it to maintain the human point of view but make the aliens more activist and prominent and rebelling. The civil rights of 1960's America, the taking of Native lands, with protests, strikes, brutality, imprisonments, despair, arson and rebellion.
Make your humans do what we assholes do, dehumanize people and treat them like garbage usually for exploitation and money and stealing their assets. And like we humans do, have some enlightened characters that can see that injustice and despair over their lack of power to stop it.
Except we have FTL spaceships and teleporters and replicators! (That's how Star Trek did the same thing, on many episodes.)
Your suggestions for alteration sound like messing up a good book. Learn the lesson you yourself wrote: Readers don't care about non-human perspectives. At least you couldn't get them to care, and that is all that counts. Accept it and figure out how to make your criticisms with a human perspective.
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