What Kind of Story Do You Want to Create?

Looking at some films and books it is easy to see that they struggle for identity. For me, the most glaring and obvious example of this is the 2008 film The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. The 150-minute film had a massive budget, a talented cast, and great special effects for its era. When I first saw this film as a kid, I really liked it, although I always felt something was a bit off. I could not place my finger on it back then, but I can now. Watching the film as an adult it becomes easy to detect a story that is on the fence between a children's movie and an adult fantasy. Although almost everything else is spot on, the story development and plot wavered greatly. Sometimes the film felt like a dark Middle Ages political war for the throne taking inspiration from works like Shakespeare's Hamlet, with a far more violent and complex storyline than the book it was based on. However, many times it was blatantly a kids' movie. No matter how epic it seemed at times, other moments fell short of other contemporary films of its time. It was certainly not a terrible picture, but if the makers of this movie had just had their minds made up on the type of film they wanted to make it might have been really great. The first film in the Narnia franchise The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a children's movie, and perhaps one of the best ever made. Although primarily for a younger audience, it was something almost every adult I know who has seen it loved. Although the second Narnia film, Prince Caspian, had nearly twice the budget, it made far less money than, The Lion the Witch, and the Wardrobe at the box office.   

Many authors change a lot as they write books, and their works seem almost unrecognizable from the first ones they started with. That is not bad, in fact, this can sometimes be very good. In my own books, the storylines and target age range are always changing. The pitfall is when there are several different key changes in a particular work. A lot of times, the longer time it takes to write a work the more that this problem will occur as months or even years can pass from the start to the finish of the book or film. What started as one thing turns into another. No matter what that means that authors must continually reread their work and make sure that it all flows into one solid work that is not all over the place like a politician trying to give an unscripted speech. Someone who was excellent at creating work that was both original and coherent was Mark Twain. While many of his books explore bipolar themes and seemed like they could be for both children and adults, they never had an identity crisis. All his books had the same feeling from the beginning to the end. That is the reason why he is still a beloved author over one hundred years after his death.