The Story Before the Story

Okay, writers and readers, let’s talk about the story that happens before the story. If you’ve been reading along thus far, you’ll know that one of my most recent reads was The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins. This book came out in 2020 as a prequel to Collins’ acclaimed series The Hunger Games and has recently been turned into a movie. I still haven’t seen said movie because I’m slow and rarely go into the outside world.

            Anyway, reading this book has recently gotten me thinking about prequels or, at the very least, how books tell the story that happens…well, before the story. Weirdly enough, as I started considering this as a topic, I actually had a hard time thinking about books I knew with a straight prequel. I mean, prequels happen all the time in movies and TV shows, but I genuinely blanked on book series that had specific novels marked as prequels. Ones that came to mind for me were C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and Jeanne Duprau’s City of Ember series, though these might fall into a bit of a grey area. From my understanding, both of these series have books that fall first in chronological order that weren’t published before or after the series. For instance, The Prophet of Yonwood is counted as the third book in the City of Ember series, even though it occurs before the first two books and the subsequent fourth novel. I suppose The Hobbit is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, but I haven’t read those so I’m wary of speaking on that territory.

            A lot of books include scenes that, theoretically, would cover potential prequel area, but do so through other means. Just for an honorable mention, Rick Riordan’s most recent release, The Chalice of the Gods, backs up before his Trials of Apollo series, yet isn’t really a prequel as it centers on different characters and is more of a side adventure set at a specific time. Still, it does technically play out before certain events later on. I think flashbacks and visions are somewhat contested ground in the writing/reading world, but looking back on it now, a lot of books I like or read in 2023 contained this element. Amie Kaufman’s The Isles of the Gods (my favorite 2023 read) opens with a prologue-y scene setting up the world and initial incident for the overall plot.  In Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s Beautiful Creatures series, each book contains a series of visions from the Civil War to the present centering on a different segment of time effecting each plotline. I got into this in one of my other blogs, but one of my favorites was the flashback series on Sarafine, the mother of the main girl in the story and an antagonist who’d been shrouded in mystery up until that point. (Click here to transport back in time that that blog.) In truth, there are all manner of ways to sneak information from the past into your story without writing a whole prequel book: visions, dreams, time travel, etc.

            And each of these can be extremely effective, though I think you have to be aware of doing each in tolerable doses. Nobody wants to be info-dumping a bunch of information on the reader every few pages or making each mode of learning too lengthy or irrelevant. I don’t think we had a ton of trouble with this while writing, but Kristin and I literally wrote our entire manuscript focusing on a character who has visions. Still, there was at least one instance where I think our editor told us to watch length on a vision. I think when using a device like a vision, you have to really keep in mind when to use it and what to show. You don’t want information to come to a character too easily to where they don’t have to work for it, which might mean you have be strict on what kind of a glimpse they see and what conclusions they draw from it. One thing Kristin and I also tried to do with writing each vision was demonstrate progress, as we were dealing with a character learning to channel and grow their abilities. In that sort of dynamic, we actually had a bit of room to play around as there were times when our MC Jade maybe didn’t know what she was doing or was pushing her abilities. This gave us the opportunity to really work with her emotions as well as her powers, for example frustration or achievement.

            Getting back on topic though, let’s talk about a sort of stand-alone prequel like The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Honestly, I think if you’re looking for a really good example of a prequel, I think this is a good option. Note: there will be spoilers ahead. Here’s what I thought this book executed really well as a prequel:

1.     Characterization Playing Off Future Knowledge

            So, I bought this book when it first came out with very little knowledge of what it was about, beyond the fact that it was a prequel to Collins’ Hunger Games series and that I’d probably enjoy reading it since I’d read those before. Right off the bat, I thought it was kind of a bold move to back up and follow a young version of President Snow as the main protagonist. I mean, she’d literally just spent three books making you hate this guy and now we’re supposed to like him? Well, maybe not like exactly, but root for at the very least.

            This seems like a bit of a weird move on the surface, but I actually think this is what made this prequel so compelling. In fact, I would say a lot of the tension of the story directly stems from the reader knowing exactly what Snow becomes later on in life. At the moment, this guy isn’t the monster he is in the later books- in fact, at the beginning, he’s not even the worst character in the story. He’s one of the few Capitol kids that actually tries to help the tributes they’re supposed to be mentoring and realizes they’re receiving inhumane treatment. On a wider scale, there’s this constant theme within The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes of humanity’s nature regarding good and evil. What circumstances can make good people do bad things and can bad people do good things? Where are the lines? So, right off the bat, Collins has plopped the reader in with a protagonist you know will eventually be bad, and given herself the monumental task of endearing him (at least somewhat since you’re not going to read it if you hate his guts) to the reader and showing his descent into who he’ll become later. Kristin made the excellent point while we were discussing this book one time that a lot of the issue with Snow is that, ultimately, he knew what was right or wrong, but chose to take the darker path.

            As I said, knowing who this guy is in the future really creates a lot of tension that a reader might not have if they were to read this series in timeline order. If you don’t know what kind of villain Snow is later, you’re just going to think you’re following a normal guy. In the same sense, Collins actually has wiggle room to surprise the readers if they’re working off knowledge of his future-self because they’re probably going to be expecting the worst from him. The Snow in this book hasn’t become that guy yet, so there might be times he makes the right choices or behaves in ways you don’t expect of him.

            One topic we’ve touched on before is writing morally gray characters (Click here to read more) and there are several factors that tend to come into play with using those effectively. For Collins to write effectively for a villain you know, she has to deconstruct him down to who he was before that and make the reader understand and empathize with his situation while ensuring he has the potential to still become who he is later. Snow operates a lot out of desperation, social pressure, legacy preservation, vanity, and at some levels, sheer survival. Characters that are desperate might be capable of anything.

The characterization in this prequel is fascinating, right down to specific wording on Snow’s motivations. For example, Snow does seem to have some level of affection for Lucy Gray Baird, the District 12 tribute, but Collins very purposefully had him refer to her in a possessive way for most of the book. Something like this to me is a sneaky way of reveling tendencies the characters themselves might not even be aware of yet. As the novel goes on, Snow quickly hits a slippery slope of power, praise, survival, treachery, and politics- all of which seem to be deadly components to his better angels.

2.     Worldbuilding

The worldbuilding in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was actually one of my favorite components. After reading three Hunger Games novels, I think you go in expecting the Hunger Games in the prequel to be built off the same grand, horrifying fanfare that appears later, but Collins presents a completely different world. The Panem in the prequel is pretty fresh off the war that instigated the games as punishment in the first place: the Capitol infrastructure is still a broken hull from the war, its citizens are starving (not unlike the Districts), and hatred is still running high. Still, the games in this scenario are viewed with distaste, not the spectacle with celebrity-status of later on. The District tributes are not pampered, praised, and literally fattened up for strength- in fact, this book presents horrific treatment of them through negligence and hate. People from the Districts are literally viewed and treated like animals, forcing them to prove their own humanity.

In truth, Collins flipped a lot of the expected on its head. Neither the Capitol or the Districts are in great shape from the war, and Snow’s own secret situation of teetering on the edge of financial ruin and starvation actually give him a lot in common with the tributes he’s supposed to hate. It’s a lot of Snow’s own efforts- whether for good or bad- that end up creating the world of the future Hunger Games you see Katniss in: the gambling stakes, the better food and accommodations, the bloodthirsty entertainment of the Capitol later on. Collins took the world you knew from the original series and stripped it down until it was still recognizable but yet completely different. By that technique, she’s giving you the same elements from the first series, but giving the entire story a completely different feel and newness. You can see the threads set up in the events of this book and how they were allowed to run wild over time to create the fascinating yet bafflingly complacent and horrific world later on. I think that’s a great mark of a prequel if you can manage that balance of same and new at the same time.

3.     Easter Eggs and Context

One thing all fans want from expansions of a story, no matter where they fall, is hints. President Snow in the original Hunger Games series was always a bit of a shadowy villain. In the sense that though Katniss had several interactions with him, he’s not ever a character she’s around a whole lot. Going back and focusing on him as a main character gives you a lot of context about his life and climb to power that you weren’t operating on before. In truth, I don’t think you know a ton about him really, whereas now you’re getting the beginning of his arc from a guy operating on desperation to the exact moment he decides to step over that line into becoming the villain he’ll be later. Throughout the whole book, Snow is drowning in desperate, murky decisions- many of which he is forced over and over to justify- but there is a point where he stops and is clearly willing to eliminate anyone in the way of his ascent to power.

      To me, a prequel should be dropping a lot of little nuggets of information that help change how you think about the original story. I thought this book was really interesting in the sense that it gave explanation to Tigris’s decision to help Katniss and the rebels in Mockingjay, and how that obviously came from a really deep tie no one knew about. Again, the worldbuilding of how the Hunger Games of this world formed into the extravagant other one. How Snow is horrified by several things you know he actively condones and trades in later. I’m trying to be vague so I won’t spoil too much for anyone that hasn’t read it, but I love it when authors drop something that completely changes how you think about it. As dark as this book is, even having a few brief glimpses of goofiness by Lucky Flickerman is a fun nod to his eventual successor in the later books, Caesar Flickerman. I kid you not, the first time I read this prequel, I actually went flipping through The Hunger Games to see if Katniss mentioned another District 12 victor besides Haymitch, and she does. I don’t know if Suzanne Collins was planning to write this book the whole time or what, but I thought that was cool.

      The most striking thing about what this prequel does, in my opinion, is reveal that President Snow has a much deeper connection to District 12 than you would have ever thought. He was the first mentor to a tribute from that District, let alone it’s first victor. He was romantically involved with said victor. He did a stint of time in District 12, frequenting several locations that the reader knows become extremely important to Katniss, and witnessing the events from the song “The Hanging Tree”. I mean, that’s some major information to drop on a reader familiar with the story.

      Plus, the entire interaction between Lucy Gray and Snow (Have you noticed I’m avoiding trying to spell his very long name haha?) actually makes me reconsider his later relationship to Katniss. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that Lucy Gray is kind of associated with a ghost story, and I loved that, in the end, the girl named for a ghost story sort of became one herself. I think that’s a really tricky ending to pull off without ticking people off, but I thought the way Collins wrote it hit really well. I mean, I don’t think I’ve read another book like that where you’re so satisfied with an unresolved mystery. Did she escape and end up free of Snow forever or did she become his first true victim? No one knows what happened to her in Katniss’s time, so who knows?

      Still though, if you consider this in the context of the whole series, like the reader, Snow himself does not know the answer to this question. Did Lucy Gray get away or did he take her out? Obviously, nothing ever came out about what she knew about him, so you don’t know if she really did die or if she was safe and just kept his secrets to herself. But I find it interesting that President Snow was always kind of weirdly bothered and obsessed by Katniss, which Collins does point out obsession is one of his weaknesses, but it is a bit strange. But knowing what you know about his past association with District 12 and Lucy Gray, I wonder if Collins is setting up this scenario that even all those years later, Snow is still haunted by the girl from a ghost story of his own making. Though Katniss doesn’t fit Lucy Gray’s exact description, it is stated that a lot of people from the Seam do have the same features. Makes you wonder if he ever really sees Katniss as she is at all or if he’s being haunted by Lucy Gray. It is a cool scenario- always bested by a girl from District 12.

      Anyway, I guess I’ll stop gushing. Still, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a dark, treacherous novel, but I think it’s a fabulous prequel. What kind of techniques do you prefer to have elements of the story retold? Are you here for flashbacks and visions or fervently against them? Are there any cool prequels to check out that Kristin and I should know about? Let us know!

      Thanks for reading. Write on.

      -Kamryn