Development and Delay

The first piece I ever wrote to something resembling completion was a short superhero story I did back in middle school. It was the first of a lot of stories and characters in a large super hero universe that I wound up scrapping due to how derivative and repetitive it was. This was one of the more original stories, a simple short about a telekinetic superhero tracking down his arch nemesis who could throw and manipulate fireballs. It ended with a showdown at a shipyard with the hero trapping the villain in a shipping container. It was simple, direct, and focused entirely on the epic battle rather than the headache inducing processes of worldbuilding and character development.

I spent a few years developing that universe, at least in my head. At one point me and a couple of class mates had an idea to start our own comic book chain. I had the characters, one had the stories, and one was a decent artist. That idea ultimately never panned out, and I never got the characters past their origins and a handful of major battles. At some point in late high school or early college I went back through and realized how many of the heroes were just rip-offs or remixes of X-Men characters, and I scrapped the Bronze Graphics project.

I'd like to think my writing has improved since then. My characters have more personality, even if it's usually just a fragment of my own. There's higher stakes, more worldbuilding, I created an entire pantheon for one of my story series. Sure, all this complexity has resulted in me overthinking every detail and scene, and all three of my works in progress are in a state of perpetual procrastination while I mentally edit every plot line and remove all the edginess I wrote in high school that makes me physically cringe now. But there's drama, there's dialogue, one of my characters has powers that are fueled by raw emotion, and I have to write well enough that my potential audience will feel that emotion too. It'll be great once I figure out how to stitch all these random scenes together.

The overall perspective has become a bit harsher admittedly. While my first story was relatively light hearted and a very simple "Hero gives a villain what for", now the majority of my protagonists have a harder time. They're almost always up against overwhelming odds, and even when they succeed at the end there's always a loss that taints the victory. I'm sure a psychologist would have a field day with the amount of times "They won the battle but lost everything else" appears in a story.

Perhaps more interesting to me though is where the quality differences appear. A lot of my stories involve people with superpowers or magic because, to be frank, that's what I've always liked daydreaming about. Most of my characters, for better or worse, started off with "wouldn't it be cool if I could do this" or "It would be so epic if I could save someone like this". But my best received works, according to peer review, are the ones where my character is just a Normal Dude dumped into an overwhelming and stress inducing paranormal situation.

I understand why, for the most part. A lot of my other stories come off as me venting a savior complex or fantasies of heroism, but the ones where its just "Guy in a Predicament" are more relatable, more compelling. I'm not writing the world around a protagonist I've created, I'm pushing a character through a world I've created, and the detail of that world and the character's reactions to it in conjunction with the reader's own apparently makes it more appealing. And the character is easier to empathize with because their motives are simpler. They're not bound by the need for complex motivations like duty or revenge, they simply would like to no longer be subject to their Predicament, which means i don't have to get bogged down with history and backstory and I can just focus on the tale im trying to tell.