who live on large open grasslands usually need horses, and usually
get involved with cattle. People who live in natural converging
points – river fords, mountain passes, and the like – usually become
traders or merchants. Geography is very important in a story.
One of the items ticked off by Horace in his Ars Poetica was that
an epic (or a drama) should begin in medias res, (in the middle of
the story). Translation: ‘Start with a big bang to grab attention.’
Fantasists tend to ignore grandfather Horace’s advice and take the
Bildungsroman approach instead. This German term can be
translated
as ‘Building (or growing up) romance’. (Note that most
European languages don’t use the word ‘Novel’; they still call these
things ‘romances’.) The ‘growing up’ approach is extremely
practical for a fantasist, since all of our inventions have to be explained to
our ‘dumb kid’ hero, and this is the easiest approach to exposition.
Some of you may have noticed that we did follow Aristotle’s
advice in the Elenium/Tamuli. That one did start in medias res, and it
seemed to work just as well. Would you like another test? How
about, ‘Explain the theological differences between Eriond and
Aphrael’?
To counter the ‘Gee Whiz! Look at that!’ sort of thing that
contaminates fantasy, the fantasist should probably grind his reader’s face
in grubby realism. Go ride a horse for a day or two so you know
what it feels like. Saddle sores show up on both sides of the saddle.
Go to an archery range and shoot off a couple hundred arrows. Try it
without the arm-guard a few times. The bow-string will act much
like a salami-slicer on the inside of your left forearm, and it’ll raise
blisters on the fingertips of your right hand. Pick up a broadsword,
swing it for ten minutes, and your arms will feel as if they’re falling
off. Those things were built to chop through steel. They’re very
heavy. Go out and take a walk. Start at daybreak and step right
along. Mark the spot where you are at sunset. Then measure the
distance. That’s as far as your characters will be able to walk in one
day. I used twenty miles, but I’ve got long legs. Ask a friend not to
bathe for a month. Then go sniff him. (Yuk!) When you write
dialogue, read it aloud – preferably to someone else. Ask if it sounds
like the speech of a real live human being. The spoken word is
different from the written word. Try to narrow that difference.
Next, learn how to compress time gracefully. You can’t record
your hero’s every breath. ‘Several days later it started to snow’ is
good. It skips time and gives a weather report simultaneously. ‘The
following spring’ isn’t bad. ‘Ten years later’ is OK if you’re not right
in the middle of something important. ‘After several generations’ or
‘About the middle of the next century’ skip over big chunks of time.
I’ve devised a personal approach which I call ‘authorial distance’.
I use it to describe just how close I am to what’s happening. ‘Long
distance’ is when I’m standing back quite a ways. ‘After Charlie got
out of prison, he moved to Chicago and joined the Mafia’, suggests
that I’m not standing in Charlie’s hip pocket. ‘Middle distance,
obviously, is closer. ‘The doors of Sing-Sing prison clanged shut
behind Charlie, and a great wave of exultation ran through him. He
was free!’ That’s sort of ‘middle’, wouldn’t you say? I refer to the last
distance as ‘in your face’. ‘Charlie spit on the closing gate. “All right,
you dirty rats, you’d better watch out now,” he muttered under his
breath. “Someday I’m gonna come back here with a tommy-gun an’
riddle the whole bunch of youse guys.” Then he swaggered off
toward the long, black limo where Don Pastrami was waiting for
him.”In your face’ means that you’re inside the character’s head. Be
advised, though, that it uses up a lot of paper. (See Belgarath the
Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress. First person is always in your face.)
I try, not always successfully, to keep chapters within certain
parameters as to length – no less than fourteen pages, or more than
twenty-two – in typescript. I try to maintain this particular length
largely because I think that’s about the right length for a chapter. It
feels right. Trust your gut-feel. Your guts know what they’re doing
even if you don’t.
Don’t write down to your readers. Don’t do a re-write of Run,
Spot, Run! Belittle your readers and you belittle your work and
yourself. Epic fantasy is genre fiction; so are mysteries, westerns, spy
books, adventure novels and bodice-rippers. This does not mean
that we can ever afford to say ‘Aw, hell, that’s good enough,’ because
it won’t be. Write anything you put on paper as good as you can
possibly make it. ‘Good enough’ stinks to high heaven, and ‘It’s only
a fantasy, after all,’ will immediately enroll you in that very large
group known as ‘unpublished writers’.
Everybody in the world probably believes that his own language
is the native tongue of God and the angels, so I’ll offend people all
over the globe when I assert that English is the richest language
in human history. Its richness doesn’t derive from its innate beauty
or elegance of expression. Its structure is Germanic (Frisian,
basically, with strong overlays of other Scandinavian tongues). West
Saxon, the language of King Alfred, wasn’t really all that pretty to
listen to, and it’ll sprain your tongue while you’re learning to speak
it. English is a rich language because the English were the greatest
pirates in history. They stole about one fifth of the world, and they
stole words and phrases from most of the languages of the world
as they went along – French, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Zulu, Spanish,
Apache – you name it; the English stole from it. My eight years of
exposure to college English gave me an extended vocabulary (my
cut of the loot, you might say), and when it’s appropriate, I’ll use it.
The youthful, marginally educated reader is going to have trouble
with such sentences as ‘Silk’s depredations were broadly
ecumenical.’ That might seem a little heavy but it said exactly what I wanted
it to say, and I chose not to rephrase it to make it more accessible to
the linguistically challenged. If you want simple, easy books, go
read ‘The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore’. How’s that for towering
arrogance?
In line with that thought, I’ll take one last pass at that ‘I get letters’
business. Some I’ve received have candidly admitted, ‘I didn’t really
like to read before I got into your stories, but now I read all the time.’
Let television tremble. Big Dave and Little Leigh are coming to black
out those screens. Maybe that’s our purpose in life. We’re here to
teach whole generations how to read – not everybody, perhaps, but
enough to possibly make a difference. ‘They left the world better
than they found it,’ sounds like a tombstone, but there are worse
things you can say about people, wouldn’t you say? Egomaniacal,
huh? But egomania is a requirement for any writer. You have to
believe that you’re good and that people will want to read your
stuff. Otherwise, you’ll give it up after your first rejection slip.
Always remember that Gone with the Wind was rejected by
thirty seven publishers before it was finally accepted, and short of the
Bible, there are probably more copies of that book in print than any
other in publishing history – or so I’ve been told.
I’ll close with a recommendation. My personal favorite fantasy
author is Lord Dunsany. He teaches me humility, since he does more
in four pages than I can do in four hundred. Read The Book of
Wonder. Get to know Slith, Thangobrind the jeweler, Pombo the
Idolater, and Nuth. Ponder the fate of people who jump off the edge
of the world. Consider the folly of messing around with Hlo-Hlo,
the Spider idol. Journey across the Plains of Zid, through the cities of
Mursk and Tlun, around the shoulder of the Peak of Mluna that
overlooks the Dubious Land, and cross the bridge from Bad to
Worse.
Go ahead. I dare you.
THE END