As I’ve been spending the better part of three days working on the “bible” (which is a compilation of notes, back story, history, etc.) for the fantasy adventure novel I’m in the process of revising (I needed a break from it, but wanted to remain within that “world”), it has occurred to me, “Hey, Jesse. You’re writing a serial-style adventure story that is largely sword and sorcery fantasy*. But you don’t even really like fantasy literature. What gives?”
And it’s true. I don’t like most fantasy literature I’ve attempted to read. There are exceptions – Tolkien’s tales of Middle-Earth (excluding “Fellowship of the Ring” which I loathed as a novel but loved as a film), CS Lewis’ Narnia books, the Harry Potter series, and Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” (at least, the first three books) – but I often have a difficult time slogging through the foreign names and random terms. Often, it feels like the authors are throwing names and such out there less out of the need to tell the story and moreso to convince the reader of the reality of their fictional world. “Borwath, son of Thrundul, stared across the fjords of Balentor and to the Spires of Miksdae’du, where the vile horde of Garen Jorax was defeated by the alliance of Cal Mortabia in the Age of Annex, before the shaping of the world.” Yeah, it may make for some interesting trivia in something like, say a D&D sourcebook, but as a convention of modern storytelling, it’s quite an easy way to slip out of the narrative and disconnect a reader from the story being told.
At least it is for me. Then again, I’m not a gaming nerd and can’t rightly say I’ve ever truly attempted a role-playing session other than a couple of botched attempts at West End Games’ old Star Wars games in the mid-90s. In fact, the whole of my experience with the realm of fantasy comes from the previously mentioned novels, “Star Wars” (which I argue is space fantasy and not science fiction), and “The Legend of Zelda” video games. Sure, I saw “Willow” as a kid, but have always felt that it suffered from the same issues I have with most fantasy fiction –at times it gets distracted with the details of its world and loses sight of the human story it’s supposed to be telling.
Which is something I’ve been trying very hard to be conscious of in my own writing. At this point in the revision process, I’m trying to keep the story very much rooted in the human experience and make it emotionally engaging rather than detail heavy. Therefore, if the characters really don’t care about the history of the Spires of Miksdai’du, or even know the names of them, they aren’t going to be mentioned. I’m trying to only put that kind of thing in there when it relates to knowledge that the reader absolutely needs to know for comprehension of the world I’m writing or if it actually affects the character. Otherwise, while it might be in my bible, it’s not going into the finished work. I’m much more interested in who these characters are as people and the personal journeys they go on. Maybe that makes me a bad fantasy writer to attempt a more mainstream approach. But so far, the few people who have read the first couple of chapters really seem to dig them, so I think I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. Besides, I’m telling the story I want to tell in the way that most interests me. And I hope that if my enthusiasm carries over, it’ll spread to the reader. If not, well, they should have been slain by Cal Mortabia during the Age of Annex as well…
*I say “largely” because if I extend beyond this initial book, which is very much ‘sword and sorcery’ fantasy, the true nature of the series will in fact revealed to be sword and sorcery novels detailing a ‘high fantasy’ tale.