It may appear strange to begin a four book series, with pretensions of epic fantasy, with nothing but a world and a bunch of characters. But that is largely what I did. I frequently get asked – as I’m sure all writers do – how I come up with ideas. I invariably (and somewhat flippantly) reply that I simply sit at a keyboard and make stuff up. This is obviously not the whole story, but it’s certainly the core of my “process”. But, in the hope that someone cares, I’ll try to be less glib and detail the things that matter to me as I write (or sit at a keyboard and make stuff up).
The world. That’s the beginning and the end for me. I love certain characters and certain plots, but the world is the only element I truly cherish, the only element that I can rely on to solve problems and smooth transitions. Most of my “planning” involves gleefully drawing maps of cities, forests, mountains, countries, coastlines… many of which don’t feature in the books at all. I select the most relevant and put them at the front, but most still adorn the wall above my monitor, providing a nice distraction between paragraphs. I’d love to say that complicated genealogies and plot flowcharts fill my creative process – and I’m certainly no stranger to them – but they don’t fill me with glee like the creation of the world.
I drew the first map of the world about fourteen years ago on a massive piece of paper. I’ve still got it somewhere, though the lines and scale have changed significantly over the years. I had an insistent idea that worlds should change, that cities and countries don’t remain stable for long, especially in a brutal fantasy world. So that’s what I did. Through tabletop role-playing with friends, I defined, destroyed and rebuilt the world more times than I can remember. The Freelands of Ranen were once Tor Ranen, and long before that the Ice Lands. Tor Funweir was once the Kingdom of Tiris and, long ago, the Stone Lands. I even have maps depicting the world as it will be in future… well, the future as far as the books are concerned. The four books of the Long War are remembered only as ancient history to certain stories already told.
But it’s not just the maps. The world came from somewhere. It bubbled and roiled in chaos, throwing forth gods and monsters in equal measure. This is where the cool pictures begin to jump off the page. The cosmology of this world is as well-defined as its borders. Though I only let readers glimpse this larger canvass, it truly informs everything I write.
I know I go on about Deep Time, but that’s the only way I have to describe the prehistory of the world, the time before men, when primal chaos ruled. It’s the scratching of my Lovecraftian itch that drove me to my pre-occupation with tentacles and over-use of the word “eldritch”. It’s the tone I wanted, a through-vein that gnaws at the back of everything. Only certain characters get to see what’s truly going on – Nanon, Utha, Ruth, maybe Fynius, but if you join the dots of all the mundane, human interactions, you’ll always find that something dark emerges.
So, it’s a love of maps and worlds, a compulsion to change things at every opportunity, and a sense that no-one – neither readers nor characters – should ever have true knowledge. The love of maps means I never get precious about changing the name of a country. The love of change means killing characters comes easily. And the spectre of eldritch knowledge means that good and evil are nothing but tentacles on the same Dark Young.
AJS By A.J. Smith, author of The Black Guard (October 1, 2016) and The Dark Blood (December 1, 2016) from Head of Zeus
