Deciding what to cut and what not to (and why are so many successful books bloated?)

[KatG]

KatG, I must say, this is some of my favorite stuff I've read of yours on this website - and it was really what I needed to hear. Thank you. I honestly think you should consider writing a book of advice for young/new writers on learning to trust themselves, and clearing out all the misconceptions on the industry. Sort of a killing of the sacred cows of fantasy literature - both from the perspective of readers and writers. I think you have something very important to say about SFF writing that isn't being said, and is being obfuscated by a lot of rather narrow writerly advice and views on what is and isn't proper fantasy (or SF).

There is a difference between books on publishing and books on fiction writing. I've taught writing courses, there's plenty of material to use on writing. But fiction publishing in its reality tends to puncture people's romantic bubbles about it. They want to view it either as a ruthless commercial copy of Hollywood formula in which only trendy hooks sell or an out of touch artsy fartsy sort of school where supposed writing genius is the main component to success. The self-published field in particular has been enjoying its rendition of being the scrappy new rebel alliance against the evil empire of large publishers and you cannot talk them out of it by pointing out basic business details, like that self-pub has always existed and always been the farm team for publishers rather than something they want to destroy. In non-fiction, the author is all important as an expert provider of information, that's how you sell non-fiction, and I'd have to be a fairly high powered person to get readers to believe me and buy the book that is telling them that the industry is entirely subjective, no guarantees, widely variable, etc., instead of here is exactly how you get published and it works every time, order now and you get a free egg timer gift.

And even then, it probably would not go over well. Because I'm not the only one saying these things at all -- others in publishing, authors, etc. say them all the time. They just aren't believed. The tools, not rules contingent is quite large. But rules make people more comfortable; they provide certainty.

So most of what I say thus ends up sounding artsy hippie but it's basically very business pragmatic. There are realities in fiction publishing that have to be dealt with by those in it. Fiction readers are marketing resistant -- they don't like or respond much to ads and the ways that other arts products are often sold. They don't care about fashionableness in fiction -- they really don't care about what's trendy or celebrities are reading, even the casual readers, outside a book actually written by a celebrity. They rely on word of mouth. So that means PR has to be targeted and done carefully for different books at different sales levels, all of it mainly to just get awareness of books' existence and mostly aimed at bestsellers already because that's where it's most effective. Fiction readers don't care much about the authors, who they are and what their social status is. They care about stories and characters and see the authors as conduits for those things, so again, marketing has to be in that direction, rather than the author-centered PR of non-fiction. It affects how and when authors and publishers can promote.

Book publishing is a slow growth, narrow profit margin business. Fiction publishing is the small, snazzy part of the industry that doesn't make as much money as non-fiction and is, see above, harder to market. Fiction therefore has to maximize variety to bring in as many readers as possible. A small press can concentrate on one type and style of work as an identity with booksellers, but if it succeeds and grows, it has to expand the variety of its list to continue. Larger publishers publish as many different kinds as they can manage. That variety has sadly been limited in its growth by a largely white industry that wrongly sometimes thinks its main audience is white and very bigoted, and so we have 80% of white authors, which is a ridiculous number and used to be worse. And male readers are seen as higher status and more flighty and thus prioritized as are male authors, even though women make up 70% of the general readership and women written books have plenty of male readers. But they're working on that, with more variety, which then leads to more readers coming in and more of the dated, erroneous and anecdotal myths that limit growth being scrapped, and a more global market.

Fiction authors, unlike non-fiction, don't directly compete, they are symbiotic and help each other sell and fund each other, even when writing different kinds of books. The more bestsellers, the more new books and small presses can be floated, and the better shot for self-pubs as well. Fiction authors can promote together more successfully and with more interest from readers and that can work extremely well, (see conventions,) bringing more readers into the pool who browse outward. Changes in distribution and business factors have affected author sale patterns far more than people like to deal with, most importantly the collapse of the wholesale media market in the 1990's that started in the 1980's. All of this has been written about; it's just a matter of whether people are willing to accept it.

One of the ways that people don't accept it is to pretend that books that don't meet their expectations and estimations of the market don't count. For all that a lot of people try to read the market and trends, they usually take a very limited view of that market, which is how we get the everything is this way now theories. If you bring up variety to show that's not the case, it is dismissed, sometimes with deeply pretzel logic. Following what authors themselves are browsing into and thus publishers publishing is very easy -- you can see the ripples if you look at the titles. It was clear that contemporary fantasy was going to have an expansion in the mid-1990's, which was only a few years after it had an expansion in the 1980's. But in 2004, the articles were everything is contemporary fantasy now, where did all this come from, it's a total surprise, it must be sex crazed women because look at the covers and there are four, count them four, women bestsellers doing these books and women only write about sex and romance, Jim Butcher doesn't count and is totally not romantic, what do you mean that there were tons of contemporary fantasy titles in 1998, and oh now science fiction is dying, killed by fantasy, etc. It's rather hard to puncture sacred cows when they just make new sacred cows.

SFF isn't influenced by suspense -- most of it is suspense. It doesn't absolutely have to be, and some works are not, especially shorter ones, but the majority of it is one form of suspense or another. Suspense is widely variable. It's going to have some violent action/threat, but tone, style and extent will be widely dispersed. Suspense does not mean a lack of exposition. The minimalist style was touted as very popular in the 1980's in realistic suspense but it wasn't the only thing going in suspense. You had giant fat thrillers in the 1980's and 1990's. For instance, The Alienist, which is now coming to t.v. as a cable series adaptation, was published in 1994. It's a historical thriller, it's long, it's filled with exposition and description of the time period, it uses a slightly Victorian-leaning style to go with the subject matter of turn of the 20th century New York, and it was a massive bestseller. You could pretty much put The Alienist on one end of the stylistic scale and any Elmore Leonard title on the other end. Both books and everything in between exist. If you deny their existence, you aren't looking at the actual market. You're building your own imaginary fantasy of the market.

So types of stories, types of styles -- these are not impediments. Nor are they guarantees. You can't be a rebel against a style or a rebel because you use a style because it's not the only or main style, ever, and it isn't a rare style either, none of them are. Saying "well this one title with this one style was very successful" means absolutely nothing. That title is not going to help you or hurt you. The market is not centered around that one title, even if it's a phenom. The publishers will use the big title to help get awareness for other titles -- symbiosis to lead to browsing -- but they are also doing that with the other big titles that are very different from the one big title you're focusing on. And there are tons of other titles that may or may not have styles in the neighborhood of the big books but are doing fine, got published, etc., that people don't pay attention to at all, even though they give you a very clear picture of what's going on in the market.

Publishers don't have to go looking for the next Song, because A) books like Song have been around in fantasy for decades; B) Song has been a big success and so lots of authors try out writing in the same neighborhood and pepper them with those subs; and C) when Game of Thrones came out, that large stream of political war sec world fantasy novels became a flood. They're going to reject most of them, they may find some they like or they may go buy a contemporary fantasy novel they like. Historical fantasy is doing gangbusters right now. I love comic/satiric fantasy but there are too many titles to keep up. There are tons and tons of comic fantasy novels out there, many of them doing quite well and bestselling. And yet so many pretend that those parts of the fantasy field aren't there, that you can't get published in them, because they are desperate to find the thing that will be the guarantee somehow or just because those areas of the field don't interest them so they just cut them out.

Maybe because back in those days editors were not lazy and put some effort into their job instead of hunting for new “Twilight” or “Hunger games” franchise?

Case in point of a limited, out of date market view, and not really knowing what book editors do. I have not been good on time these days, but I'll tell you what, Fish Owl, I'll see about reviving one of the Stickies so we can do publishing industry questions and we can discuss some of your sacred cows.

But I think the truth is closer to what William Goldman said about making movies: "Nobody knows anything."

True. But I think a lot of people find it very helpful when you talk about how you write your books, Matt. And Mike, Jo, Sue, etc. Even if their situations are not the same, it gives them an idea of things.

 

[Alchemist]

I didn't have much to say in reply, Kat, except to "like" your last post as I've enjoyed the further discussion. But a couple days later, some further thoughts came to me, which have actually led to a bit of a shift in my thinking, and is potentially helping me through a writing obstacle that I've struggled with. Bear with me as I elaborate.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this here or in another thread, or perhaps not at all, but I'm currently re-reading/skimming some of my favorite books from my formative early years of reading fantasy in the 80s. I haven't read some of these books in over 30 years, although a few I have re-read several times over the decades. But all have something in common: they were what inspired my love of fantasy and formed my idea of what fantasy was, and is.

Now of course my view has broadened and my tastes have changed over the years. But I still hold a special place in my heart for these stories, this style of "big, fat epic secondary world quest fantasy." Perhaps it is rooted in the very first fantasy I read on my own, Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, and of course my love of Tolkien's work.

As I grew older, and particularly in more recent years, I gradually began to become infected with the minimalist virus. OK, that implies a pejorative - but your discussion of the minimalist trend made me realize that I kind of bought into the idea that minimalism was inherently superior. I mean, Ernest F***ing Hemingway. I found myself thinking that the Zen-like prose of Le Guin was just inherently better to more ornate, baroque stylings (although, to be honest, I think Le Guin's prose is unsurpassed in its elegant perfection, but that is because of her craft, not where she resides on the spectrum of prose granularity). But this started shifting just yesterday, when I found a hardcover copy of The Eye of the World at a library book sale for $1 and started reading it; a thought struck me: minimalism isn't always or inherently better. And furthermore, there are certain effects that can't really be accomplished with minimalist prose and/or quick-paced plotting (for the two often go hand-in-hand).

(Re-reading what I just wrote, I can't help but chuckle at my thick-skulledness. Of course a particular style or degree of prose granularity is not inherently superior to another. Of course different styles have their place, with different strengths and effects. Of course.)

Going back a bit, I loved The Wheel of Time for several years, starting the series in the early 90s in my last year or two of high school, reading the first seven books as they came out. It was a Great Event for me and a couple of friends when the next "Jordan book" would come out. For those in my generational cohort of fantasy readers, the impact of the Wheel of Time was immense. It was almost like it was the culmination of everything that came before, or at least of the commercial era of secondary world fantasy that we grew up with, that burgeoned in 1977 with the publication of Sword of Shannara and Lord Foul's Bane, and proliferated through the 80s with The Riftwar Saga (Feist), the Belgariad (Eddings), Memory, Sorry and Thorn (Williams), Dragonlance (Weis & Hickman) and many others. The Wheel of Time seemed to take the best elements of the big epic fantasy stories of the last dozen or so years, take it up a notch and offer something new. And of course it deeply impacted what was to follow, setting the table for 90s style "big fat fantasies," including George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, and others (I realize that some consider Tad Williams work to be the first true BFF, but I think Jordan is the one who truly popularized it, or at least "turned it up to 11," to quote Spinal Tap).

Anyhow, as Jordan's work grew longer (and, I would say, too long, to serve commercial rather than artistic needs), I began to lose interest. I stopped reading the series when Book 8, Path of Daggers, came out in 1998. I think it was the 40-page prologue of endless braid-tugging and minutia that did it for me. I was reading less fantasy by then and my tastes had changed (and probably matured). I began to find myself preferring more minimalist prose stylings, looking to Ursula Le Guin as the example par excellence of What a Fantasy Author Should Sound Like. On the other hand, I found myself always craving the immersion that the Big Fat Fantasy specialized in, and found it difficult to find anything that compared to The Wheel of Time in that regard, even though I never went back to finish it - especially after Jordan died and Sanderson took over.

Fast forward a bit to now. As I find myself once more going over my own manuscript in progress, something about the first part has been bothering me for quite some time. I've gone over it again and again, tweaked it, added and subtracted chapters, but can't seem to get it right. I decided that I would revisit old favorites to see how they began their big epic stories, to look at issues of pacing, immersion, and simply how you begin a massive work (mine is a planned five-book sequence, with the draft of the first around 200,000 words - so it is big, although puny compared to WoT). My hope was (and is) to find clues that will help me figure out what my first part is missing.

I started with The Dragonbone Chair, but lost interest after a few chapters. I might revisit it, but it really is slow to begin, even tedious. I have a feeling I would enjoy reading it, but decided to save my "Tad Williams slot" for the new series coming out this summer. I then moved on to Dragons of Autumn Twilight, while ordering a used copy of Raymond E Feist's Magician, and eying the copy of The Belgariad I have on my bookshelf. So far nothing quite seemed to illuminate that missing component, until...

Yesterday I picked up The Eye of the World and read the first chapter, and I think I found it. As of this writing, I've only read a couple chapters, but there is something in it that I have craved to both read and capture in my writing. It is a quality of immersive storytelling that has its own pace. In fact, the pace is quite slow and the tone almost warmly phlegmatic. There is no sign of minimalism, obviously, but also--and perhaps more importantly--no sense of urgency. Jordan draws the reader in, places them in Two Rivers, and shows them around like how an old man might show their urban-dwelling grandchildren his garden. At first the grandchildren are impatient, wanting greater stimulus, their iPad or other iEntertainment of some kind, but then something clicks and they slow down, noticing the details, the world coming more fully alive.

Interestingly enough, The Wheel of Time had come to represent to me What Went Wrong With Fantasy in the 80s and 90s. I had convinced myself that the more minimalist fantasy of the 60s and 70s, the cousin to SF's New Wave, was how fantasy should be properly written, and that things began to go terribly wrong when Donaldson and Brooks tainted the pure waters with their sordid commercialism. But now I'm starting to see it differently. I see it more as a wide spectrum of possibilities, from Zennish minimalism to Victorian lushness, from quick pacing to slow meandering, with so many flavors in-between--and all flavors having a place at the great banquet table that is the fantasy tradition.

Like many connoisseurs who are more clever than wise, my taste had narrowed, and with it my understanding of how fantasy "should" be written. My own writing struggled because I thought I "should" write in a quick and minimalist manner, when what I was really trying to accomplish was an immersive quality that was better attained through a slower pace, and more detailed, imagistic presentation. This is not to say that I want to to re-write my draft in a more Jordan-like or Martinian manner; in fact, the "prose granularity" is secondary to the matter of pace. What struck me most is how Jordan created a slow pace that was still evocative. Actually, I am reminded a bit of Name of the Wind, even though I haven't been able to get past the first couple hundred pages of that book (this had nothing to do with the pace or style, and more to do with the authorial voice and viewpoint character, both of which I find a bit irritating...but that's a different story).

Anyhow, the long and short of it is that I think I had a bit of a eureka moment. Not only was my sense of what is good fantasy greatly broadened, but it also pointed the direction into solving a problem I've been struggling with for, well, years with my own work. You had a part in this, Kat, so I thank you for that.

 

[KatG]

I'm glad that you had an eureka moment that helped you. That's always a nice thing.

But. You're not talking about minimalism for most of this, so I think a few things should be addressed. Minimalism is a specific style -- bare bones straight description, screenplay formats, action and dialogue driven, less Zen meditative simplicity than rat-a-tat rapid bursts. It was influenced by movies, first off, and in large part by the noir movement of the 1930's to 1950's of movies, books and short fiction, which had become an established tradition by the 1970's.

Ernest Hemingway is not a minimalist. (And uses lots of adverbs.) He's got entirely too much inner character angst and metaphoric symbolism. He is less florid than Victorians, but that was part of a larger movement that started at the turn of the century and accelerated due to WWI, the development of modern fiction, post-modernism, etc. Minimalism was much later. Ursula Le Guin is certainly not a minimalist. She is an advocate for immersion and poetic language, and the major theme of her works is characters immersed in cultures and shifting cultures, with quite a lot of description. (In fact, she wrote a very famous essay about too much modernity in fantasy writing styles and word choices that she later partly regretted.) Writing in the 1950's, 1960's, as she was part of, they built SF novels by extending or combining short works and a lot of novels were consequently short and often serialized in magazines -- it wasn't an aversion to writing long as a bad style.

The New Wave SF writers were against minimalism in large part. They wanted to get away from the bare bones, cinematic, violent and adventure action centered SF stories of the Campbellian era, as well as the social prudery of the 1950's western culture. They wanted to write SF that was more "literary" -- more exposition, metaphor, imagery and poetic prose, more philosophical and thought experiment works, more sociological and cultural including tackling social taboos -- mainly sex, it being the 1960's and 1970's. And while they did lots of short fiction, they also frequently wrote long novels -- part of SF moving from being magazine centered to book centered. If you want to find the minimalist style in SF -- where it is more frequent than in fantasy -- you are most likely to find it in military and mystery SF. Certainly that style is infrequent in space opera, which is the closest in SF to most sec world fantasy sagas.

The big fat fantasy was established in the 1970's, way before Williams. Really big ones were rare even in the 1990's. Lots of big fat fantasy didn't sell, lots of thinner fantasy did sell. But the perception of fantasy fiction in the 1990's was affected by changes in the publishing market for fiction, specifically the collapse and shrinkage of the wholesale market. That meant publishers were more reliant on booksellers to move books. Paper and print costs went up and mass market paperbacks got more expensive to ship because they were going to the bookstores rather than as much large bulk shippings to wholesalers. Booksellers didn't like mass market paperbacks as much because the profit margins were minuscule since they couldn't sell in bulk like the wholesalers. Big discount sellers in the remains of the wholesale market sprung up -- Amazon and Costco, which meant a market still for paperbacks and some hardcovers, but very low prices.

All of these things caused the prices of mass market paperbacks to go up way faster than hardcover and trade paperback costs to compensate. And it also caused genre publishers to move more works into limited runs of hardcover and trade paperback earlier and more often, to please booksellers, get the works into libraries, get more review coverage and try to build up more audience to cover the losses of the wholesale market. Big fantasy books could work pretty well for that because fantasy fans were willing to cough up to buy them reliably, fantasy being a newer category market, and even if they didn't sell at first, they might sell over time to the fanbase. They were already milking that by the 1990's and they pushed titles where they could in the 1990's. They pushed shorter works like Stephen Brust's bestselling Taltos series too, but people don't notice short works doing well on hc display as much as they do big ones, nor does medium sized works selling make as good a media story as big fat ones selling.

So the perception of the 1990's was that fantasy was all massive tomes about imaginary lands full of elves and dragons, which was missing the mark. (And affected by the popularity of RPG and electronic games as well.) But they definitely were there, a key part. So it's rather weird that minimalist ideas sprout still concerning writing fantasy fiction. Nowadays, it's less about excising exposition and more that the reliance on violent action is emphasized when this stuff comes up in fantasy. I'm not sure how you got it into your head that you should write fantasy fiction like a 1960's science fiction novel, though. Although you can and people do. But it's hardly required.

The thing to look at with your length is what is it that you want the readers to see and know. We tend to regard details as superfluous when they bore us. But details are chosen by the author and quite often they aren't just building a world setting -- they're symbolic and thematic and engage readers emotionally into scenes and events. A writer might focus very tightly on what seems a minor side object -- a flower on the side of the road -- and then telescope outward from that flower, connecting it to a wider view. The author decides that the flower, its description, is the thing that they want readers focused on, to then develop the wider view of say a battlefield or a dragon or a castle on fire, etc. Other authors won't chose an object or an image to start with; they'll go with a sound -- a line of dialogue spoken that they want the readers to focus on, and then go from there. Or a piece of information, a musing of a pov character, a dream fragment. If you're plunging readers into the middle of a scene, you're doing it for a number of reasons. If you are leading readers into a scene, you're doing it for a number of reasons. Because it's what you want them to experience first.

So Matt likes to look for a way to present conflict for the character first:

Erm Kaslo came to Cheddle on the Adelaine, a tramp freighter that didn't mind taking passengers who didn't mind the quality of the accommodations. He could have come on a liner, but he preferred, when working, to make his entrances unnoticed.

That's all exposition and interior thought. It's not action scenic description and it's not metaphoric imagery. It does provide information -- a character on a work mission comes into a place secretively. That's the first thing Matt wants us to know and experience in his futuristic fantasy novel -- secrecy. And then after that comes action, description, etc. Not everything in a novel is there to advance the plot or even develop characters. But it is there to be part of the experience the readers are getting, parts of which they will love and parts of which, even in a book they like, will bore them. You can't thrill them all with the ride all the time; they are different from each other. But you can pick what you present to them, what the ride is going to look like.

So with length, it's not strict plot adherence but it is a matter of why the author wants it there. Sometimes the author is going to write a bunch of stuff that the author needs to work out what the author wants in the story and where the story should go. But the readers don't necessarily need to see all that material. So the author then has to go back and decide what gets cut that is the author's fodder, not reader presentation. Sometimes the author cuts too much or something in the author's head doesn't make it down to the page and the author doesn't notice. Happens to the best, most award winning authors -- it is not a skill issue. So authors have to be on guard for that, plus it helps to have beta readers and editors who can catch those. But the author decides because only the author understands the story in the end and what they want to present to readers in it. If you think it's going to help your readers understand a lot of what characters are going through to have a whole thing on how dragons are milked, then you do that. Some readers may hate that and find it unnecessary and boring. Others will enjoy it as part of the experience. If you're doing battle scenes, the issues is how big a battle and how much detail. Some authors go for minimal; others go for very extensive, or they will be minimal in one area and very extensive in another. A lot of people get taught that minimal description should be used for action -- that action should be brief. And that can work, but it can also mean that the action ends up a lot less interesting for the readers because there's no emotional engagement through the characters in what is happening to really visualize it. You can alleviate that with dialogue during action sometimes, but that may not always be the chosen vehicle. Exposition/character inner thought can convey a lot of info much faster than dialogue -- it does heavier lifting and can time jump and coalesce. But you don't have to have exposition where you don't want it. It depends. And out of all those choices, your style emerges.

So you have options. It may be a good idea to "kill your darlings" and get rid of prose that just came out of your brain but which isn't really part of the experience you want readers to have. You may get bogged down in plot events that you don't necessarily need to show as scenes (which again take longer than summary exposition.) Cutting is not a bad thing; it's a matter of judging it. Writing long and then figuring out what to cut works for some people; for others, that's just an impossible situation. Try to work with your brain -- that's the first thing that writers have to do.

 

[Alchemist]

I realize that I was using the word "minimalism" in my own idiosyncratic way, as is often my wont, rather than as referring to the specific artistic and literary movement. You might have noticed that in what I wrote above, I transitioned to focus more on pace and what I called "prose granularity," which is basically how many words different authors use to describe what they're describing, and how detailed they are in telling their story. I called Le Guin "minimalist" because she uses far fewer words than, say, Robert Jordan (similarly with Hemingway). This is true on both the micro and macro scale. On micro, when Le Guin introduces a new character, she barely describes him or her, just giving a sentence with a choice phrase or two to stimulate the reader's imagination. With Jordan, he may spend several paragraphs describing the intricacies of the character's clothing, appearance, and mannerism. On a macro scale, the original Earthsea trilogy has about half the word-count of Eye of the World, yet spans decades and several major stories. I realize that she isn't a minimalist in the technical sense of the word, but her prose style--the granularity--is more Zen garden than Tibetan mandala.

Further, it wasn't that I felt like I needed to write like 1960s SF writers (haha), but more that I had this association of "Jordan-style = bad, Le Guin-style = good," that grew out of my "falling out" with The Wheel of Time that I discussed. This contradicted with the fact that the story I'm telling is closer to Jordan in terms of scope and the type of immersion I want, yet I found myself wanting to write more Le Guin-like. In a way I kind of wanted to write a Jordan-sized epic with Le Guin-esque prose (well, not exactly, but that's the gist of it...I of course want it to be my own style, and it is, but I'm speaking more in the "school of" those authors).

Like many writers, I often discover what I want to say through the act of writing what I want to say. I think by the end of my prior post, my "eureka moment" mainly had to do with how to address a missing piece to a section of my work; so it wasn't as much how to develop my style, but how to address a problem I've been struggling with for a few years (my WIP has been on and off for over a decade...I really hope the second book doesn't take this long to write!).

The problem? Well, this requires a bit of explanation, so please bear with me. The book (which is, again, the first of a planned five-book cycle) is composed of four parts, with the first part being the "origin story" of the protagonist, the second being a kind of "gathering of threads," the third a quest, and the fourth the climax of the quest. The biggest problem I've had is what to include in Part One, which takes place over several years and focuses on the "inciting incident" and subsequent trauma of the primary protagonist, with a side story of one of the secondary protagonists. Part One, which at this moment is about 120 of the 640ish pages, focuses on the protagonist at age 15, then skips ahead a couple years, then one more year. Part Two starts him at 21, and the rest of the book takes place over the next half year or so.

What I was struggling with was the jerkiness of Part One and the feeling that I "had to" start with the main sequence (at age 21); I even considered cutting it altogether, thinking this was the Proper Writerly Thing To Do, but felt rather strongly about including this origin material--it is part of what I want to present to the reader, and (I think) an interesting sequence in its own right--but for some reason I felt that I was doing something wrong by developing this back-story, rather than referring back to it through memory and flashback. But to be honest, I tend to dislike non-linear narratives and flashbacks, so want to present it sequentially. But the problem is the jerkiness, jumping from age 15 to 17ish to 18ish, then to 21 (at one point there was a bit at age 12, but I decided to add that to age 15). It didn't flow well, and the pacing felt (feels) off.

So I've been struggling with what to include and what not to include with Part One, and how to sequence it. Couple that with the fact that there is a sense of rushing to get through the origin material, to get to the main sequence - perhaps because of the "minimalist bias" I discussed above.

I think what struck me about Jordan is that, while he starts with the main sequence and doesn't have an introductory origin sequence like I want (while Le Guin does, ironically enough), he takes his time setting the scene. He doesn't rush right into the action. In the first chapter, he does introduce some drama - the shadowy figure on the road - but it is mainly about introducing Rand and giving us a glimpse into his bucolic home. I'm into chapter 4, and Jordan has introduced more characters, but there's still no sign of serious trouble except for Padan Fain's rumors of war.

The bottom line, I think, has little to nothing to do with prose granularity, minimalism, or style at all, but pace. I think the "eureka moment" mainly had to do with me realizing that I can and should slow down the pace, and let it breathe a bit. I don't need to rush to the main sequence, that this was an unnecessary tension and problem that I felt I needed to solve.

Anyhow, I apologize if this is all dreadfully boring - I'm partially just thinking aloud.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

A footnote to the little opening Kat quoted above: the style is derived from Dashiell Hammett, writing hardboiled noir in the 1920s and 30s. I love that old stuff. Much out of date, you might think. But it's the opening of "And Then Some," a novelette that sold first to Sheila Williams at Asimov's, then as a reprint to John Joseph Adams at Lightspeed, and finally (as the opening of a novel) to Pete Crowther at PS Publishing, who brought out all the Kaslo episodes as A Wizard's Henchman.

I write in several different styles and tell myself that I intuitively fit the style to the content, or perhaps to the intended effect of the storytelling. I've since written four more Kaslo stories as prequels to AWH, sold one to Nick Gevers for a forthcoming anthology called Extrasolar, another to Sheila Williams, and have the other two in the Asimov's queue.

So you could reasonably call it an antiquated style, but I'm selling. Go figure.

 

[KatG]

Here's one of the things about pace -- people think fast-paced means fewer words and description, but it doesn't automatically. It's how details are placed. If you write a narrative with lots of short chapters, for instance, a lot of people think that's fast paced and it may be. But what it can actually do is make readers feel that a lot of time (narratively) has passed without much happening, since only so much is going to happen in a short chapter that might be only a scene length. It's the breaks from one chapter to another (pauses) that serve to create this effect, making the pacing potentially choppy, like a spinning wheel that doesn't go anywhere.

And if you are doing action, barely describing the action again doesn't necessarily make that action seem fast paced or exciting. Written fiction doesn't have visuals like a film; readers have to create them from the words. If there are few words, if the action happens quickly with little detail, this can actually bore readers and seem flat, plus they are liable to miss important information details needed for the plot. Essentially, readers read fairly fast -- if the action is over in a blink of an eye, they may not process it very well and instead of seeming fast paced and significant, the action may just seem under-whelming and unimportant. Fiction writers essentially have to cement violent action with memorable images to juice the action up from mere words. They have to milk the action in some way.

Minimalists manage it by their emphasis on dialogue -- which is an action, speaking. They seek to create memorable lines of dialogue that illuminate action, give emotional context and juice the scenes up. That's the key purpose of snappy patter, including in visual storytelling -- it focuses the reades/viewers -- and it's what they often remember best about an action scene ("Snakes, why did it have to be snakes?" "Asps. Very dangerous. You go first.") So minimalists spend extra narrative time/space on dialogue, rather than rush through it, providing detail through sound.

Le Guin does do extensive description of place and may do less of characters, but what she uses as the anchor is pov character inner thought, as well as omniscient narrator in some stories, since she often used that format. You can see this particularly in The Dispossed, which is a novel about a character dealing with vastly different philosophies and ways of thinking and resolving cultural conflicts in his mind. People think having a lot of character thought that is not simply the pov character viewing action (scenic description -- sensory info) will slow pace down, but it actually makes the action interesting as well as providing information as the pov character interprets the action occurring and makes decisions of what actions to take. A car chase on paper is not that exciting. A car chase where the pov character is freaking out or figuring out how to survive it then becomes a lot more exciting and has more meaning -- readers pay more attention.

The big epic series like Jordan and Martin also do this -- it's how they keep the large scope stories tied together. It's not that the characters are hacking and slashing, but their emotions on what is happening that makes those action scenes more than just reporting hacking and slashing, like a news article. We get stories through the eyes of the pov characters (and any omniscient narrators if used,) so it is their interpretation of the action that will infuse scenes, even in minimalism. Jordan spends a lot of narrative time on minor characters, many of whom you never see again, and how they are experiencing various events that may not involve any of the major characters. He does this, and spent time on clothes, cultures, etc., because the scope of the story is to show the entire breaking of the world, not just the central people. Whereas in Earthsea, that was not what Le Guin was doing, she was more on a folklore approach, so she wasn't spending time on that. It's a different focus, a different breadth.

Martin also likes to use symbolic, strong images to cement his action scenes, which is why when it was possible to turn the thing into a workable t.v. show, those images were visually striking -- a horse's head cleaved off, a blue rose, a wall of ice, a three-eyed crow, the Moon door, the heraldry of the major houses, etc. So Martin spends time on those images and description as part of the action. He is writing about giant wars, so he will spend extra time on describing those action scenes. At the same time, he'll have action happening that is not shown within the narrative, but only summarized by other characters. We don't see the Mountain raping and pillaging villages -- we're told about it. He chooses which actions to concentrate on, but some of those actions are long sequences.

So you are not necessarily "slowing things down" by adding description. It's a matter of which bits of description, as presented through the pov characters or/and omniscient narrator, you're going to use. Don't be afraid, though, of jump cuts. Readers are fully able to process them, within a scene or between parts of a story. A jump in time isn't particularly tricky.

And again, there's nothing wrong with a build-up if that is a structure the story needs to use. And you can alternate -- some things may involve a build-up, the peace before the trauma, and other scenes, you may want to cut right into the middle because the beginning of the action sequence wasn't particularly important. Either situation can create tension, depending on the goals/structures of the particular story. And tension is what makes something seem fast-paced -- not the number of words.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Readers are fully able to process them, within a scene or between parts of a story. A jump in time isn't particularly tricky.

Indeed. Readers have been educated by movies, which were IMO the key art form of the 20th century. Take a look at movies from the fifties and before. You'll see plenty of "establishing shots," where the setting is all laid out before the character(s) appear and the action begins. Then take a look at movies from the past twenty years. Establishing shots are far fewer.

Modern cinema viewers are comfortable with jump cuts. So are modern readers. Or should that be post-modern?

So I advise taking a look at your scenes to see whether you're writing your way into them and then writing your way out at the end. As a rule of thumb, I think: every scene poses a dramatic question, then answers it by what happens in the scene. Very often, you can start the scene with the positing of the question -- the spaceship touches down on the unknown planet, what will happen? -- then end it when the question is answered by the appearance of alien war machines bursting out of the soil to surround the ship.

 

[Alchemist]

The big fat fantasy was established in the 1970's, way before Williams. Really big ones were rare even in the 1990's.

I just wanted to go back to something you said a couple posts ago. I suppose it depends upon what we mean by "big fat fantasy." If you mean multi-volume fantasy sequences, well those go back at least to the 1920s with Cabell's Don Manuel books, if not before. But I think that is just the fantasy series; I would differentiate "big fat fantasy" as being a multi-volume fantasy series set in a secondary world, of which each volume is rather large (thus "fat"). I mean, maybe five volumes at 350 pages each is no different than three volumes at 600 pages each, but it certainly feels different. For instance, I don't see Deryni as big fat fantasy--it doesn't quite feel like one--even though there are over a dozen books and 10,000+ words (I'm guessing). Not sure exactly why this is; maybe it is because it is a bunch of different stories and characters set at different times, sort of like Darkover (although not quite as spread out).

So my question is, what are the big fat fantasies of the 1970s? I suppose we could start with Brooks and Donaldson, or possibly even Anthony or McCaffrey, or are you thinking before that? There probably isn't a clear demarcation, with a first true big fat fantasy series, if only because of he nebulous definition, but certainly Williams could be the first to write a multi-volume fantasy series in a secondary world with such a huge page count, and then Jordan turned it up to 11. I don't see anything comparable before Williams in terms of the sheer size of the volumes.

Actually, if you have the time, I'd love to hear you lay out a kind of "history of the big fat fantasy series." I have a sense of it, but am curious as to how you'd describe it.

 

[KatG]

I meant really long, large individual books. Novels that were starting in the 450-600 pages long range became pretty common in the 1970's, and there were a lot of big fat paperbacks being stuffed in racks and also taking advantage of the move into bookstores that had been progressing in the 1960's-1970's (also some large hardcovers that were broken up into somewhat shorter multiple paperbacks.) Some of them weren't series but standalones, like Little, Big and The Stand (which was cut down to the 800 page range for its first printing in the late 1970's, later bumped back up to the original 1200 pages.) Horror, particularly, liked to do big fat paperbacks in the 1970's and 1980's. (And large novels were a thing in the 1970's and 1980's in general -- see Judith Krantz's large glitz sagas, James Michener's mega historical novels and James Clavell's thousand page bestseller Shogun.) And of course lots of fantasy novels and even secondary world fantasy novels continued to be shorter throughout the 1970's through the 1990's and still today. Deryni, for instance, were good sized novels but Kurtz was trying to do a contemporary, political cast on the world fantasy, rather than a war saga, so they weren't quite in the "fat" range, nor were Brust's Vlad Taltos mystery thrillers, also going for a contemporary, political sheen.

But it became not at all unusual to fantasy readers for the pre-industrial secondary world fantasy novels to run quite long and the term "big fat fantasy" was in use before Williams' Dragonbone Chair arrived on the scene. (Tailchaser's Song, his standalone first fantasy novel about cats, ran in the 400 pages range.) Certainly, the existence of Lord of the Rings itself cemented the idea that epic sagas were perfectly fine when "fat," (although other types of fantasy would also have their large novels too.) Since readers would reliably buy some of them, publishers then would sometimes publish the even larger novels in the 600-850 page range. Raymond Feist's Magician, the first in his Riftwar series about the magician called Pug, published in 1982 several years before Dragonbone Chair, was in the 800-1000 page range. In the U.K. it was published in its entirety. In the U.S., Doubleday decided to split the sucker into two novels, Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master, each coming around 500 pages, but then a fuller complete edition was issued in 1992. This sort of maneuvering would also occur to Williams, as well as other authors. The last very large Memory novel, To Green Angel Tower, was published whole in the U.K. at first and split into two in the U.S., then later split into two for the U.K. and has varied by editions. Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet was not originally a Quartet, but more of a duology that was then split in the U.S. Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History, an alternate history fantasy, was larger at first but some publishers did split it, and so on.

So there are and continue to be production and distribution issues that can affect what lengths publishers can do at various times. It's not unusual for a publisher to license a large work and then have it split, not to milk the thing but to deal with production costs, pricing issues, shipping, rack size, etc. If you're presenting a 200,000 word novel to the market, you will have to deal with that being a possibility -- that they'll want a split, or ask you to figure out some cuts, though splits are more common. The development of e-books has not changed that circumstance -- e-files have to be priced, audio is an issue, print editions have to be factored in for most publishers, downloading time, marketing issues, etc.

But, publishers are comfortable and have been for awhile now with doing occasionally big 800 page pubs. So when Williams came in with Dragonbone Chair, it wasn't that no one marveled at its size, but the groundwork was already in place for it, and for Jordan around the same time. But even in the 1990's, when you had again a lot more hardcovers which could more frequently accommodate long lengths, the really big ones were not that frequent. But they were present, some of them were big hits. And the big fat fantasy in the 450-650 page range is quite common, of course.