Found an interesting bit of process for big projects in
this interview with Moore. I like the idea of picking very resonant names for parts of a big work - like an epic fantasy series - to help get things straight in the head. Not sure there's too many people talking about planning whole series out there (other than Eddings' Rivan Codex).
"
As a fan I’ve been following things you’ve said in interviews over the years, first thing I’d ask is – if you’ve taken ten years to write a book of this scale and scope, how do you know when it’s actually finished?
Well, it helps if you’ve got a reasonably rigid blueprint right at the start. This helps to contain a book which is about eternity and which I understood right at the beginning could end up being infinite, if I wasn’t very careful. At the very beginning of the process, when I’d only got the most amorphous idea of the kind of novel that I’d wanted to write, I started to think it was going to be a very, very big novel. I thought, maybe if I started writing down smart-arse chapter titles, or titles that seemed to resonate with the numerous subjects I wanted to talk about, that would be a place to begin. So, I ended up writing down the titles that seemed to have room for everything I wanted to discuss. I got to 35 and then I worked out that would make a prologue, an epilogue, and the remaining 33 chapters divided into 3 books of eleven chapters each.
This is all fairly anally retentive and probably boring and unfathomable but it was just that I needed that seemingly arbitrary ground plan before I actually buckled down to the work. Having got that, and having arranged so that these titles would work best in the first book, these in the second book and so on, I eventually got them into some sort of intuitive order, and then I simply started with the prelude and worked my way over that ten years, with perhaps eighteen months off in the middle doing
Dodgem Logic. At that point, I was satisfied that everything I’d wanted to discuss was tied up somewhere in there, and so that was the point at which I was released from my servitude to
Jerusalem. I’d fulfilled my part of the bargain.
It sounds like a very committed way to work
Well, it seemed to be necessary. I’d never actually had the impulse to write a book that was as big as this in every sense, and I understood fairly early on that I was going to need a lot of new tools and new ideas to actually navigate a book of that size. I mean plotting, simple things like plotting, become a difficulty, especially with the multiple plots that run through
Jerusalem, when you’re expecting a reader to remember an incident on a certain page of a novel hundreds and hundreds of pages later - perhaps weeks in their actual life. You’ve got to sort of think about that and plot the novel differently so that certain things are reminders, or are underlined at certain intervals. It’s more or less stuff that I was working out as I was going, but it is a fairly committed way of doing it, as you say."
If I get too naggy, tell me to cut it out. But there are numerous fantasy authors who do both secondary world with swords and contemporary fantasy, with only occasional swords. And crime syndicates in epic fantasy are a thing, so you don't have to worry too much there. You can use noir style anywhere in any type of story and it's much liked in fantasy fiction.
