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Novel Writing: Extrapolations

Novel Writing: Extrapolations

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Ford's MordredNaNoWriMo continues. I’m adding to my word count, generating text and ideas. Last week, I talked about Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which I’m using as a source text for my novel, and I mentioned that it can act as a spur to creativity.

This week, I’d like to give an example of what I meant, and go over some of the ways I’m rewriting Malory, and some of the ways I’ve interpreted him in ways that serve the purpose of my own tale. This will therefore be an unavoidably self-indulgent post.

My plan is for the story I’m writing to weave in and out around the events of Malory’s book, presenting bits of Le Morte d’Arthur from a new angle. I’m still going with the basic idea I outlined in my first post on NaNoWriMo; the Arthur story from Modred’s point of view, but a Modred who is half-elven and as deeply enmeshed in the politics of the elven world as of Camelot. Modred as a bitter moralist, struggling against fate; as I said, Modred as Elric.

So how do I get from there to a 50,000 word (or 100,000 word) novel?

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“Worms of the Earth”: Bending the rules of swords and sorcery

“Worms of the Earth”: Bending the rules of swords and sorcery

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worms-of-the-earth“Worms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gonar was right—there are shapes too foul to use even against Rome!”

–Robert E. Howard, “Worms of the Earth”

Robert E. Howard has received his fair share of criticism over the years, including the accusation that he wrote shallow, muscle-bound characters that cut their way out of every situation. Violence by strong, self-sufficient swordsmen is the end game for solving all problems in REH’s stories, his detractors argue, not wits or guile or diplomacy. For example, in his audio book survey of fantasy literature Rings, Swords, and Monsters, author Michael Drout declares Conan an uninteresting character who simply “smashes everything in his path.” L. Sprague De Camp, who penned the introductions to the famous (infamous?) Lancer Conan reprints of the 1960s and 70s, wrote that Howard’s heroes are “men of mighty thews, hot passions, and indomitable will, who easily dominate the stories through which they stride.” Howard wrote escape fiction, De Camp continued, wherein “all men are strong…” and “all problems simple.”

These generalizations lead casual readers to conclude that Howard considered violence to be the answer to all of life’s problems. They reduce Howard’s stories to brutish pulp escapism and denude them of subtlety or complexity. Sword and sorcery and its fans are painted with the same broad, clumsy brush by association. “Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless,” wrote Stephen King in his overview of horror and fantasy Danse Macabre (1981). “The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his pot belly miraculously gone.”

These criticisms aren’t entirely groundless. It’s rather easy to find examples of Howardian heroes hacking their way through a problem. Kull of Valusia butchering a horde of Serpent Men in an orgiastic, cathartic red fury in “The Shadow Kingdom” springs immediately to mind, for instance. Howard was in many ways bound by the conventions of the pulps in which he made his living as a writer. But there are an equal number of examples of Conan using his wits to extricate himself from situations when brute force won’t suffice, his reaver’s instinct restrained by sovereign responsibility. And of course, Howard penned many more characters than his famous Cimmerian.

Howard’s 1932 story “Worms of the Earth” features the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn on an ill-advised mission to enlist supernatural aid to defeat an invading force of Romans. In it Howard substitutes complexity and compromise for crashing swordplay and victory in arms. While “Worms” is a tale of vengeance, it’s of a rather hollow, unfulfilling sort.

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Novel Writing: Le Morte d’Arthur

Novel Writing: Le Morte d’Arthur

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Idylls of the KingNational Novel Writing Month is well underway for me. I’ve gotten a start on my novel, at the same time as I’m still getting the structure figured out. I’ll have some thoughts on my process, and what I’m learning, a bit later in this post; first, I want to write a bit about the subject I’m wrestling with, the Matter of Britain.

I’m writing an Arthurian fantasy. Like, I’d imagine, most people, I’ve been vaguely familiar with the stories of Arthur and his knights since I was very young. At different times in my life I’ve been more or less intensely interested in different aspects of the Arthurian tales and the way they developed over time; writing a story using that material, though, forces a new perspective on me.

I’ve had to think a lot about what precisely interests me about these stories. And which stories, in particular, have grabbed me? Why do they matter? Why do I want to write about them?

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After Halloween: Novel Writing

After Halloween: Novel Writing

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NaNoWriMo web badgeTonight, children go trick-or-treating, and many adults go to Halloween parties, thereby, perhaps, proving Ogden Nash’s line that children get more joy out of childhood than adults get out of adultery. For myself, though, I’ll be counting down the minutes to midnight, scrawling notes and making plans. Because at 12 AM, November 1, National Novel Writing Month begins.

National Novel Writing Month, more accurately International Novel Writing Month, is a worldwide challenge anyone can sign up for: you pledge to write 50,000 words in the month of November. You have to have those words written by midnight, November 30; otherwise, anything goes.

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The Book Fair

The Book Fair

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Book Fair flyerThe McGill book fair is the largest English-language used book sale in Montreal. It’s been held for decades, every October, on the second Wednesday and Thursday after Thanksgiving (which in Canada is on the second Monday in October). Every year an eclectic mix of thousands of books are sold, helping to raise money for scholarships.

I’ve been coming to the sale for about a dozen years. I’ve found novels by Lord Dunsany, a biography of C.S. Lewis, a book about Hypatia of Alexandria, a Dennis Wheatley omnibus, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, Paul Park’s Celestis, a volume combining Bede’s Ecclesiastical History with The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, collections of poetry by John Clare and Francois Villon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Southey and Don Marquis, a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds — and all of these (along with books by Neal Stephenson, Tad Williams, and T.H. White) in just one year, 2008, when I bought a total of 65 books for $161.

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My First Novel Sale

My First Novel Sale

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childoffireThis essay first appeared as a part of Jim C. Hines’s First Book Friday series, in which authors describe their first sales. You can read the entire series on his blog or LiveJournal. This piece has been lightly edited for clarity.

The first thing to know about selling Child of Fire, my first novel, is that it happened after I’d already quit writing.

I’d spent years trying to sell longer works, but had no success; you might say I was a smidge discouraged. The book I’d written just before Child of Fire was very difficult and very personal; I’d literally wept while composing the first draft. What happened when I sent it out? Form rejection after form rejection.

I was angry (with myself, not with the people who’d rejected me; that’s one of my most important rules). I thought I’d been doing everything I needed to do, but apparently not.

For my next book, I used my anger as fuel. I started with a strange incident that needed to be investigated. I loaded the story with antagonists and conflicting goals. Then I ramped up the pace and kept it going, making even the slower parts, where the characters just talk with each other, quick and full of conflict.

But I was sure I was wasting my time. If my last book hadn’t gone anywhere, why should this one?

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Heavy metal fantasy: Blind Guardian back in the fray with At the Edge of Time

Heavy metal fantasy: Blind Guardian back in the fray with At the Edge of Time

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blind-guardian-live-frontTo the gods of the north, I pray
And raise my cup for the fallen ones
Then I cry
In Valhalla they’ll sing

–“Valkyries,” Blind Guardian

As a life-long heavy metal fan who also loves fantasy literature, it was only a matter of time before I got to the subject of Blind Guardian. About all you need to know about this wonderful, semi-obscure German metal band is that they wrote an entire album about J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (Nightfall in Middle Earth).

Need I say more? I mean, look at the picture I’ve embedded — that’s a Blind Guardian album cover, and it looks like it could have been plucked off the cover of a Robert Jordan novel.

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Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part IV)

Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part IV)

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This is the fourth in a series of posts investigating the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy (you can find the first part here, the second here, and the third here). By ‘otherworld fantasy’ I mean a story set entirely in another world, with no framing device to connect it to reality. Traditionally, the credit for inventing otherworld fantasy has been given to William Morris. I have another figure in mind.

You can see her there on the right.

In 1837, Sara Coleridge, the daughter of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published a book called Phantasmion, which was received, and reviewed, as a fairy tale novel. And, at first glance, it certainly seems similar to the German and French fairy tales that were popular at around that time. But I don’t think it reads like a fairy tale, certainly not once it gets going.

It reads very like a high fantasy. In fact, like an otherworld fantasy.

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Finding Deliverance in a dearth of heroic fantasy

Finding Deliverance in a dearth of heroic fantasy

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dickey-deliveranceI lay with the flashlight still in one hand, and tried to shape the day. The river ran through it, but before we got back into the current other things were possible. What I thought about mainly was that I was in a place where none—or almost none—of my daily ways of living my life would work; there was not habit I could call on. Is this freedom? I wondered.

–James Dickey, Deliverance

So you’ve read yourself out of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, closed the cover on the latest Bernard Cornwell and Joe Abercrombie, and you’re looking for something new in heroic fiction. But you can’t seem to find what you’re looking for. Rather than slumming around in the dregs of the genre or reaching for The Sword of Shannara (with apologies to fans of Terry Brooks), my suggestion is to take a look at modern realistic adventure fiction and non-fiction.

I read heroic fiction for the action, the adventure, the storytelling, and the sense of palpable danger that real life (typically) doesn’t provide. Likewise, I find that works like The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf by Jack London, Alive by Piers Paul Read, and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer satisfy the same primal needs as the stories of an Edgar Rice Burroughs or David Gemmell. The best modern adventure fiction/non-fiction stories are bedfellows with heroic fiction: While they may not contain magic or monstrous beasts, they allow us to experience savagery and survival in the wild and walk the line of life and death.

My favorite work in this genre is Deliverance by James Dickey, and it’s to this book that I’d like to devote the remainder of this post.

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Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part III)

Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part III)

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William MorrisThis is the third in a series of posts looking at the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy: that is, the first fantasy to be set entirely in its own fictional world, with no connection to conventional reality at all. It’s an innovation traditionally ascribed to William Morris, but I think I’ve found an earlier writer who deserves that honor.

In the first post, I considered how to identify a fictional otherworld. I suggested four characteristics, of which a story’s fictional world needed to have at least three to be a true otherworld: its own logic (which might involve, say, the existence of magic), characters who we identified as residents of another world than our own, a coherent history, and a coherent fictional geography. In the second post, I considered ways in which older fantasies were linked to reality — by being set in the past, or in a place beyond contemporary knowledge, or being established as a dream, or as a story within a story, or as a myth. I concluded by discussing what I felt was significant about the idea of otherworld fantasy.

Before going on to present my suggestion for the writer of the first otherworld fantasy, though, I’d like to take a closer look at some past fantasies I thought came very close to presenting self-contained otherworlds. These are works which I don’t think are true otherworld fantasies, but which other people might choose to see as such.

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