Isn't there some saying that every journalist has a novel manuscript in his or her desk drawer? Here we are, a bunch of ruthless nonfiction writers—speaking for myself here—who would rush a flamethrower for a buck, envious of the creative freedom of the novelist and wondering how to make that work financially.
Count me among you. I have one mystery done and am working on a sequel and also a five-book fantasy series of which I have written two.
Thus far, no trees have been injured in the making of these books.
For the mystery series, I happily admit to one and all that I ape the best of what I glean from three authors who most influence me:
- Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe lent the the idea for the two-detective office-oriented story, with the narrator being the less-intelligent (though still smart) gofer for his boss.
- John McDonald's Travis McGee series gave me the idea for having my detectives live aboard a boat (and office) that can move around Florida and the Caribbean. OK, perhaps this is a blatant tax dodge to let me write off research trips.
- And Robert Parker's Spenser books reinforce my own desire to give my narrator a smart mouth and irreverent wit. I've read many other mystery authors too, but those are my main influences.
Not so with fantasy. Fantasy has one huge advantage in that you get to make up everything and nobody can say you're wrong. It has one huge disadvantage in that you also cannot assume much in the way of reader background knowledge and you find yourself describing things like common animals. It's too easy to wander off into expository lumps bigger than the most devoted reader would swallow.
But one reason I am trying this form is that I have rarely found a fantasy series (they're almost all series these days) that I liked. Oh, sure, I liked Tolkein, the fountainhead for all modern fantasy, even if the man did use his books as filing cabinets for every shred of background information he had ever run across or invented. But subsequent writers don't take forty years to write a three-book Ring series (I exclude The Hobbit, an earlier work). Perhaps they should. What I see today is writers who create tension by having their characters, usually a group, act so stupidly that you wonder who let them outside, or who seem to almost willfully misunderstand one another's intentions. They also run to wordy; apparently, told by the publishing houses to write series, they write three or four or six or more books, each 100,000 to 120,000 words, to accomplish a single plot. This isn't telling stories, this is just processing a lot of wood pulp. I find myself flipping pages ten at a time and saying "Gawd almighty! Enough drivel. Get to the point already!"
Partly it's training. I've spent 25 years having brevity hammered into me, making every word pull double-duty, scanning manuscripts looking for ways to cut thirty words. Fantasy novelists never use five words when fifty could do the same job.
To top this off, fantasies usually assume that if some horrible monster is not stopped the whole world will end. Given the diameter of most worlds, it's happy coincidence for our heroes that they hapen to live within walking distance of the World Ending Bad Buy. Tough break for the WEBG, of course. Should have renewed his passport and moved abroad.
Even Tolkein gave in to this. Well, yes, having a WEBG certainly ups the ante and makes the travails of our little band of heroes that much more gripping. But even Tolkein, in the conference at the elven valley in book one, had a hard time putting forth the notion that the way to stop impending World Doom was to entrust the task to four untrained and ignorant hobbits and a lot of blind luck, when there was so much more experience and talent available.
I find that, in fantasy -- unlike with mysteries -- there's nobody I want to copy. This is probably a mistake since we know that publishers are sheeplike while, at the same time, lacking the IQ of ewe and I. (sorry) I expect to turn in a manuscript and be told, "These people are not stupid enough! Each 70,000 word book tells a complete story as part of a series! We have Canadian pine forests needing mowing, you have to be less succinct! We want to see a story arc like a rainbow: it starts here and then just sails off into the clouds and vanishes! Get with the program, write like all the other lazy writers we hire!"
It's just lucky I'm not bitter about it. Meantime, I will happily go along doing my own fantasy which will be like none other I have ever seen. What then becomes of it, who knows.
And you can read at least a few chapters of it, at http://www.Sorcet.com and then tell me what you think. |
