I like making elaborate metaphors when it distracts me from actually having to write anything.
Announcing my daily writing progress is my way of making myself stick to it. It’s a brain hack. Because writing is very hard, but I don’t like breaking promises. So I stick to it, even if it means writing way past my bedtime. Even when it hurts.
And it frequently hurts. Physically, sometimes. Mentally, often.
I once mentioned that I’m structuring the Annals of the Bitch Queen trilogy to make the “epic fantasy” bit easier to swallow. I love epic fantasy, but it’s not the easiest to write well. High stakes, world-shattering consequences, and I always feel like they have to end with this atmosphere of “whoa.” The decision to write epic fantasy is like shooting yourself in both feet before you begin a race.
See? I did it again.
But in any case, I decided to structure it as: sword and sorcery for the first book, “adventure quest” for the second book, and then leave the actual “epic” for the end. I think it’s a great trap. People who want to find out more, who want to get deeper into the story and the characters’ journey, are rewarded as they go along.
It’s a bit of a strange way to write fantasy, maybe, especially in an exposition-heavy genre. Writing epic fantasy is always a balance. Tipping to one side or the other carries consequences. Creating rich, nuanced characters doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye–you can’t really plan out for them, either. You have to give them the room and space to grow, which often involves giving them problems to work out and allowing them to act organically within the confines of the narrative, which means not choking them with exposition.
But focusing on characters also means that I have to juggle scenes to make sure they aren’t pointless (because if there’s one thing I hate more than exposition, it’s a meandering narrative). And to get the interactions seem natural while you’re trying to relay information to the reader is more difficult than it looks. You also want to make sure the prose reads well the entire time, too. My love for efficiency has resulted in the firm belief that acceptable prose is one you don’t notice, good prose makes you SEE things, and great prose makes you see and feel everything on a visceral level. It’s not about pretty; pretty without emotional impact is meaningless to me. When I read empty, pretty prose, I actually cringe a bit inside.
Others will disagree, of course, and that’s fine–I’m aware I have pretty strange ideas about this whole thing. But that’s what makes it challenging for me. I want to tell this great story but I want to tell it in such a way that you care by the end. My style has been criticized for leaving people in the dark, so I’ve been trying to learn how to pace this better so the reader understands it’s on purpose because otherwise it’s going to be 300 pages of politics that no one (most of all, ME) will care about, anyway.
So this is where I’m at with this book at the moment. I’m showing my cards now, doling the politics out over the course of 200k words, but the challenge to do it in such a way that the reader cares about the why, not just the how. My goal is to take the reader on the journey, which means a build-up that leads to a climax that has an impact, not just one that peters out.
I’ve got ideas. I don’t know if they’ll work, in the end. Like I said. It’s throwing a ball across a field and hoping you can run fast and far enough to catch it. The good thing is I may have been doing this long enough to know how to pull it off.
Maybe. We’ll see. At least now that I’ve talked about it, I have to do it somehow.
