Babel Clash

It seems like it was only yesterday that Brent Weeks and Brandon Sanderson jumped on the blog to debate all things epic fantasy.  The conversation was so engaging that I completely lost track of time.  I can’t believe today is their last day on Babel Clash (maybe if we ask nicely they’ll come back when it’s time to promote their next books - hint, hint guys!)

While Brent and Brandon prepare to say their good-byes, don’t forget to support them in their craft and pick up a copy of their books.  I don’t think I need anymore convincing to pick up their books, but if you’d like to Brent and Brandon, please feel free to offer up a sales pitch to the readers of Babel Clash!

Also, starting tomorrow, we switch from epic debate to an editor’s roundtable of sorts.  Curious to read about what some very accredited editors think about current trends in the genre?  Curious to read about their thoughts on the e-book revolution?  Curious to read about what an editor does?  I’m sure you’ll find out about all this and more starting tomorrow as three editors take the floor on Babel Clash for the next two weeks.  I’m really looking forward to hearing what our next three guests have to say about the publishing business and where they see the genre heading (who knows, it may even help me get closer to adding featured guest and moderator to my Babel Clash bio…if you catch my drift)! 

We’ll have Lou Anders, the four-time Hugo nominated Editorial Director of Pyr Books, a Chesley award winning art director, and the PKD nominated editor of nine anthologies, the latest being Masked (Gallery Books) and Swords & Dark Magic (with Jonathan Strahan, Eos).

We’ll also have Ginjer Buchanan, the Editor-in-Chief of Ace/Roc Books which are the Science Fiction and Fantasy imprints of Penguin USA. Ginjer adds:  “Lou and I are tied for Hugo nominations, but I’ve also managed a World Fantasy Award nom in the Special Award-Professional category. I’ve been with Ace since the propitious year of 1984.”

And finally, we’ll have Jeremy Lassen, Editor-in-Chief at Night Shade Books, an independent publisher who have been publishing horror, science fiction, and fantasy for over a decade.  Prior to his career as a publisher, he was a book seller (at Mysterious Galaxy and Borderlands Books).  His view from the sales floor has been instrumental in forming his outlook on publishing and book selling in general.

Ah, good.  Something we can disagree on.  (Though only a little, since we’re both mostly arguing against bad usage of form–which by that definition, is bad.  So neither of us would want to use it anyway.  But there does seem to be some room to talk here.)

I think short chapters do some good, and accomplish a lot.  Martin is a master, and he uses them well.  (At least, in some places.)  Pratchett does an equally good job at it in a different type of sub-genre.  But used poorly (or, well, unfairly) they do some terrible things to me as a reader.

An example here for me is Dan Brown.  I don’t want to pick on him, as big targets are often too easy to pick on.  He’s obviously been very successful, and has some very interesting things about his writing.  However, one thing I noticed reading the Da Vinci Code was that he seemed to be using the same tricks over and over and over to simply get me to turn the page.  Someone would open a door and…  We don’t find out what was on the other side.  The chapter ends.  We go to the next chapter, and we either find out that nothing really that important was on the other side of the door, or we get told “I’ll tell you what was on the other side of that door eventually…if you keep reading.”

This actually works, quite well, for a little while.  (For me in the Da Vinci Code it worked for about half the book.)  And then, it just gets wearying to me.  The gimmicks start to show through, and I get tired of never finding anything out.  There doesn’t feel like development, just one big long stall.  Yes, it’s possible for a book to be “too exciting.”  Because if excitement is all there is, we lose character, setting, and a whole lot of depth.  We go from trouble, to trouble, to trouble.  Hight tension moment to high tension moment.

Now, this is an extreme example, but I think that it’s something for writers to think about.  You suggest that self-indulgence is a danger.  Yes, perhaps it is.  At the same time, I’m not writing thrillers.  I’m writing epic fantasy.  I’m writing 300,000 word plus books.  There should be ups, there should be downs, there should be moments of frantic pace, and there should be scenes of (yes) dinner.  Sometimes, the most telling scenes in a story can be a simple dinner sequence.  The scene with Faramir riding to charge while his father eats from the LoTR movies comes to mind.

But this isn’t exactly what I was trying to get to.  I write long chapters not to (hopefully) indulge.  I do it to make each chapter (or sequence of them) to have its own rising action, its own climactic moments, its own falling action.  I want to open the door and, instead of cutting away, show something on the other side that really does upset the scene.  Then continue through the scene to show the ramifications.  I want to have each chapter be a story unto itself, rather than a movie trailer for the next chapter.  (Which, in turn, is a movie trailer for the next one…and so on.)

Again, I do think there are great ways to use the short chapters.  But I worry that the conventional wisdom of “Don’t ever let them put the book down!” is bad advice for some authors.  Les Miserables has a whole lot of parts that are not very exciting.  There are plenty of parts where, once I’m done with the scene, I can put the book down and walk away.  It pulls me back to read not because it uses a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, but because the deep, rich characters draw me back to read further about them.

I do agree that the larger casts are a problem that doesn’t seem to have a good solution.  Either you ignore half your characters for a book–as GRRM did–or you give them only brief appearances–as Robert Jordan often did.  I don’t think I’m in a position to criticize either author as, unlike Dan Brown, I think they both do/did fantastic jobs with their works.  But I am consciously keeping the cast of the Stormlight Archive down.

Let me tackle the question about deus ex machinas. (Dei ex machinae? Dang, I’ve taken either too much or too little Latin.) Could such a thing work in modern fantasy, and how?

Yes, I think it could. But you’re running into the middle of the intersection of fiction and reality. And you know what can happen when you run into an intersection.

To answer the question requires context (which you probably know, Brandon, but is relevant for those who haven’t studied this).

One paragraph infodump: The Greeks of the fifth century BC believed in many gods, and they believed those gods intervened in real life (especially with the heroes who were so often the gods’ own kids). The original plays happened during a religious festival. So part of the point of the drama (as my Classics prof explained it) was that humans make a huge mess–and need the gods to come straighten things out. Thus, the Athenians get rid of the endless cycle of personal retributive justice (you-killed-my-family-member-so-I-must-kill-you-so-your-family-must-kill-me) in the Oresteia only through Athena’s intervention and establishment of the rule of law. (She sticks the Furies into the ground beneath Athens, if I remember correctly.) Intractable problem solved.

We don’t believe in Athena (sorry, neo-pagans, but generally…), so reading that ending is interesting metaphorically and sociologically and historically. But it is much less interesting to us dramatically. And it doesn’t fill us with religious awe. We’re just not going to express a heartfelt, “Thank you Athena for sparing me!” (Stop me before I talk catharsis and Aristotle’s Poetics here. No really, stop me!)

A deus ex machina written now runs into entirely different audience expectations. It just looks like the author cheating. “Hmm, the way I’ve set things up, the good guy will die, but I don’t want that. So… magic sword!”

I think there are only a couple routes you could use if you really wanted to write a modern day deus ex machina that worked. First, you could set up a fantasy world in which the gods do regularly intervene and play favorites, and where mortals need them. It could be done well. However, at the end of that book, you’re still not going to get religious awe from your audience. I think you can get everything else.

So I think the only way to have the full effect that Aeschylus got would be to write your epic fantasy specifically for a particular religious audience: set up your deus as a Hindu goddess for a Hindu audience and then have her act in ways consistent with what they believe is her character. Or a Christian God for a Christian audience, or what have you. I guess the limiter here would be that you’d have to choose a religion which believes in an intervenient God. Deists, you’re hosed.

Is that success?

We have a strong rationalist thread in fantasy right now, a demand that the magic system be explained and consistent so that the author doesn’t cheat at the end. If magic figures importantly to the plot, we want it stitched in there like a good mystery: all the hints were there for us to figure it out for ourselves, we just didn’t put it together. There’s an intellectual pleasure to it: Well played, Mr. Sanderson! Compare that to the magic of Tolkien’s Gandalf. The guy is treated like he can pull mountains down on your head, but mostly he just uses the Magic Staff Flashlight. Come on, Tolkien, how about a chart of what the Rings of Power do? The people demand a graph!

(Tomorrow, I’ll hit your second post regarding short chapters and what is clearly your tragically flawed view of cliffhangers.)

I thought I’d do a post on pacing, chapter length, and pulling readers through a story.  This is something I’ve been thinking about.  Specifically, I’ve noticed at many authors in fantasy seem to be adopting a more thriller-style (genre, not the music video) of pacing.  Shorter chapters, with cliffhanger endings that make for a quick turn to the next page.

Perhaps it’s always been this way, and I’m just more sensitive to writing methodology now, as I’m a writer myself.  But it does seem to be happening more.  A good example are the Codex Alera books by Jim Butcher.  But I’ve noticed some of it in your own books, Brent.  It makes me wonder if this is a reaction, on our part as a genre, but the huge teen-fantasy bubble that happened surrounding Harry Potter.  YA and middle grade also tend to be more quickly paced, more tight in this regard.

Oddly, I’ve found myself reacting against it.  Not that I don’t like this style of storytelling–in fact, I think it works very well.  Jim’s novel that I mentioned above was a real pleasure to read.  Terry Pratchett does this in his books, and they’re excellent.  But I don’t know if it matches every project and every story.

Conventional wisdom in writing is that you don’t want the reader to stop and take a break, otherwise they might not return to the book.  You always want to leave them hanging.  And yet, I don’t know if this kind of pacing works very well in the very long form novels.  When I write my books these days, I WANT to give the reader some breathing room.  Some time to step away from the book, if they want, and digest what has happened.  I feel that if I pace them absolutely break-neck, the experience will be exhausting and draining across the long haul, and the book will end up unfulfilling.

Is this something you’ve ever thought about?  Do you merely let pacing and chapter breaks happen?  Readers, do you notice this?  What do you think of it?

Brent, I think you’re absolutely right several places in there.  (Though I feel like I should object on principle, so there’s more conflict to our narrative.  Good storytelling, and all that.)

Yes, there are things I can get away with now that I couldn’t before–or ones I didn’t try to get away with before.  One big one is flashbacks.  In my early years as a writer, published and unpublished, I stayed far away from flashbacks.  Partially because I’d been told to do so, and partially because I’d seen them done poorly from a large number of other new writers.  There are good reasons to stay away from them, and the advice is good.  If you do flashbacks the wrong way, you’ll break the flow of your narrative, risk undermining the tension of your story, confuse the reader, and basically make a big old mess.

Then Pat Rothfuss comes along and does a narrative-within-a-narrative where the entire book is basically flashback, and it works really well.  I do know, however, that Pat had a lot of trouble selling that book of his to start.  (Though admittedly, I’m not sure if that was the flashbacks or not.  I seem to remember he added the frame story later in the process, and that the huge length of the book was what was scaring people away at first.)

I guess this brings us back to the first rule of writing: you can do whatever you want, if you do it well.  Regardless, I decided–after some deliberation–that I’d use flashbacks as an extensive device in The Way of Kings and the rest of the series.  None of these were in earlier drafts of the novel, however, because I knew that many readers (and editors) have a knee-jerk reaction against flashbacks because of how likely they are to screw things up.  Now that I’m established, however, I feel that people will trust me when they see them.

(One thing I’m leaving out is that I think I’m a better writer now than I was before, and if I’d tried these flashbacks during earlier days, I’d likely have flubbed them.)

You talk about foreshadowing, and make some great points.  One thing I think that I want to bring up is the idea of nesting reveals.  I always try to have a nice spectrum of types of plot twists and revelations in the book.  Some are easier to figure out, others more difficult.  My experience has been that some readers want to try to guess what is going to happen, and others do not, but both appreciate a legitimate twist in the story.  (One that was clearly foreshadowed, but not made obvious.)  As so yes, there are going to be different types of readers, and some will see the foreshadowing that others will not.  Some won’t care at all if the story just twists unexpectedly (and without explanation) while others will consider it a put-downable offense.

In the spirit of tossing questions back and forth, then, let me ask you this: I just mentioned above that you can do anything in your writing if you do it well.  Yet I’ve also talked a lot about the importance of foreshadowing.  What do you think?  Is it ever justified to have a total Deus Ex Machina?  (For those who don’t know, this refers to a major plot twist–usually involving the heroes/protagonists being rescued from danger unexpectedly–that is not explained or foreshadowed.)  How might one do this well?  Or is it an exception to my rule?  Is my rule even really a good rule?

(Also, all, please forgive typos in this post.  Just back from book tour after a long day traveling, and wanted to make sure I got this posted.  But I’m kind of drooping here.)

Brandon, you asked if I’ve ever planned a story to be of a certain length, and then decided that there just wasn’t enough there to justify it.

Honestly, my problem so far has been the opposite. I’ve always ended up having too much to write. Of course, some of this has to do with growing up when we did, reading epic fantasy that was absolutely enormous, so maybe that formed a big part of what I feel an epic fantasy ought to be. (Feel, not think: it’s an emotional artifact of my youth, not an intellectual one.) It’s silly, but I pick up a book by a great writer like David Gemmell, and I go, Man, it’s kinda short.

But of course there are competing tensions about how long is long enough, especially when you’re a new writer. And some of these are nakedly commercial. You turn in a first book that’s over 200,000 words (like I did, that one didn’t sell) and that’s a big strike against an editor buying it from you. It’s more paper; fewer books can fit on the shelves; it’s more shipping; and not least, much more time for the editor and copyeditor (and more time for the sales people that you pray read it, too).

So after I wrote the Night Angel books, I cut ruthlessly. I took The Way of Shadows from over 200k words (again, dangit) and cut 44k words. I cut 20k words from Shadow’s Edge, and I cut 40k words from Beyond the Shadows. The last was the only one, in my opinion, that suffered from me cutting too much. I had to get information across sometimes by telling–messenger says, Oh yeah, guy went into these woods and made a sword–rather than showing it. When you have too many of those kinds of important details given once, in brief, if a reader misses a few, they get confused. (I should also point out that this cutting was done on my own because of what I guessed or kind-of knew about the industry, not at Orbit’s behest.)

For good and ill, the stories we tell are limited by our market.

In your paragraph on effective foreshadowing, you speak of foreshadowing like it’s matching paint colors: you do it well or you don’t. I think that leaves out an intrinsic part of the equation: the audience. There are better and worse writers (and foreshadowing is a real skill), but there are also better and worse readers.

Some writers purport not to write for an audience, but aside from guys like T.S. Eliot who are throwing bits of Sanskrit into their poems (because hey, THEY know Sanskrit), I don’t see how that can be true. When I set up a plot twist, I have something I want the audience to being thinking before that twist or the big reveal will fail. But it’s different to fool different audiences: someone who’s read the genre for 50 years is going to read differently than a 15-year-old who’s reading her first book outside of school assignments. What is recognizable foreshadowing for the latter is going to be like being beaten over the head with a brick for the former.

So I think there is an interplay that goes both ways between readers and writers: writers teach readers broadly what to expect from their own work, and–I think–readers teach us what works. Dean Koontz writes about writing a book in iambic meter and thinking no one would notice, but then feeling a rush of pleasure when someone did. I’m sure you’ve had an analogous experience.

By the way, who killed Asmodean?

Fine, fine. Can’t fault me for trying.

So something that I’d love to hear your thoughts on are if you think as your career progresses that you can get away with things–story things–that you couldn’t when you were less well known?

Obviously, as we grow in our storytelling skills and experience with the industry, we can try harder challenges and succeed where we wouldn’t have before. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m more curious about if you think we train our readers (and book store buyers). I think–pure speculation because I haven’t yet dug in to my copy of The Way of Kings–that if a 400,000 word tome hit my desk from someone I’d never heard of and when I began reading, I found it didn’t follow any epic fantasy structure I knew, I’d be much more likely to assume it was just an amateur mess–but because it says “Brandon Sanderson, #1 NYT Bestselling Author” on the front, I trust that you’re Doing Something Big. I think I read it differently. Do you agree?

I run into the same sort of thing: I’ve got a decent reputation for deep characters now, so when a character does something contradictory (dumb jock says something brilliant or whatever), my readers think, “Oh, there’s more going on here under the surface, can’t wait to see what.” Rather than, “This character is inconsistent. Bad writing.”

And I would contend that precisely because you’re a magic system guy, that if you don’t explain the magic in TWOK, people are NOT going to say, “Good book, but magic system doesn’t make sense.” They’re going to say, “Obviously brilliant stuff going on with the magic, can’t wait until book 12 to see what!” (That’s hyperbole with a wink, not snark.)

Do you believe you can get away with storytelling stunts, elisions, or tricks now that Brandon Sanderson the debut author couldn’t have? If so, what’s the good part of that–and is there a bad side?

People have been asking me to expand on that essay, though it was written (originally) to be part of a series I did on writing The Way of Kings.  I never had the time, however, and that was the only one that was fleshed out, so my assistant suggested it might be a good fit for a Scalzi guest blog.  However, I do worry that some of the ideas are unformed, as it was written to come after several other essays I was planning.

The short answer to your first comment is a yes, you are right. The realization I came to while working on The Way of Kings was that I was so accustomed to writing self-aware fantasy in the Mistborn books that I was searching to do the same with Kings.  While anyone can enjoy Mistborn (I hope) it works best as a series for those who are familiar with (and expecting) tropes of epic fantasy to come their direction. That allows me to play with conventions and use reader expectations in a delightful way.  But it also means that if you don’t know those conventions, the story loses a little of its impact.

But this is an interesting discussion as to the larger form of a novel.  Is it okay, in an epic fantasy, to hang a gun on the mantle, then not fire it until book ten of the series written fifteen years later. Will people wait that long?  Will it even be meaningful?  My general instincts as a writer so far have been to make sure those guns are there, but to obscure them—or at least downplay them.  People say this is so that I can be more surprising.  But it’s partially so that those weapons are there when I need them.

It often seems to me that so much in a book is about effective foreshadowing.  This deserves more attention than we give it credit. When readers have problems with characters being inconsistent, you could say this is a foreshadowing problem—the changes, or potential for change, within the character has not been presented in the right way. When you have a deus ex machina ending, you could argue that the problem was not in the ending, but the lack of proper framework at the start. Some of the biggest problems in books that are otherwise technically sound come from the lack of proper groundwork.

In the case you mentioned, however, I think I would have cut the creature.  Because you said it was slowing things down.  There’s an old rule of thumb in screenwriting that I’ve heard expressed in several ways, and think it works well applied to fiction.  Don’t save your best storytelling for the sequel.  If your best storytelling isn’t up front, you won’t get a sequel. Of course, once you’re done, you do need to come up with something as good or better for the sequel, otherwise it might not be worth writing.

For The Way of Kings, I’ve had to walk a very careful balance.  I do have ten books planned, but I had to make sure I was putting my best foot forward for the first book.  I had to hang guns for the later novels, but not make this story about them—otherwise readers would be unsatisfied to only get part of a story.

Question for you, then, Brent.  Have you ever planned out a story to be a certain length, then ended up deciding there just wasn’t enough there to justify it?  I had trouble learning this balance as a younger writer, and some of my readers know that I wrote two failed books (one called Mistborn, the other called The Final Empire) in which neither one had enough material to form a novel.  It wasn’t until I combined the ideas and story together and wrote Mistborn: The Final Empire that everything worked.

Brandon, I just read your essay on Postmodernism in Fantasy, and as always, I’m intrigued by your mix of humility (real) and ambition (huge). You talked about interpretation, intention, and audience–which I hope we can touch on in these posts.

For those joining us who doesn’t know, both Brandon and I have each just published first books in new epic fantasy series. In other company, people would say I write big books–The Black Prism is 640 pages and 210,000 words–but Brandon has just published The Way of Kings, which is what? 1,000 pages and 390,000 words? My series will be a trilogy which will definitely come in under five books, whereas Brandon is planning a decalogy (oddly enough, not the study of decals), which will definitely come in under fifteen.

I want to revisit that essay if we have a chance, but because Brandon’s still on the road for his book tour and won’t have much time for a few days, let me toss him a few softballs first:

1) Brandon, multi-volume epic fantasy presents unique storytelling challenges and unique demands upon a reader. You said in your essay that with The Stormlight Archive, “I didn’t want to intentionally build a story where I relied upon reader expectations.” But I assume you meant that in a specific rather than a global way: you do intend that subplots will get wrapped up eventually, that there is a main plot, that characters have arcs, and that the story has an ending… right?

2) If that’s a valid assumption, then as a storyteller chunking a story out in ten volumes, how much do you worry about imposing the traditional limits of a novel on each volume? (i.e. Chekhov’s Gun: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it must absolutely go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”)

For example, I wrote a scene for The Black Prism which was interesting in its own right and introduced a cool monster and a setting that I plan to use later in the trilogy–but it didn’t accomplish anything necessary for book 1. It slowed the headlong rush to the end of the book; it looked like gratuitous worldbuilding. It wasn’t, but a critic wouldn’t know that until they read book 3–which I haven’t yet written. So I cut it.

Would you have? Would you have cut an analogous scene in Mistborn 1, but not from TSA 1?

Are you writing these books so that each volume has that rousing, bang-up finish, or are you fine with a cliffhanger, content that the series must be judged as a whole? In a ten-volume epic, do you conceive of them as telling one story or ten stories? Or both? Or more?

It’s that time again where we must say goodbye to our current guests and welcome our new guests.  Special thanks to Mira and Jesse who filled the last two weeks with all things zombie.  I had a blast reading your posts and getting a peek into your world.  Do come back again!  If you have any last words (or zombie survival tips, or book plugs), we’d love to hear them. 

Next up, we switch focus from the undead to the epic with New York Times Bestselling authors Brandon Sanderson and Brent Weeks (who have both coincidentally started new series with their recent releases)! 

In The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson brings us the first in a ten book epic fantasy series called The Stormlight Archive.  Brandon was also one of the very first guests on Babel Clash and we’re glad to have him back on the blog.

Brent Weeks is also another Babel Clash alum (who could forget Brent’s epic debate with Joe Aberbrombie).  Brent’s new book is the first in a brand new series featuring Gavin Guile, a prism with only five years to achieve five goals. 

Welcome back to Babel Clash, Brandon and Brent.  We can’t wait to see what you have in store for us.

Thanks again to Brent & Joe!

I’m very pleased to announce that our next feature guest is Karen Miller, author of the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series and the Godspeaker Trilogy. Her new novel, Prodigal Mage, is on-sale 8/10.

Karen has also written the Star Wars novel Wild Space and two excellent novels under the pen name K. E. Mills.

Tune in tomorrow to learn the topic of our next geeky debate.