Tuesday, December 18, 2018

The Epic Tale of the Epic Fantasy I Wasn't Going to Write

A few weeks back I wrote a long piece in my notebook about the hankering to write a big, thick, heavy, weighty, old school, doorstopping epic fantasy. Part of it was what I think is a really terrific introduction that captured how and why I was feeling that way, touching on how the weather stoked the always smoldering nostalgia I feel about reading epic fantasy and how I always viewed the fall as the time for reading them. But it doesn't exactly work right now. We had a blizzard. I've written some other things. My Christmas lights are up. The mood is different. (You can read it here if you like.) But I'm still feeling the hankering though and I've been thinking about it a lot, the idea gestating and growing in my mind.

I've always wanted to write an old school, 90s style, epic high fantasy book. We're talking a doorstopper where the word count is expressed in fractions of millions and requires at least two reams of paper to properly print out in double spaced Times New Roman, 12 point font.


I've tried it before and never quite got there. My first completed novel, THE FALLING DARK, was an attempt at this. Interestingly, this time of year always makes me think of that book because about fifteen years ago, my wife's cousin challenged me to complete the book by Christmas Eve or I couldn't eat at our family celebration. I finished it and it was a mess. A glorious 172k word, 575 manuscript paged mess. And I'm damned proud of it. It's the textbook example of a trunk novel. I actually just spent about 20 minutes cycling through several thumb drives I own to confirm word counts and pages. It was on an old 128MB PNY stick.

My next attempt were the SEASONS book. They came in at 135k (WINTER) and 131k (SPRING) with a lost "working draft" of a few dozen thousand words (SUMMER). Interestingly enough, the word counts of those two books are comparable to the word counts of my beloved Dragonlance books. But the SEASONS books were YA books, not traditional epic fantasy. My former agent had even suggested shopping them as adult with crossover YA potential. I don't know if he ever did, hence the reason he's my former agent....but that's a discussion for another time.

THE LOST SCIONS has epic elements though I don't fully think of it as epic fantasy. I always intended it to be more fantasy adventure than epic fantasy, but I definitely blurred lines with it. It's also YA and topped out at about 108k. So as you can see, I never quite reached my loft aspirations. In retrospect, it's probably a good thing. I don't think I could've actually handled it twenty years ago. And I still don't know if I can handle it now.

This really all started a few months back. I was hanging out with my kids, niece and nephew. They wanted to color. My daughter asked me to draw pictures for them. She thinks that I can draw. I can't.  I printed out some figure drawing templates, traced over them and added details and embellishments for the kids, creating a slew of knights, princesses, sorceresses and one midriff bearing Aiel knock-off that was Natalie's favorite. I joked that they were characters from the "epic fantasy I'm never going to write." I couldn't leave it alone though. The drawings became the grain of sand that gets stuck in the oyster. A pearl started to form, agitating me to the point of ignoring my WIP (a YA fantasy inspired by THE THIEF by Megan Turner Whalen) and spending energy on a project that doesn't exist.



The pearl has grown, grinding bit by bit. It's mostly little character vignettes or fragments of ideas, some based on the pictures I drew others just ones that have popped in or I've thought about before that could fit into a story that size. I contemplated integrating some of these elements into the world and story of my SEASONS book making it a more traditional epic fantasy, kind of like he who shall not be named suggested, but I decided against that because I still believe in that story. No, this has to be a wholly original concept. And that's scary.

The logistics alone could be alarming. The longest thing I've ever written is 172k and it was garbage. Looking back, I've written as many as 440k in one year. A lot of those words were part of rewrites. Still though, I can write that much. I've talked about this before. Even if I were to go the length of a middle WHEEL OF TIME book, between 226k and 315k, that's less than a thousand words a day. That's about three pages a day. About an hour of writing. I feel like my friend Brian Fay would find that interesting. However, logistics aren't the problem. The story is. It's a problem because I don't have one.And that's a major problem.

You can't write a story without a story. Okay, sorry, I'm mixing up my terms. I don't have a plot. I have some nice elements that could make up an epic fantasy story: characters, settings and even vague notions of a protagonist. But I don't know how they come together. And that has to be the first step if I'm going to write the epic fantasy I wasn't going to write. I have to sate this hunger somehow and it can't just be a mashing together of tropes (and cliches) associated with epic fantasy. I was reminded of this last night watching an old episode of Family Guy:



This year I've been joking around with students that if they wrote for 30 minutes a day they could write a book length piece. It makes sense, honestly. I've seen that advice in a lot of places. Even if they eek out 100 words a day, that's still over 35k for the year, a midsized novella. I'm better writers than them and vastly more passionate about it, I could easily bang out three pages a day. But I've said this before. Many times. But I'll address this in the end of year review. For now, I'm off on a quest to find a plot. I'll come back to process when I find that. I have some ideas of how I'm going to go about this and work on other things as well.

I talk a lot about epic on this blog. It probably gets weary to my readers. This entry rambled a bit and was kind of a pain in the butt to put together from the various fragments of it I wrote over the last few weeks. I wonder if that might be portentous. It went from three pages to six pages to a full nine pages of madness, including little vignettes of characters, vague plot points and setting ideas. For now, I'm on an epic quest of my own to find a plot for this epic fantasy I wasn't going to write.

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