Thought: Authors Withholding Info.

The title of this post seems a whole lot more sinister than I meant it to. I don’t even mean mystery authors, really. Who I mean is Tanya Huff, and her newest book The Enchantment Emporium.

Going along with the theme of talking about books I’ve read recently, yes, I just read this book. (I thought it was fantastic, by the way, so if anyone is looking for a really neat fantasy book to read, I highly recommend this book.) And by far the most interesting thing about this book was the author’s way of divulging information. We’ve all heard of the dreaded “info dumps” and been told not to do them. The phrase that I’ve heard often is that info should be “slipped in like spice.” (No Dune puns intended, I believe.) I’m not sure that info dumps aren’t something an author should do, necessarily, as I’ve seen them used well.

But this book.

Tanya Huff seems to mostly just assume that the reader knows what’s going on. Or that if they don’t, they’ll just sit tight and piece together the small clues until we have something that vaguely resembles a Big Picture. For instance, the Gales—the main family in The Enchantment Emporium—is a family of magic users. The reader sort of gets a hint at that in the beginning, but there’s no description of what type of magic, of how they use their magic, how their magic differs from those they oppose, nothing. (With the sole exception of one character, but even that is vague.) It’s not until way into the meat of the book that someone actually uses their magic and it’s up to the reader to catch it and work it out in their mind and decide what just happened.

I loved it. And it made me think about what sort of things the author has to tell their readers. Part of writing a compelling story is, in a lot of ways, withholding information to begin with. That’s how you get to the climax. But somewhere there’s a line. You know, a really fuzzy line that no one can really discern—until, maybe, you’ve already crossed it.

But it made me think about some of my own writing. Maybe you don’t need to explain how your magic system works. Maybe you don’t have to explain why the world is the way it is. And, hell, would that make writing or world building any easier?

(I ought to mention, also, that a big part of loving this book was all the geeky references. I know I didn’t catch them all, and I still caught a lot of them. There was a whole list of “Jacks” at one point, and the list absolutely included Captain Jack Sparrow and Captain Jack Harkness. That’s the only geek reference I remember, but I know there were bunches more. It was awesome. I almost want to get my own copy and read it again so that I can highlight all the geek references.)

Thought: Large Ensemble Casts.

I recently finished Laurell K. Hamlton’s newest Anita Blake Vampire Hunter book, Bullet. If you don’t know, the main character of this book has… ok, at least a dozen “boyfriends” and for mystical purposes she must have sex with them all the time. (Yeah, I don’t…. even.) That’s not really the important part. The important part is that there are countless numbers of characters in this series.

There seem to be three ways of dealing with the problem of creating massive casts of characters: for the moment I will call them the Laurell K. Hamilton Method (LKH Method) and the Robert Jordan Method (RJ Method) and the George R.R. Martin Method (GRRM Method).

LKH Method: In the reading of Bullet, I noticed that two characters that I personally care about a lot—but who were almost non-existent in the previous few books—were suddenly important main characters and in the center of the action! They just… disappeared, until she had a need for them—or until a fan reminded her that she hadn’t said anything about them in a while.

While nice to see those characters, it was jarring. What the hell happened to them in the mean time? Why were they suddenly important now, when they hadn’t been for several books before?

RJ Method: (Please note that I haven’t read The Wheel of Time series, but that I have several close friends with whom I have discussed it.) Famously, one of Robert Jordan’s last books took place over the span of 23 hours, because he had so many characters that were all over the place, doing things that were relevant to the plot.

I can understand the impetus to make sure that all of one’s characters are accounted for and seen to be doing useful things, but it made for a long, and yet also short book. I make no judgments here since, as I said, I haven’t read the books. But somehow this strikes me as awkward.

GRRM Method: These books I have read. And yes, they are long and the plots are epic and inspiring, and the cast of characters is vast and covers two separate continents. But somehow, Martin manages to maneuver this territory with deceptively easy grace. For those who don’t know, Martin’s books are written in a switching POV style. You get a chapter from one character, then a chapter from another, and so on and so forth. There are lots of them, and the POVs are only sometimes consistent from book to book (by which I mean that just because someone is a narrator in the first book doesn’t mean that you should expect to see them in the second).

In his last book, instead of making it eight bazillion pages long, he split his characters into groups: North and South (I believe). The book that was released contained the stories of the characters in the North (I think, maybe it’s South, it’s been a while since I read it) and spans a certain period of time. When the next book comes out, it will be the characters that weren’t included in the book before it, but it will cover the same span of time in the story as the previous book.

It was stroke of genius (both as a writing tool and as a marketing ploy)! The plot marches merrily along, and the readers greedily gobbled up the characters’ thoughts and actions and then sat back to await the next book. Because we were still missing characters. While Martin handles his large cast of characters very well in his first three books, I thought the method faltered a bit.

To Sum Up: I have no idea how an author “should” handle a large ensemble. In fact, I suspect that the methods that these authors have chosen works for them—it’s just the readers who are left flailing in the abyss. (I will state for the record that I don’t think that authors should write for their readers—they should write what they want to and hope their readers will enjoy it.) It’s just that the methods chosen by these particular authors leave me wondering… why they created that many characters to begin with, and if they planned on using the methods they chose.

Still, my personal method? Don’t create more characters than I can reasonably keep track of.