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.)

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.

So here’s today’s thought: World Building is hard.

I’ve created several worlds for various novels I thought I wanted to write, and I would never say that any of the worlds I created were really able to sustain story. Sure, I had different races, I had the ruling families, I even had some of the history. But as I wrote, I had to keep making new things up, finding little bits and pieces about the world that even I, the writer, didn’t know. Now maybe that’s just how I do it. Hell, maybe that’s how other people do it too, but it struck me as… well, not quite complete.

Looking at someone like—and you all must know who I’m going to say here—Tolkien, it’s easy to see that world building could be hard. Even now, decades after his death, books are still being released of more stories from his Middle Earth. He created a wealth of information about a world that he thought up in his head, a world whose history spans millennia. And he knew what happened in all those years. (I think about this sometimes and I despair of ever writing anything good ever.) It’s incredible. Not that someone could do that, but the sheer amount of things he created for his world is utterly amazing.

But then I read things like Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn and Warbreaker. And I have hope again. Not because the books or their world building are bad, but because they’re good. Maybe it’s that they lack the sense of the epic that Tolkien’s books have, but I’m not sure that’s quite it. What I do know is that the worlds of both books are beautifully thought out. That the reader (or at least I) never wondered about something that was left out. Because nothing seemed to be left out at all.

As a writer, I’m left wondering this: how much does the writer need to know about the world before they can write something without holes? Does the writer know a whole lot more than ends up in the book? How much history does the writer have to invent before their world feels like it has some history? Or is it all up to the writer’s skill in mending those little holes so no one sees them?

I am, of course, thinking about this more and more because I plan on using this summer for writing. Lots and lots of writing. I look forward to telling you all about it as I find my way through it.

The Twilight Saga is definitely a prime example of this, but I know that the Vampire Kisses series also had a vampire in high school. I can only imagine that the countless teen vampire books have a few vampires in high school. I liked high school and I wouldn’t want to be there for the rest of eternity. College–of which I have attended two–I would probably gladly attend for the rest of my life. Imagine all the graduate degrees and doctorates I could acquire! (Seriously, if they find a way to make me immortal sometimes in the next 5 years, I’m totally going with that plan.)

I know that YA fiction generally focuses on teens–those who are somewhere between the ages of (in my experience) 15 and 17. But I don’t believe it. No one wants to attend high school more than once.

There’s a market for books about college students. I’m going to get on that. Go forth and write.

I still firmly believe that writer’s block is not a writer being lazy, like some people seem to think. I don’t believe that it’s a facet of a writer’s imagination–that if they think they’re blocked, then they are. I do believe that it has something to do with motivation and, yes, inspiration. In my case, it seem to be tied to my emotions as well. I spent significant parts of 2008 and 2009 being seriously depressed, and I am sure that factored into my inability to write.

But in the end, all I really needed was the right motivation to get over it: jealousy. As many of you know, November is National Novel Writing Month. And it only took nine words from my boyfriend to get me going again: “I think I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year.” To be utterly fair, I don’t think it was purely jealousy on my part. I think it was also fear–fear that I was somehow going to get left behind in the wake of his creativity and his determination. And also that I would somehow lose what made me Me. If he was the writer, then who was I?

Anyway, I am happy to announce that I have conquered the beast and lived.

My only problem now is what to write first! But oh, it’s nice to be thinking like a writer again.

It took me some time to hit upon the answer to this. In fact, it wasn’t until my roommate and I started planning out a series of novels that, while they also didn’t contain any magic (nor did the world that they are set in), were clearly fantasy. It seems to me that there is this conception that for a book to be classified as a “fantasy novel” there has to be some sort of magical element in it.

I would like to propose that no, this is wrong.

Clearly if something does have magic in it, then it is fantasy. But not everything that doesn’t have that particular element to the story is simply going to be fictional. The dictionary in my computer (an application that is so incredibly useful) says, “the faculty or activity of imagining things, esp. things that are impossible or improbable.” Fantasy is something that takes place in a reality that is not our own. (It now becomes clear why Alternate Histories are thrown in with fantasy. Also, for the record, I will say that my computer’s dictionary also has this to say in the entry about fantasy: “a genre of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure, esp. in a setting other than the real world.” As you might imagine, I don’t entirely agree, but I can’t change the thing.)

In my mind, the distinction is simple: “fantasy” is something that is set in a world that is imagined. It is in the very definition of the word “fantasy.” Fantasy is something that has to be imagined, because it simply is not real.

Suffice to say that I have met many of my favorite authors and decided that, yeah, I’m in the right business. There’s nothing else I would rather be doing with my time, or with my life.

It was lovely. That’s not the point of this post. Shortly before finishing the book, I went ahead and got my hands on the rest of the series. There were three other books, and though out of print (or simply widely unavailable), this is what abebooks.com is for. I finished the “first” book, and then started on the “second.”

The quotes are there because it took me all of two pages to realize that though The Painter Knight is supposed to be a sequel (it was written after The Stone Prince and I have always seen it called the sequel), it comes chronologically after the “first” book! And the “third” book comes chronologically before the “second.” Following along that concept, the “fourth” is even further back in Fiona Patton’s world’s history. (Understand that it took some fancy figuring to come to this conclusion, but what confirmed it was the list of kings (called Aristoks in this world) in the front of the “fourth” book.)

At first I was very confused, and a little bit annoyed. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to read what came before the book I had just enjoyed. I wanted to know what came next. Well, that passed. I mean, the writing of the second book (with no quotes to denote that it was written second) was just as good as the first, and I was perfectly happy with it as a book, just maybe not as a sequel.

But the more I thought about it, the more interesting it actually became, and the less annoyed I was about the prospects of reading these books. By the time the first books open there are some 800 years of history for this world that Fiona Patton has created. Which she obviously has a very clear picture of. And she manages to convey this in the book, I thought. There are mentions of previous Aristoks and how many of them there were, and wars that have been fought, and so on and so forth.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a review of the Branion series, after all, I’ve read one and only begun the next. What this post is about is the challenges that one must be faced with if one is going to write a series of books in a world that is rich with history, and one is going to make the books chronologically backwards to the order that one writes them. You would have to be very careful about how much information you divulged and be very careful to keep with your own continuity.

I’m thinking about this from the point of view of another writer and I am thinking of the sheer amount of information you would have to know about the world you were working with just to keep your own facts straight and prevent incontinuity. Frankly, it sounds like a lot of work and I would be somewhat impressed with someone who even tried. I would be very impressed if they succeeded.

That all said, I have no idea if Fiona Patton succeeds. I’m not far enough into the second book to make a call on that one. But I’m already a little impressed.

And I did it, however hard it might have been and however I might have felt about what I actually managed to write. (Granted, I think that there may have been one useable paragraph in the whole thing, but hey, I did it. I’m not really proud, but it’s done.)

I even, just the other day, signed up for The Yuletide Challenge in the hope that it will push me back on the trail. (I signed up for things that I think I will really enjoy and have fun writing if I get, and that I think will challenge me. I think that was a good move.)

So, by tooth or by nail I will get myself back on track. Because I love writing. And I can’t stand not doing it.

Here’s the deal: Until very recently (I might even say still, but that might just be semantics) I hadn’t written anything for about a year and a half. It was May 2006 that I wrote my last story. And then I just… hit a block. Who knows why. I don’t think it really matters.

Now, I know this happens to people. Sometimes a block can last a day. Maybe a week. Or a month. I’ve had that before. And I know that sometimes it can last years. (God forbid that should happen. *knocks on wood*) And I understand, from an intellectual standpoint, that something like this is bound to happen to everyone at some point. And honestly? I’m all right with that. I don’t terribly mind getting blocked, because I know it will break eventually. I love writing, it’s what I want to do, so I know that it can’t just go away forever. (Though, want some scary nightmares after ~9 months of Writer’s Block? The thought that I won’t ever write again is enough to make me cry.)

Some people say that it’s laziness. I don’t know that I believe that is the cause, but I think that definitely feeds into it. I will say that for me, it’s a complete lack of motivation and inspiration and creativity(-ation?). That pretty much explains exactly what Writer’s Block feels like to me. And, let me just say, it sucks. A lot. It’s like a big chunk of who I am simply isn’t there for me to call on anymore.

But, what drives me absolutely batty about having Writer’s Block is this: I genuinely LOVE writing. I love everything about it. I find joy and a sense of satisfaction from stringing the exact right words together in the exact right patterns to make beautiful sentences. I love making characters and being able to feel them in my head, clear as day. I love writing complicated plots, weaving the knots and the loops and the webs that my characters get into. I don’t think there’s a single thing about writing that I don’t enjoy (and that includes editing, no matter how much I might complain about it).

So not being able to do it? Really drives me bat-shit crazy. I understand that it might have to happen, and I can tolerate it, no matter how annoyed with it I may become, but I am still annoyed.

I want to go back to being able to do what I love doing. It is my hobby, my passion and, as it conveniently happens, my goal. I’d like to be able to do it again.