For landscape, you start with a map. Some people seem to end with the map.

[Let me say mention that the biggest mistake I've made with my fantasy series is that I still don't have a really good map, with everything marked on it. This creates a problem in logistics, and also forces me to spend a lot of time going back and searching through the books for directions.]

Yet landscape is far more than a map.

I don't think a map creates depth and resonance on its own. Nor is it details alone (for instance, a notebook full of discrete details, e.g. that there are five gods or that people wear red caps in this town and black caps in that town) that create depth.

It's the intersection of a physical place, a cultural place, and an historical place – a map, a society or societies, and the back story. Just as a character needs back-story – what the author knows about his or her or its life up until now, no matter how much of that information actually gets in the book – so does the world.

Landscapes do not spring fully formed out of the head of Zeus. They take time. A properly developed landscape will, like a properly developed character, be revealed as much as it is created. As the author you discover as many things as you make up.

What's difficult is knowing how much time to spend on creating back-story as opposed to writing the narrative. Problems develop with balance:

In a story where the landscape has great importance, how do you balance narrative pacing versus world-building?

If you force the narrative along too swiftly, then the landscape through which the characters move becomes shallow, a mere backdrop like the soundstage in the western. But if you spend too much time detailing the landscape, then the narrative pacing slows until it's no better than molasses. Description must either help move forward the action or it must illuminate the background in a way that fosters resonance in the story and creates a greater sense of believability.

Another challenge in creating landscape is internal consistency, which helps foster the famous suspension of disbelief necessary to any reader. And even to an author. When I was in the early stages of developing the Crown of Stars universe, I had a visual sense of the underpinnings of the world and story – two interlocking triangles like a Star of David, which made six points: three ‘secular' or ‘mundane' and three ‘fantastic' or ‘supernatural'.

The mundane triangle consists of: invasion, civil war, and heresy.

The supernatural triangle consists of: non-human races, cosmology, and magic.

As an inhabitant of the modern era, I had a really hard time figuring out how to deal with magic, because I don't personally believe in it. I knew it was necessary to the plot, but I couldn't get past my own lack of suspension of disbelief until one day I had a revelation that it didn't matter whether or not –I– believed; it only mattered whether my characters believed in the context of their cosmology, their view of the world.

That still left me with challenges in creating the magic used and experienced in the books. You can't follow strict real world rules, or be too prosaic, but on the other hand you can't have Anything Goes (no set up, no follow through, pull a rabbit from the hat). You can't have character X read the mind of character Y – no matter how handy for the plot – if there has been no previous indication that such abilities exist. Everything has to be set up and consistent.

This is the most difficult element of world building – the incomplete set up, or the set up that goes no where (I'‘ll come back to this problem later). Occasionally one is gifted with the opposite problem: you throw in a detail, or a stupid bit, and discover two books later that it fits perfectly or solves a problem that you had not been preparing for. I wrote a rather stupid, generic "magic" rhyme into a scene in one of the opening chapters of King's Dragon for reasons I cannot now recall, and spent the next two books bitterly regretting that I had done so. Then I got to volume IV, where I hit a situation in which, it transpired, the rhyme not only fit perfectly but was necessary. Indeed, it actually looks like I planned it that way. I only wish I was so clever, and can hope that my unconscious continues to help me along.

Everything I've said about landscape is true twofold for character. Just as a reader can come to know and love a certain landscape (in the broadest sense), readers also come to know and love –to invest in– the characters in a series.

Let's start with point of view.

Here are some quick and dirty definitions. First person uses "I". Third person uses "he" and "she". With a limited third person, the "she" who is the subject of the scene is the only one whose feelings and thoughts we know. In omniscient third, the writer/narrator can dip in and out of the thoughts and emotions of any character at any time; s/he stands, like God, on high watching the action unfold and directing our attention wherever she wills.

These days in fat fantasy series it is usual for the writer to employ multiple limited third person points of view. Using a single point of view is usually too linear and too narrow when you're dealing with a cast of thousands, which is the preferred method these days, it seems. You want scope, and scope means time, space, and multitudes.

The first difficulty comes in introducing your cast of thousands. If you have decided that you can't use just a single point of view to convey the scope of your story, you must use several or many different characters as view-point characters. But if you widen too fast – introduce too many characters too quickly -- then the reader can't build identification with so many new people so quickly. In this same way, few people can walk into a new town and create a wide circle of friends in the first month. You have to pull them in more slowly, build up trust and familiarity. So as the author you have to juggle how quickly you expand scope.

Tolkien did this masterfully in The Lord of the Rings, and most of us writing in the field today are imitating (or responding to) him in some manner, although he was using omniscient third. Start with the Shire and a few central characters and then expand into the landscape, adding characters as you go, at a rate that doesn't overwhelm the reader.

So let us assume you've figured out how to introduce characters at the right rate, more or less.

With a cast of thousands, the first problem you always run into is the devil in the details:

What was the name of the Dark Lord's third cousin? Does she have blue eyes or green eyes?

How deal with it? For one thing, do not describe a character purely as a physical description unless their appearance matters for the plot; they can be described in other ways (weary and old, young and eager, stooped with pain, irrepressibly energetic, missing a finger, and so on), many of which are easier for the writer to recall and the reader to identify with.

The second problem lies in the balance of scope and intimacy.

I'd like to quote writer Sherwood Smith, author of the Wren series and The Crown and Court Duet at length here.

This technique begins to bring landscape and character together so that, eventually, one cannot be unraveled from the other. It's at that point, I believe, that the greatest depth results. The more characters we get to know, even for moments, the richer the work.

But of course – this adds length, often in a good way, and often in a less positive way if the writer gets involved in side trips that veer wildly off from the main story. It can be a danger. It takes discipline to rein in secondary characters, any of whom secretly believe that they ought to be the center of the book.

So we have landscape, and we have characters, and combining them creates plot.

Which brings me to the really difficult part of writing a fat fantasy series.

That's when you have developed so many plot threads that even and especially the writer begins to lose track of them all.

When you write a complicated story, the narrative itself must be crafted. If you set up numerous threads over the first two volumes and then try to tie them all together in the last quarter of the final book, you'll have a rushed and dissatisfying ending. Better to tie off secondary plot threads one at a time as you go along – if you remember to.

For me personally, the sheer complication factor is without question the hardest element to deal with. I get fan-mail in which a reader will mention some small but significant detail that they're wondering about – how will it be resolved? – and I'll realize that my sketchy outline for the next portion of the book doesn't take it into account because I've simply forgotten it.

I do make lists of Things ("the war horse that Sanglant rides was a present to Liath from Lavastine"), and then when I've finished the first draft of the latest volume, I go over that list to make sure I didn't leave anything out that needed to be, at the least, mentioned in passing [e.g. Berthold sleeping under the hill].

I make a lot of lists, which themselves become confused. But in following the lists and in the process of revising, I often add as much as I cut (and I cut a great deal while revising), because of the sheer number of layers of story I'm juggling.

Could there be less story? Definitely. But less story may = less scope may = a different kind of fantasy novel. And there's nothing wrong with that. The genre has room for every type of fantasy novel from the intricate and intimate Patricia McKillip gem to the sprawling Jordan epic, but the writer needs to determine which breed it is s/he wants to create.

Continued...

Text Copyright © 2002 Kate Elliott