Fantasy Week - Epic fantasy: Does it have to be so long?

Do you need 1000 pages to tell an epic fantasy story?

I’ve heard this question a lot lately. Honestly more likely framed as why is epic fantasy so long?

I cut my reading teeth on authors like JRR Tolkien, George RR Martin, CS Lewis. 

(Notice how they all have initials. Honestly that’s why I should have gone SL Thomas.)

Game of Thrones - Clash of Kings at 1006 pages? I honestly won’t bat an eyelash. Bring it on.

But the question remains. Why are these books so long? In today’s fast-paced society, people don’t have patience for a thousand-page book. Novellas and shorts are popular for a reason. Get to the happily ever after in six hundred pages or less, please.

I get that.

So shouldn’t epic fantasy follow the same pattern?

I honestly think it would be a tragedy.

From Merriam Webster -  Epic: extending beyond the usual or ordinary especially in size or scope.

Epic fantasy gives you vistas. Vistas need words. It gives you the history of kings back a hundred generations. It gives you mythologies. It gives ruins of civilizations that lived before the one your heroine is currently fighting for. It tells you not only the color of the king’s hair, but what’s on his banner and why. It gives you not only the names of the characters, but their fathers and grandfathers. Why. What. When. Where.

Good epic fantasy doesn’t just take you to a world; it builds a world from the ground up: Currency, politics, food, geography, history. Nothing is left to chance. Once you enter Martin’s seven kingdoms or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, you will have felt you could navigate the culture, sit at dinner with the commoners or even royalty and not miss a beat or wonder where the spoons are.

So couldn’t you condense this a wee bit... you know to attract more readers. Because not many readers want to dive so deep into a world.

Yes. And no.

I admit, in today's world, not many readers want to pick up a tome. So can we hold on to the tenants of what makes epic fantasy epic without drowning in minutiae? 

It's a fine line. 

My Triune Stones series began as a single book. A single book that is now four books. Journey of Dominion, which will release on May 20^th, is the second in the series.  

And while the series is firmly epic fantasy, when rewriting it for publication, I recognized the need for action. I deleted many musings, many descriptions of beautiful scenery because they just didn’t move the plot forward.  

Even epic fantasy authors must adapt and change with the times. That said, by their very nature, our stories will still be too slow paced for some readers. But if you have patience, the story will weave around your imagination, drawing you into a land where magic happens, where villains desire power, heroes are ordinary people, just like you, who do extraordinary things that not only affect them, but the entire world. There may be dragons, fairies, airydh, magic rings, magic stones, elves, white walkers, secret glens and woven through it all, a sense that it has all been there for time beyond time.  Unless, of course, our hero fails. 

Journey of Dominion - a legend’s fall. 

May 20th, 2013

Don't forget to check out the other awesome posts for Fantasy week! 

Braving the Fantasy Debates - Not Only Epic, but Romantic

My world seems full of fantasy discussions and parsings lately. Like Jane Kindred, who posted yesterday, I was also at the RT Convention last week. Unlike her, I feel right at home among the romance authors - much more so than at World Fantasy Con last fall, which I also attended along with Jane.

(Is she stalking me or am I stalking HER? Hmmm...)

A popular tail-sniffing question at all of these conferences is "What do you write?" This is largely in lieu of the real question, which is more along the lines of "Are you a successful writer I should be interested in talking to and should I know who you are?" My answer has always been complicated, but for now I reel off "fantasy, fantasy romance and erotic contemporary romance."

People nod at this, sometimes looking a bit glazed over. It's really not kosher to reply with more than one genre, but sue me - I've always been an eclectic kind of gal and I'm used to getting funny looks.

The thing is, to me, it all feels more or less like the same thing. Or, at least, like a continuum. The erotic contemporary romances of my Facets of Passion series have no magic per se, but I write post-apocalyptic ones (Blood Currency) that feel much the same, only in a more broken world. I'm working on edits for MASTER OF THE OPERA, a modern retelling of Phantom of the Opera, which is contemporary, erotic and also full of magical realism. The Covenant of Thorns books are about a modern woman - a scientist - trapped in Faerie. When I was shopping it (before I knew better), I called it "an urban fantasy that takes place in a non-urban landscape."

You all should have just SEEN the way the agents' eyes would roll back in their heads when I said that. One might have frothed at the mouth a little bit.

Even my own agent, who loves my work and says she wants to make me the Queen of Fantasy Romance (which apparently does not come with a tiara - what a gyp), said of one of my books "it's like epic fantasy and urban fantasy had a lurid affair and this is their baby."

Now I've been assigned yet another genre - my trilogy coming out in 2014, The Twelve Kingdoms, is being called Adult Fantasy by the publisher.

I just roll with it.

Because, really, on a fundamental level, genre is irrelevant to me as a storyteller.Yes, it's meant to convey a promise to readers, but this dividing and sub-dividing is not something that really serves anyone. If we have to spend all this time and effort parsing the difference between fantasy, fantasy romance, epic fantasy and epic fantasy romance, obviously we're not clearly communicating anything at all. When I mentioned I was writing this post, @e_bookpushers, a reviewer for The Bookpushers and fan of all kinds of fantasy, with and without romance, commented "Sometimes I think we subdivide to far and use descriptive terms that turn people off."

This is where we see the eyes glaze over. 

After all, those of us in our 30s and 40s remember an era before the Young Adult (YA) "genre" even existed. I think that's part of what's happening now. So many of us writing variations on the Fantasy theme grew up reading a melange of books - Judy Blume and Judy Garwood. Anne McCaffrey, Ann Tyler and Anne Rice. Orson Scott Card, Jack Chalker, Margaret Atwood and Mary Stewart.

We all started as readers and, as readers, we didn't really care what genre a book fell into, as long as we could find more like it. That's the key - helping our readers, and ourselves, find more of what we love to read.

I suspect that, more and more, that will occur through blogs like this one. And like The Bookpushers. Maybe we've moved past the need to describe books with a one- or two-word label. We can talk more broadly and allow more room for stories that don't quite fit neatly into a product mold.

As Miranda says in The Tempest, arguably a fantasy story, "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

Brave new world, indeed. 

Epic Fantasy: Where’s the Love?

Welcome to the second installment of Fantasy Week, the first in a series spotlighting the different speculative fiction subgenres we write in here at Here Be Magic.

I’m a fantasy writer, not a romance writer. I say this repeatedly to anyone who will listen—not because I think there’s anything wrong with romance; au contraire! I think romance belongs in everything. But I want to make sure no one is disappointed when they read my books expecting a traditional romantic plot with the push-pull of a hero and heroine trying to resist one another and failing, full of erotic tension and the eventual surrender of both in the unequivocal HEA. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got that, too, but it’s only a part of the story.

My agent recently confirmed as much when I tried to write a traditional romantic suspense to sell to an established line. “I love your writing, as always,” she said. “But this isn’t really feeling like a romance to me.” Try as I might, I just can’t resist the allure of building my own world, creating my own mythology, and dragging my characters on an epic journey fraught with peril and rife with high stakes that can bring down entire kingdoms—or entire worlds.

Nevertheless, I spent the past week enmeshed in a different kind of alternate world: the world of the romance writer, at the RT Booklovers Convention. Because despite the fact that I don’t write romance, I can’t write fantasy without it. Fantasy without romance feels like it’s missing one of the most epic of adventures—the adventure of the human heart.

And that puts me smack-dab in the middle of a publishing conundrum. Romance readers are often a bit intimidated by the epic-ness of the epic fantasy. And fantasy readers have a tendency to be a tad suspicious when something looks like romance—despite the fact that at their core, many fantasies have a love story, though often underdeveloped. As a kid devouring both romance and fantasy, I always wished the fantasies had more of the former, and the romances more of the fantastical.

So there I sat at RT, surrounded by romance writers and readers, and feeling just as much a fish out of water as I did last November at the World Fantasy Convention. I’m some kind of chimera that can’t be classified. I have chocolate in my peanut butter. I may even be Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together with parts that work well together though they’ve come from different origins, but seeming a little scary and misshapen to those who’ve never seen one of me before. “What do you write?” people would ask. “Epic fantasy,” I’d reply, and then quickly add “with romantic elements” before they came at me with torches and pitchforks.

To most people who haven’t read the genre, when they hear “epic fantasy,” they think of 1,000-page paperweights full of elves and orcs and dragons, page after page of painstaking descriptions of drab medieval customs and complicated court intrigue with names no one can pronounce, and lots and lots of swords and sorcerers. And to be sure, books with those elements are epic fantasy, but none of those things are required to make a book an epic fantasy. What it requires, generally, is a uniquely invented world that is not our own, a protagonist whose problem is much larger than herself (her people and her world are depending on her and she usually has to fight someone powerful to save them), and magic. And what’s more magical than love? I say it fits right in with the epic.

Some of my favorite epic and romantic fantasies are Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series—its court intrigue woven together through highly charged erotic scenes, sacred prostitutes, and a healthy dose of BDSM; Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series, with its sexy, fae-like m/m lovers as medieval Sherlock Holmesian detectives who are also scoundrels and thieves; and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Yes, Harry Potter is as epic and romantic as they come.

So, really…what’s not to love about epic fantasy?

Don't forget to check out Sunday's kick-off post for Fantasy Week from Angela Highland on why she reads fantasy, and be sure to stop by every day this week for a new post from one of our fantasy writers.