Brian McClellan (the Powder Mage trilogy) was a student of yours. Why is it that you recommend his writing so frequently?
You know, when I read his very first story—he wrote this cool thing, I hope he posted it online somewhere—it was a novella he wrote for my class the first year. You get so many authors through the class that sometimes you start forgetting them–most of the time, honestly, I get so many. But once in a while, a person comes along and their writing is just amazing. And at that point, I shift from the mode of “I’m going to help you become a better writer” to the mode of “you’re already doing all the stuff I’m talking about, you just need to know the business side now.” And Brian was one of those. I can’t take any credit for his writing because it was already awesome.
And he wrote this wonderful story about these paragons in the world. It was our world plus, where people get chosen as paragons as like a religion . . . it was so cool. There’s like an ancient Greek paragon next to a Christian paragon that’s based on kind of . . . anyway, it’s great. You ought to have him post on it. It was the best thing I had had come through the class in a long while. It’s a mixture of a lot of things. Mostly, I talk about the grand scale of being a fantasy writer is being able to, in the first few pages, get across a sense of character and world without dumping paragraphs of thick text on us. And that is the best—if someone can learn to do that, if you can pick it up and read it, and read a few pages and feel like you’re in the world and character, but you haven’t been dumped on—that’s what Brian was doing. Also, the premise was awesome, the premise was great. But you know, it’s that character voice. And it’s weird because in fantasy, right, it’s our magic systems and our worldbuilding that distinguishes us. But a great magic system and terrible writing is a bad book. And a weak magic system with great writing is a great book. And so even though this is what it’s about, the skill that a writer really needs to learn is not the magic systems or not the worldbuilding—that’s great. The skill is telling a powerful character in a different world from ourselves without making you feel like you’re reading a history textbook. And Brian did that.
So, there you go . . . so you guys should read the book. I just finished it—I read it late. This is what a bad teacher I am, right? He gets published, I read the book a year later. It came out in April and I finished it in June, but he gave it to me . . . It’s really just good, it’s fun, it’s great. So, I should have read that earlier. But Brent Weeks was on the ball, and he got a cover blurb. So yeah, Brent took care of us.
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