Chekhov’s Gun in Act 12
Brandon, I just read your essay on Postmodernism in Fantasy , and as always, I’m intrigued by your mix of humility (real) and ambition (huge). You talked about interpretation, intention, and audience—which I hope we can touch on in these posts.
For those joining us who don’t know, both Brandon and I have each just published first books in new epic fantasy series. In other company, people would say I write big books— The Black Prism is 640 pages and 210,000 words—but Brandon has just published The Way of Kings , which is what? 1,000 pages and 390,000 words? My series will be a trilogy which will definitely come in under five books, whereas Brandon is planning a decalogy (oddly enough, not the study of decals), which will definitely come in under fifteen.
I want to revisit that essay if we have a chance, but because Brandon’s still on the road for his book tour and won’t have much time for a few days, let me toss him a few softballs first:
1) Brandon, multi-volume epic fantasy presents unique storytelling challenges and unique demands upon a reader. You said in your essay that with The Stormlight Archive, “I didn’t want to intentionally build a story where I relied upon reader expectations.” But I assume you meant that in a specific rather than a global way: you do intend that subplots will get wrapped up eventually, that there is a main plot, that characters have arcs, and that the story has an ending…right?
For example, I wrote a scene for The Black Prism which was interesting in its own right and introduced a cool monster and a setting that I plan to use later in the trilogy—but it didn’t accomplish anything necessary for book 1. It slowed the headlong rush to the end of the book; it looked like gratuitous worldbuilding. It wasn’t, but a critic wouldn’t know that until they read book 3—which I haven’t yet written. So I cut it.
Would you have? Would you have cut an analogous scene in Mistborn 1, but not from TSA 1?
Are you writing these books so that each volume has that rousing, bang-up finish, or are you fine with a cliffhanger, content that the series must be judged as a whole? In a ten-volume epic, do you conceive of them as telling one story or ten stories? Or both? Or more?
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