Sanskrit and SFF
Brandon, you asked if I’ve ever planned a story to be of a certain length, and then decided that there just wasn’t enough there to justify it.
Honestly, my problem so far has been the opposite. I’ve always ended up having too much to write. Of course, some of this has to do with growing up when we did, reading epic fantasy that was absolutely enormous, so maybe that formed a big part of what I feel an epic fantasy ought to be. (Feel, not think: it’s an emotional artifact of my youth, not an intellectual one.) It’s silly, but I pick up a book by a great writer like David Gemmell, and I go, Man, it’s kinda short.
But of course there are competing tensions about how long is long enough, especially when you’re a new writer. And some of these are nakedly commercial. You turn in a first book that’s over 200,000 words (like I did, that one didn’t sell) and that’s a big strike against an editor buying it from you. It’s more paper; fewer books can fit on the shelves; it’s more shipping; and not least, much more time for the editor and copyeditor (and more time for the sales people that you pray read it, too).
So after I wrote the Night Angel books, I cut ruthlessly. I took The Way of Shadows from over 200k words (again, dangit) and cut 44k words. I cut 20k words from Shadow’s Edge , and I cut 40k words from Beyond the Shadows . The last was the only one, in my opinion, that suffered from me cutting too much. I had to get information across sometimes by telling—messenger says, Oh yeah, guy went into these woods and made a sword—rather than showing it. When you have too many of those kinds of important details given once, in brief, if a reader misses a few, they get confused. (I should also point out that this cutting was done on my own because of what I guessed or kind—of knew about the industry, not at Orbit’s behest.)
For good and ill, the stories we tell are limited by our market.
In your paragraph on effective foreshadowing, you speak of foreshadowing like it’s matching paint colors: you do it well or you don’t. I think that leaves out an intrinsic part of the equation: the audience. There are better and worse writers (and foreshadowing is a real skill), but there are also better and worse readers.
Some writers purport not to write for an audience, but aside from guys like T.S. Eliot who are throwing bits of Sanskrit into their poems (because hey, THEY know Sanskrit), I don’t see how that can be true. When I set up a plot twist, I have something I want the audience to being thinking before that twist or the big reveal will fail. But it’s different to fool different audiences: someone who’s read the genre for 50 years is going to read differently than a 15-year-old who’s reading her first book outside of school assignments. What is recognizable foreshadowing for the latter is going to be like being beaten over the head with a brick for the former.
So I think there is an interplay that goes both ways between readers and writers: writers teach readers broadly what to expect from their own work, and—I think—readers teach us what works. Dean Koontz writes about writing a book in iambic meter and thinking no one would notice, but then feeling a rush of pleasure when someone did. I’m sure you’ve had an analogous experience.
By the way, who killed Asmodean?
Fine, fine. Can’t fault me for trying.
So something that I’d love to hear your thoughts on are if you think as your career progresses that you can get away with things—story things—that you couldn’t when you were less well known?
Obviously, as we grow in our storytelling skills and experience with the industry, we can try harder challenges and succeed where we wouldn’t have before. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m more curious about if you think we train our readers (and book store buyers). I think—pure speculation because I haven’t yet dug in to my copy of The Way of Kings —that if a 400,000 word tome hit my desk from someone I’d never heard of and when I began reading, I found it didn’t follow any epic fantasy structure I knew, I’d be much more likely to assume it was just an amateur mess—but because it says “Brandon Sanderson, #1 NYT Bestselling Author” on the front, I trust that you’re Doing Something Big. I think I read it differently. Do you agree?
I run into the same sort of thing: I’ve got a decent reputation for deep characters now, so when a character does something contradictory (dumb jock says something brilliant or whatever), my readers think, “Oh, there’s more going on here under the surface, can’t wait to see what.” Rather than, “This character is inconsistent. Bad writing.”
And I would contend that precisely because you’re a magic system guy, that if you don’t explain the magic in TWOK, people are NOT going to say, “Good book, but magic system doesn’t make sense.” They’re going to say, “Obviously brilliant stuff going on with the magic, can’t wait until book 12 to see what!” (That’s hyperbole with a wink, not snark.)
Do you believe you can get away with storytelling stunts, elisions, or tricks now that Brandon Sanderson the debut author couldn’t have? If so, what’s the good part of that—and is there a bad side?
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