Breaking Archetypes
I’ve recently started reading Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy. I finished Assassin’s Apprentice the other night, and I’m about 100 pages into Royal Assassin. I picked up the series mainly because a lot of people, including my UK editor, have compared my work to Hobb’s, particularly in terms of character development. A few even suggested I must be influenced by her work. Having never read anything of hers, I was both amused and intrigued at the assumption, and managed to snag the Farseer books from Voyager to see what the all the fuss was about.
I’m quite enjoying them. Hobb does an excellent job of keeping the reader interested, mainly because her characters are compelling and you come to care about them and what happens to them. After attempting to read several fantasy novels during my paternity leave from writing, this was the first one to keep me interested enough to make it to the end.
When I was a younger, it was unthinkable for me to start a book and not finish it, but that was when I had long daily commutes, or other abundant free time to read. Now, my reading time is very precious, and if a book won’t hold my attention, I feel a lot less guilt over putting it aside. I don’t have time to waste on a book that is laborious to read.
Part of it is also that I am a much tougher and more demanding reader now. A couple of years ago, something clicked in my head about what makes compelling writing, and ever since, I have become very critical of what I read, unable to turn off my internal editor. It’s depressing sometimes, because it makes finding enjoyable reading a chore, but I wouldn’t give up the new insight for anything, because it’s made my own work so much better.
Applying said insight to the Farseer books, or the first one, anyway, I think Hobb had an uphill climb in terms of tension because of her decision to tell the story in the first person with a single POV, memoir-style. She succeeds, but I think at the price of making more work for herself. I’ve tried writing in first person. Most writers have. It’s a style that can be very tempting to an author about to tell a story, but it has a great many pitfalls that crop up as you go on. You lose a lot of tension and immediacy because everything is firmly in the past, as if it happened years or decades ago, as opposed to the short past tense of most novels, where the story could have happened a minute or a century ago, or could even be unfolding right before your eyes. Another weakness of the first person is that the reader knows the main character lives on to tell the tale, so any life-threatening scenes regarding them are seen through that lens. You might sit upright, but you’re never on the edge of your seat over the protagonist’s fate.
Also, the single POV has one main weakness that gets to me, which is the need to have all information filtered through the protagonist, even information that, however important to the story it may be, the character should have no way of knowing. It is an old fantasy trope to use dreams, visions, telepathy, and ridiculous coincidence to make up for this. Like how Harry Potter always manages to accidentally stumble into a hiding spot just in time to overhear Malfoy’s latest plot, or how he has a “connection” with Voldemort which only surfaces when Rowling wants Harry and the reader to know something they otherwise wouldn’t.
If done well, this technique suffices, and Hobb does it well with her character’s use of the Skill, which is essentially telepathy, but this sort of thing always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because it’s one of those times when you can see the author’s puppet strings, and those strings should be kept hidden whenever possible.
Another fantasy trope that bothers me is the standard fantasy story arc/ending. Basically, the main character starts out thinking they are Joe Nobody, only to discover they are the heir to a magic they don’t understand and are afraid/unable to use. They muddle through the book with no control over this special power until the last possible minute, when, for no real reason whatsoever, they manage to bend the magic to their will and save the day, usually somehow defeating a life-long master of the same magic in the process because “good” magic, as everybody knows, is stronger than “bad” magic, and the hero always has the strongest magic of all.
A LOT of amazing fantasy authors, including almost all of the bestsellers, use this story skeleton, and there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but after seeing it in a few dozen different books, it’s begun to stick in my craw. With a very few exceptions, it makes for an unsatisfying ending in my opinion, because the protagonist kind of… cheats at the end. In artificially holding back the climactic epiphany until the last minute, the author seeks to create an orgasmic release of tension, but more often than not, it’s a big buildup to a faked orgasm.
When I set out to write The Painted Man, I was looking to avoid those fantasy tropes wherever possible, while still sticking close to those things that I felt made fantasy great. There is no good and evil magic, and no one is born to it. If you want magic in your life, it comes from hard work, risk, and sacrifice. It’s not something you figure out in the seconds between sinking under the water and drowning. That may deny me the climax that has proven, time and again, to make for bestsellers, but that’s okay. There are other kinds of climax, and they can be hot, too.
Cassie feels the same way (even though she’s too young to catch the double-entendre). Daddy’s not the only one fed up with the same old themes in fantasy books:
There’s a reason that tired arc works so. . .well . . . tirelessly. This is because Joe Reader wants to believe that *they* are special, that their daily hum-drum life is really just a cheap veneer covering a dramatic and fantastic power lurking just beneath the surface. And in the end, most people want to win, even if there’s a little cheating involved to bring it about.
I think “Wanted” is the baldest expression of this. You’re not just a punk-ass cubicle monkey being bitched out by your fat boss. You’re really a deadly assassin – so powerful that you can defeat a *legion* of supervillians (all of whom have epochs of experience on you). All you have to do is keep trudging along until some gorgeous ninja chick shows up to pierce the veil. Hell, you don’t even have to put in the years of sweat and blood that makes real warriors, all you have to do is shoot the wings off the flies because a stern-faced man told you that you could.
People just want to be amazing, they don’t want to put the work into becoming amazing.
Point being: It may leave you feeling disappointed in the end, but don’t underestimate the power of this narrative on many, many readers. There’s a reason they call this stuff fantasy. . .
Hey Peter, I know what you’re saying. 🙁 I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to read some great new books (yours, Acacia – now there’s a book that I think you would enjoy!-, Jo Graham’s Black Ships and I’ve just started The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss) and so far none of them have been concerned with the farmboy/nobody who struggles through the book until he kicks ass in the end; I think that what is happening in the genre now is brilliant, I mean, Fantasy has to evolve at some point, and with guys like you and David Durham and Steven Erikson leading the way, it’ll happen. 🙂
Pete-You bring up many good points. I wanted to comment about you talking about reading time becoming shorter, and I know how you feel. Even though much of my work these days is in reading new manuscripts for others, there is also that pile of books in my “waiting to be read” pile and sometimes I must just let something go that doesn’t do it for me. But I am also pleasantly surprised occasionally (like with my recent re-discovery of Jeff Somers’ The Electric Church – where by the way, the main dude worked for years becoming a badd@ss of the streets, barely surviving, learning his skills through experience and hard if dubius work).
And for me there is always the possibility of reading what can be, like, the next Peter V. Brett. I am always on that road of hopefullness in discovering something new and noteworthy.
It’s true that I am probably not alone in this, and my feelings may just represent a generational shift in the genre as new writers seek to build upon the foundation of books they loved, which were written by authors more influenced by Tolkien and Lewis and pulp authors like Robert E. Howard.
This is a good thing, as it keeps fantasy fresh and alive after a certain amount of stagnation, but my brain hurts just thinking about keeping the complexities of a dozen separate Song of Fire and Ice style series straight in my head.
Dave, I read your interview David Anthony Durham the other day, and I agree Acacia sounds pretty awesome. I’ll try and pick it up one of these days.