Story – Find More and Dig Deeper

What makes a good story? But that’s a question anyone would answer differently… so it might be clearer written the other way around: what story counts as good, at least for a thrillseeking, fiction-obsessed geek like myself. And how that can’t help but be the first steps in understanding the fantasy I’m trying to write.

The blogging world is full of easy answers to that, enough options to make the choice hard. Conflict of course, real use of story structure, characters—that one always make me wince the way it’s thrown around so casually, but that’s a post for another day.

Or it might start with basic genre. Comedy and mystery are all very well, but I’m the one who notices that DC Comics now has its superheroes on a broadcast network at 8 pm for four out of five weeknights. Still, the screenful of power beams don’t make me forget that an Arrow villain can “hack a nuclear missile to fuel for launch in 24 hours”… and the missile’s keepers never think to yank its wires. Agents of SHIELD has a plainer costume style, but it can be a downright relief to switch over there and hear its super/spies talk about a mission plan that at least knows when it’s cutting corners.

Call it sheer believability. A story can rub two cool elements together and trust that they’ll make enough sparks, or it can trace out what that coolness ought to have behind it to bring it into the story, and some of the other effects that they generate as well. Anyone can come up with a mind-reading hero, but exactly what he do to switch off his gift every minute of day? How many layers of suspicion do his friends have to go through to really trust him?

Dig deeper. Let a story work out how many ripples each twist makes, and use them to give more glimpses of how much is going on, more signs of why it all matters. With background they call it rich world-building and a convincing environment; when a character reacts to more of them it’s better characterization.

That and, I’d rather read and write about how someone flunked out of Arcana College than Notre Dame. Paranormal elements need at least as much detail as “the gritty mundane” does, if they’re going to give us a full sense of what it’s like to have power at our fingertips—and how that power’s not the same as how other writers work it. (No, Batman can’t keep swinging on down the block like Spider-Man, not if his grapnel’s still human technology.)

And with all those extra routes to look down… shouldn’t a story use them instead of following the proverbial beaten path? Yes, some tales are more comforting than others, and the overall arc ought to hold together. But even a familiar storyline ought to pick just how many things are allowed to wrong (and right), and own that to make us feel the pressure.

Or when the story’s not so simple? Well, take a look at K M Weiland’s nod to Brent Weeks: http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/how-to-write-books-readers-cant-put-down/. Brent is an author who bends rules until they scream to keep the reader hooked.

Dig deep, and hit hard. That sums so much of it up.

Or, here’s something I put together last year:

How should a hero fight for his life? With what weapons?

How would you?

Would you tense to catch the first echo in the alleys around you, that could be your enemy about to strike? Charge forward to reach the person you’re protecting in time? Every step could be the one that lets the enemy get behind you–and if you have the gift to see right through those shadows or leap over the walls, could you use it in time?

And, what would you fight for? What person, or what dream, would make you step out of your daily cubicles and into the line of fire? Think of the day after the adventure, trying to go back to work and wondering who might be tracing you back to your own life… or if, just maybe, you have a chance to stay out there and build something better.

Except, who can you really trust? It might be that you can protect your family best by working with that “enemy,” if you can get the right leverage on him. Or perhaps the friends, that you thought were safer away from the things you’ve seen, have their own reasons for walking into danger too. And every move, every choice you make, could be leading you deeper into a trap where no amount of power can break you free because you never spotted how–

–It’s alright. You don’t have to turn the page.

When I’m writing supernatural suspense, I know one thing: never fight fair.

 

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Review: Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series

Can I write about the Codex Alera series and keep it out of the shadow of Jim Butcher’s signature Dresden Files books? It ought to be possible… but I’m not going to try.

(One caveat: Furies of Calderon and Academ’s Fury are the only Alera novels I’ve read so far. Yes, “so far”—if you’re standing in front of a bookshelf or a Click To Buy button right now, you can take those two words as my recommendation. Or you can read on for my spoiler-free musings of what makes the books work, and what they show about what makes medieval-type fantasy so different from urban fantasy.)

Many of Alera’s readers must be coming there wondering if it will have some of the Dresden magic (of the storytelling kind, of course). Or as we true Dresden-philes see it, whether any other concept could cram so much fun into so few pages. And honestly, for this series that isn’t the goal.

Butcher likes to say these books are written out of his original love for classic “swords-and-horses” fantasy. In that it’s spot on: sprawling empires and clashing armies, all hingeing on valiant village leaders or conflicted spies.

It’s an appealling world, too. Alera is visibly descended from a “lost Roman Legion,” so a legionnaire wields a gladius and the culture mixes some history with the storytelling. The magic’s straightforward but not dull: its “furies” (spirits) don’t only fling the obvious element around, they’re as prized for their indirect effects, from enhanced strength to empathy. Plus, by the second book there are threats with more sinister options than armies and assassins, so anything can happen.

Best of all, it is Jim Butcher, so the thick of a fight can be as exciting and twisty as anything ever written. And there’s no shortage of fights.

What a Dresden fan would notice most is the difference in characters and pace. Harry Dresden is one of the most colorful, history-laden characters around, and he swims in a sea of fascinating friends that are scrambling to stop multiple plots in all too few pages. Codex Alera gives us Tavi, a shepherd boy we first meet for endangering his herds (and the fate of nations) when a village girl asks him to bring him some flowers… we soon see his cleverness against impossible odds, but he’ll have to climb up a 700-page book or two to be as obviously interesting as some folks we know.

But then, it’s the measured pace of his climb that’s the essence of the series. This is meant to be 700-page fantasy, with multiple viewpoints, wide worldbuilding, and all the rest.

 

Epic vs Urban Fantasy?

In fact: I’d recommend comparing Codex Alera with the Dresden Files for anyone who wants to ponder the differences between medieval-based fantasy (or medieval life) and modern life and contemporary-setting fantasy. It’s all in that slow, multicharacter pace of how old-fashioned heroes move through the world.

Or as Tolkien readers would say, you can’t have a classic journey if it’s easy to Call The Eagles.

Urban fantasy keeps pace with the modern world. That means layers of the world’s texture can take form in half a page, and each battle that breaks out and each implication of the magic might ripple out with Internet speed to change hundreds of pieces of the world. It’s no coincidence that Harry Dresden is one of many UF heroes who spend a healthy chunk of time telling the reader just how the unearthly affects their “ordinary” earth in so many ways, and that a major writing question in the genre is whether magic keeps to the shadows or if the public is in some stage of discovering it.

But in Codex Alera, more than one plot point hinges on whether news can reach a fort in time, a whole dozen miles away. And that slowness is a key to fantasy like this: making us feel that each town and city has roots and buffer spaces that keep them from spilling into each other like our interconnected age does. A writer there has to take time to make each of those separate places real, without quick reference to the modern world, hence those fantasy tropes that help us get our bearings. The best fantasies of this kind either make us live those rhythms, or—and this is the Alera approach—use them to keep the story always close to the next crisis. Either way we readers need that local understanding, because the hero can only function by learning each place’s separate rhythms of village councils, mountain survival, and chains of command—and he needs to be downright lucky to be in the right place to get armies moving in time at all.

No airplanes, and only a few wind-spirits to ride. Call it “you’ll believe a man can’t fly.”

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Codex Alera respects that steady pace, and it isn’t a series that’s meant to be devoured. It’s a smooth, enjoyable read along familiar territory with frequent lunges forward into thrills. Stick with it, and see what it delivers.