Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself

I’m one of those people who likes to make lists to keep track of things I want to do, things I want to get, books I should read etc... (and sometimes I even just add things to lists so I can cross them off). So, I had this list of books that have really great action scenes, because my action scenes need a lot of work, and completely forgot about it, like I usually do. But I recently I found and reviewed it and a funny thing happened. Coincidence? Fate’s sarcastic ways? Who knows? The book I just finished reading, Joe Abercrombie’s THE BLADE ITSELF, was on there.

Here I was just about ready to write a mostly unsavory review for it, but then all of a sudden, I realized that yeah, I had some issues with the book, but the action scenes were not on that list. That’s what I can learn from Joe Abercrombie.

The book starts with an action scene, which are usually good hooks. I can see why Abercrombie would do this as it is one of his strengths and is known as an effective kick off. In the first lines of the book we have:

Logen plunged through the trees, bare feet slipping and sliding on the wet earth, the slush, the wet pine needles, breath rasping in his chest, blood thumping in his head. He stumbled and sprawled onto his side, nearly cut his chest open with his own axe, lay there panting, peering through the shadowy forest.

The Dogman had been with him until a moment before, he was sure, but there wasn’t any sign of him now. As for the others, there was no telling. Some leader, getting split up from his boys like that. He should’ve been trying to get back, but the Shanka were all around. He could feel them moving between the trees, his nose was full of the smell of them. Sounded as if there was some shouting somewhere on his left, fighting maybe. Logen crept slowly to his feet, trying to stay quiet. A twig snapped and he whipped round.

There was a spear coming at him. A cruel-looking spear, coming at him fast with a Shanka on the other end of it.

What a way to kick off a story. I got sucked right into this. What is going to happen to this dude?

Good action verbs: Plunged, slipped, stumbled
Imagery: wet pine needles
What’s going on in the body: blood thumping, air rasping
Risk/loss: stumbling almost kills himself,
Uncertainty: doesn’t know where his friends are, doesn’t know where his enemies are

Every step of the way is in very close POV. Things happen as a person would see them unfold.

I wonder if Abercrombie spent hours coming up with that one, had to revise it twenty times, or if it just fell out of his fingers into the keyboard.

Especially with Logen, all the action scenes painted him kind of a clumsy old washout who really wouldn’t survive without a lot of help or the similar ineptitude of his fellow men. This makes him feel more human by our standards, and helps us relate to him. But we also wonder how the hell he got his badass reputation. All the characters, too, when put in tight situations were very worried and not sure of what to do next. This is very human and relatable. No one knows the future or can be 100% sure of the result of their actions. Surprise is a frequent result of the action=reaction equation, at least for this girl.

So that was the beginning. Let’s quickly look at a fencing match in the middle.

“Begin!”

They closed quickly this time, and exchanged a cut or two.

Jezal could hardly believe how slowly his opponent was moving, it was as if his swords weighed a ton each. Broya fished around in the air with his long steel, trying to use his reach to pin Jezal down. He had barely used his short steel yet, let alone coordinated the two. Worse still, he was starting to look out of breath, and they’d barely been fencing two minutes.

Hmm ok, not too much action in this one at first glance…but it creates a sense of suspense, and we know that it is fencing, so that’s action right? I think that’s another of his tricks. He gets so down to the detail, using them to make readers see the concerns and holding off on the actual action, which is what makes the story move forward (ya know, people actually doing things). I also really like the description “fished around in the air with his long steel.” It’s a good action verb and imagery all in one.

And bear with me. One more action scene from the end. And this one really kicks ass! (spoiler haters be warned)

The talk was done. Stone-Splitter came at him with axe in one hand and mace in the other, great heavy weapons, though he used them quick enough. The mace swung across, smashed a great hole through the glass in one of the windows. The axe came down, split one timber of the table in half, made the plates jump in the air, the candlesticks topple. The Bloody-Nine twitched away, frog hopping, waiting for his time.

The mace missed his shoulder by an inch as he rolled across the table, cracked one of the big flat stones on the floor, split it down the middle, chips flying through the air. Stone-Splitter roared, swinging his weapons, smashing a chair in half, knocking a chunk of stone out of the fireplace, chopping a great gash in the wall. His axe stuck fast in the wood for a moment and the Bloody-Nine’s sword flashed over, broke the haft into splintered halves, leaving the Stone-Splitter with a broken stick in his paw. He flung it away and hefted the mace, came on even harder, swinging it round with furious bellows.

The biggest thing here? SHOWING. The strength of the enemy-risk. The effects of weapons on things other than people-risk and tension. Weapons breaking, building destruction-this is intense! “a broken stick in his paw,” the imagery again. Step by step unfolding of the mortal dance.

However, here, as it is the end of the book, it is less holding back and examining the details and more the full tilt ahead desperation of the time to win or die. It is just as rough and intense if not more so than at the beginning. Abercrombie’s energy does not flag. I think he wrote this entire book just so he could write this fight scene (I did not include all of it, and it does get better).

Aside from the action, I did learn a couple more things from this book. The way he handled his six main POVs (heh, you think this is an epic fantasy?) is rather interesting. All but one of them were usually in the same place at the same time. They were all overlapping witnesses to the same events, sometimes simultaneously, or from different times with different insights. It allows build up of tension and suspense as well as a sense of intrigue and gives the story a feel of space in a small setting. I like this, but haven’t seen it a lot in my reading and wish I could see it more than the usual display of all the different POV characters in a different part of the world as the story goes.

And then, there was always that POV thread out in the world letting us know what was on the horizon for the main clutch of characters.

This book is representative of a new voice who doesn’t follow all the rules, but at the same time you can tell this was his first work, or an early work, as it has an “unpolished” feel along with, or maybe because of, the newness. (But who am I to say anything about this?) It also works for the book’s noir, gritty feel.

I noticed a problem with hissing speakers. This word showed up numerous times as a speech tag, and not when any words ended in “s.”

There were a lot of exclamation points, but for some reason they didn’t bother me. Point for Abercrombie there.

The enemy-out-of-sight, the Shanka, are never really described very well, other than having the nickname “flatheads.” And as Abercrombie obviously has good imagery skills, I don’t know why he didn’t do this.

There was also a major reveal about a main character in the last twenty-or-so pages (totally done on purpose and I’m not sure I like it-maybe it just needed to be done more artfully) and the whole book was a set up for...the next one. Usually in epic fantasy, the first book in a trilogy resolves at least one semi-major plot arc. Nope, not here...“sorry, go buy the next book...” Good thing Borders is in its last weeks. Organization like this may be what makes me feel that this book is unpolished, or written by an inexperienced writer.

But in the end, the story is there and I cared about the characters, and of course, the action is full tilt all the way through.

Now how about you go and see if what I discovered above helps you improve your action scenes. I know it’s going to help mine.


Scribings is now available!

The Hour of the Dragon by Robert E. Howard

The Hour of the Dragon by Robert E. Howard

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book this old. And this book has been on my to-read list for a long time. A mentor in my MA program suggested I read some Robert E. Howard and so I got this book but I never quite got to it.

The Hour of the Dragon is Howard’s only novel-length story--the mass market paperback wasn’t even 300 pages. It was featured in installments in Weird Tales starting in 1935. Magic and betrayal, wizards, death and quests what’s not to love about this original sword and sorcery story?

While Howard had great stories to tell, I found myself cringing at the usage and style. Exclamation points everywhere, ill-placed Middle English, impossible names (yet not as impossible as his contemporary and friend H. P. Lovecraft). Every time I cringed, I had to remind myself how long ago this was written. Have tastes in prose changed so much? Or was that just the result of the cheaply produced pulps of the era?

Despite all that, delicious vocabulary crept among the purple prose on which 90’s Sword and Sorcery was built. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to look up a word while reading, and I think it’s a shame that I don’t have to do so more often. Maybe I’m just not reading the right stuff?

What about Conan himself? The character that people could not get enough of in his heyday? I can certainly see the draw to him. He was the strapping giant that no one could beat, he fought on the side of good and didn’t back down from confrontation. Despite being a little sexist by my own 21st century standards, he had respectable morals and philosophies. He also was intelligent. He had a mind for politics, even though he obviously hated them, and could strategize a battle--and Howard could write it well enough to draw out the suspense (this is probably the key to his success).

As I mentioned before, Howard created the original Conan character during the Great Depression. And now, the new movie for Conan the Barbarian is coming out, during this new depression we’re living through. Coincidence? What do you think?

Review cross posted at Wandering Around the Words

Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction

I knew Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction would be a treasure before I opened it. Hearing it described as a "writers workshop in a bottle" had piqued my interest. Now that I’ve gone through it, I can confirm it’s true. Any writer, beginner or otherwise will find benefit from reading this book. Usually structured around one theme, craft element or one particular way to write; how-to books can be limited on how much they can help you.

Before I go any further, I should probably share that I am an alumna of Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction program. I know about half of the contributing authors, either by studying writing under them or with them. And I can only say how much I absolutely respect their skill and knowledge of writing. That done, let’s move on...

Many Genres one Craft is broken into sections discussing “Craft,” which encompasses everything from Style to Character, Plot and Setting. The section for “Genre” discusses genre itself as well as the contemporary classifications we are all familiar with, including romance and women’s fiction, sci-fi and fantasy, horror and suspense, children’s and they even have an alternative section. Most other how-to books don’t discuss anything beyond those topics, but Many Genres one Craft continues with a section about “The Writer’s Life.” It’s true, if it was easy everyone would do it...and this section discusses how to deal with the self-inflicted curse and joy of being a writer. Probably the most useful section of the book for me was the section on “Promoting.”

Within all the sections, from idea generation to promotion of a published work is the wisdom of those who’ve “been there, done that” and are still publishing because they adapt to change, or newly publishing because they know what they are doing. Many of these contributors fondly reminisce on old times, when publishing was kind to writers. But, as Arnzen says in the intro, “Writing is a tough business and it's only grown colder as the trade has evolved.” And that’s why we need books like this.

As you read you feel like the contributors are there talking with you. They are not saying “I’m a great writer I know how it should be done,” they are saying “I’ve been writing, and I discovered this.” These writers are not telling you absolutes, they are pushing you to develop your own judgment. As a writer, your strongest tool will be your own judgment: of your own work, and of what you read.

If you read all these essays closely, you may find that some of the advice contradicts other pieces. This doesn’t mean one of them is wrong. One tidbit of hard-won industry knowledge may cancel out another bit of wisdom gleaned off an insider’s insight. But that doesn’t mean one is right and one is wrong. Both pieces of conflicting knowledge are important because they both happened. That’s the way it is.

No one book can tell you everything you need to know to get published. But Many Genres, One Craft might be close.

Scrivener review

Scrivener is a text editor by Literature & Latte, geared towards writers and has quite an impressive number of features, but remains extremely easy to get started and continue to be very useful. It is a Mac only program at the moment, but there is a Windows version in the works.

The features I will focus on is the editing, document notes, outlining, exporting/printing. I won't be talking about how you can use it for scriptwriting, look at statistics and targets or its full screen modes. Frankly I never used those features, and in all honesty, I didn't much like the full screen views.

What I liked, actually loved, was that you could sit down and be writing your story within seconds of starting the program for the first time. I have used other programs that force you into a certain structure and wizards to create your world, characters, chapters, etc, etc, add nauseum. Not so with Scrivener. You start the program, choose a template or just a blank project, give it a filename, and Bob's your uncle. You are writing your next bestselling novel within seconds.

At the left side of the program is your binder. Think of it as a mini file system that consists of one or more documents (your story sections) and folders, which can contain additional sections or folders. It really helps keep things organized, but doesn't force a structure on you. Note that when you create a new project, it will create an untitled document for you. Automatic, easy to use.

On the right side is your Inspector, which can be used to keep notes on your current document.

It the middle is the actual document, where you can do all the regular stuff like change the font, add tables, and images. No matter how many features a program has, if the core purpose of the program isn’t any good, the whole experience goes out the window. Editing the document in this case, is top notch. It gives you a word and character count, lets you zoom the text in and out with a single keystroke (a huge feature for me). You can select your font face and size, spacing, tab settings. Much like you would a word processor. I didn't find working with tables to be much fun. They work seamlessly for the most part in MS Word, but in Scrivener, they were hard to work with.

So it's easy to get started, but what about keeping yourself going? Can Scrivener help you stay organized? I would have to answer yes, very much so.

Some writers can just sit down and use MS Word to type out their 100,000 word novel. Not me, I like to break things up. Scrivener will let you organize the story to whatever grain you like. If you want to break it into chapters, you can do that; then if you decide to break it down further, into scenes, you can do that to. In fact, you can even write out large pieces of your story, and when it gets too big to wrap your head around, with a single keystroke, you can break it into separate documents.

If you are the type of writer that prefers to use a bunch of index cards to outline your story before writing the meat of it, the corkboard view mode is your answer. It is a layout of index cards, each card had the title and synopsis you have written on it. You can arrange the events however you like by dragging the cards around. Your story will be organized under the covers. In other words, each section is tied to the index card.

The other fantastic feature I would like to touch on is the outliner mode. When your story grows to a very large size, you need to be able to keep track of what stage each of the scenes or chapters are at. The outliner will show all your documents in single row format. It will also show the synopsis if you have typed one. You can assign each row a status like, "To do", "First Draft", "Revised Draft", "Final Draft", "Done". You can also change those defaults to whatever you like.

Exporting is one of Scriveners strongest points. You can export in a number of formats including Word .doc and .docx, .pdf, .rtf, .txt, .html, epub (iPad), mobi (Kindle) and a host of others. You can have export change the font to something other then what you were editing in. You can have it change underlined text to italics or vice versa. You can assign a title page or generate a table of contents. It's just so flexible, letting you edit one way, and if you choose, make the final copy conform to a particular publishers manuscript format. For example, I like to type my story using double space courier font. I also like to underline for things that will output as italicized. The reason for that is it is easier to read and proof as I am writing the story. When I export to a final format, like PDF or epub, I want to use a nice looking font, and I want anything underlined to be converted to italics. Export does this for you, and much more.

All in all, a fantastic program. Great for both the beginner and experienced writers.

Pros:

• You are up and writing right away.
• No messing with clunky wizards, no forced structure.
• Very easy to create your own structure.
• Easy to outline and manage the state of your sections/chapters/scenes.

Cons:

• Autosave saves to your current document, which is an unsafe operation. It should save to a temporary file, and only save to the main file when you save manually.
• MS Word .doc export is really just an RTF file renamed. You need to pay attention when making edits/comments and re-saving the word file. I had a friend loose his changes, but might have been an Open Office oddity. Using MS Word to edit and save seemed to work fine.
• With such a wealth of options, it can be a little complex.
• Once I upgraded to version 2.0, my 5000 word story with a few notes attached to it started freezing up the program for several seconds at a time. This worries me since once I get to a story that is 100,000 words, and lots more notes, will it kill the performance of the app?
• You have to click each section you want to export, no keyboard shortcut. I'm a heavy keyboarder, and avoid the mouse whenever possible. Better on the wrists/hands/elbows.

Maria V. Snyder's Glass Series

I’ve just finished reading all of Maria V. Snyder’s Glass series. This includes, Storm Glass, Sea Glass and Spy Glass. Simply put, they are wonderful. I couldn’t put them down. That is part of the reason I’m reviewing the series and not each book. The other part of that reason is that each book picks right up where the previous left off, so it’s almost like one really long book.

In Storm Glass, we follow Opal, who we met toward the end of the Study books, through her last year at the Keep, that is at magic school. Except she’s an odd student with odd abilities and her education didn’t go smoothly, especially her last year. We hardly see her at school though. There is tons of action, tons of on-the-spot decision making, and characters that are easy to relate to. Opal is not the super hero that waltzes in and just saves everyone. She suffers, she sacrifices and she gets very upset by the things that happen to her. She also has to deal with the consequences of being a young person in an adult society.

The only unsatisfying thing for me about Storm Glass is the ending. (Mild Spoiler Alert) While the build up and action were great, it died for me after. Opal goes in, does her thing and just passes out. The others deal with the clean up, and I feel like I missed out on something, like she missed out on it. Sure it’s not important to her story, but by not seeing the payoff I almost feel like it didn’t happen.

Sea Glass sees Opal returning to school, only to have her story turned against her. Everything that happens to Opal always gets turned around on her. Her decisions are always questioned. But she is resolute to set things right. She gets closer to that in this book as she gets older and more experienced with the “joys” of the real world. Old enemies turn up, with more at stake and different agendas. Conflict twists around Opal and her abilities and reputation, constantly getting her into trouble. But she’s able to put smarts to use and depend on her trusted friends. This book did not let me down at all.

Spy Glass gives us a new Opal. She’s had so much happen to her in the first two books. This one shows how she recovers from the events up to now. She has a more hardened exterior, more smarts and knows a lot more about her enemies. But this still doesn’t make it easy for her. Her personal life is in a shambles and she’s working through the last few issues from all her previous exploits. But the way she tackles them now is the good result of all her previous trouble. I almost feel like a proud parent watching the ways she’s grown. (But I’m not a parent, and any parent in their right mind would never put their children through these things.)

Another thing I can laud about the book is introduction of “really cool stuff.” She shows us the processes of glassmaking as only someone who’s done it can, and not too many people have. She talks about diamonds and other gemstones (my other passion) with authority. This book is not the first time people have blackmarketed diamonds to fund a war. So bonus points for working in modern issues. Snyder has done her homework. And some things, like all the spy work, I really wonder how she describes it so well? Has she done some of that, or is that just the skill of her writing at hand?

This entry is cross posted at Wandering Around the Words.

Have you taken our survey yet?

One winner will receive a $20 gift card to the ebook store of their choice and a free copy of our ebook. Five other free ebooks will be given away.

iA Writer review

iA Writer is a text editor for the iPad that boasts distraction free writing. After using it for a week, I find that it isn't so much the distraction free writing that makes this program well suited for writers, it's the helpful additions to a plain text editor.

My feelings on writing fiction on the iPad are mixed. While the iPad provides one of the most portable devices with a built in keyboard, it does fall short on one key point. Yes, it's the keyboard. But not for the reason you might think. The virtual keyboard actually works really well. I find my fingers fly just as effortlessly over the virtual keyboard as they do over the keys of my laptop. I do make a lot more mistakes, but the autocorrect fixes most of them as I type. So what _is_ wrong with the keyboard if, not the typing?

Navigation. On the virtual keyboard, you dont have any arrows. You also don't have a home, end, page up or page down keys. Why is this a problem? Well take for instance the word "dont" above. I noticed the typo a sentence after I typed it. To fix it, I would normally have to stop what I was doing, press and hold my finger on the screen at the location I need to insert the apostrophe, slide it around till I find the right location, then hope the position doesn't change when I lift my finger up. All too often it takes several seconds to make a correction that should only take a fraction of that time. Talk about a distraction!

Enter iA Writer. It has arrows so you can navigate around your text. This I believe is the single most important feature iA Writer has to offer. It places the arrows, and a few other common punctuation marks on a bar just above the regular keyboard. It looks like it should have been there the whole time! There are left/right and word left/right arrows (like holding Control-Left/right). This feature alone, makes it worth the purchase if you plan to actually do some heavy writing (and not pull your hair out while typing.)

Strange as it may seem, they also like to promote the font they use. If you are going to be staring at text for long periods of time, it has to be clear, easy to read, and nice to look at. They used a font called Nitti Light, which accomplishes the task wonderfully. It is a beautiful font. It isn’t quite as sharp in portrait mode however, but still is easy on the eyes.

The last feature worth mentioning is called FocusMode. Your mileage may very, but I didn't find it particularly useful. The feature gets rid of the toolbar and grays out all text except for the three lines closest to what you are working on, forcing you to focus and providing a distraction free environment. Yeah right. If you are easily distracted, graying out a few lines of text is not going to get the creative juices flowing again. I do like the concept, but it also turns off auto correction, and the red mis-spelling highlighting. Two features I find I can't live without, especially on a virtual keyboard were my typing error rate is so much higher. For example, normally the iPad will replace a lower case "i" with an uppercase one when you mean to say "I". In focus mode it no longer does that. Maybe that mode would be more useful to someone using an external keyboard. But when I use the iPad, I usually only use the virtual keyboard.

Although there are a lot of features that are missing, I like the app and would recommend it to other writers. A few items I hope get addressed in the near future would include:

1. Toss out the word arrow sound fx. When I turn off the keyboard clicking sound, I don't want to listen to swiping sounds when you use those keys.

2. Up and down arrows would be very helpful. Maybe even home and end.

3. iA Writer saves plain text files, but uses UTF16 encoding. That file encoding is not widely recognized by other text editor apps, either on the iPad, Mac or PC. This makes it difficult when trying to integrate with other programs. In this case, Scrivener 2.0. Note that if the file was created by another program, and you edit it in iA Writer, it will re-save it with the correct encoding.

4. Dropbox integration really needs to support directories. For me to use Scrivener synching I had to use a symlink and point my Writer directory to my Draft folder that Scrivener exports to. It would actually have been helpful for Scrivener not to force the export to the Draft folder as well.

Having Folder support would also allow me to work on more then one story at a time, as well as use it as a general text editor, which I can't really do when I am syncing with Scrivener.

Pros:

- Additional virtual keys available all the time, allowing you to navigate your text using left/right arrow keys.

- Very good font choice.

Cons:

-No directory support for drop box, making it hard to use the app for more then one project at a time.

-Files are not sorted alphabetically, so you can't even using a number naming scheme to make chapters appear in the correct order.

-Keyboard sounds when you have turned key clicks off.

-UTF16 encoding isn't very well supported by other programs.

Celtx for Writing Novels

A few years ago I found an open source script writing program called Celtx. My brother and I wrote a screenplay using it, and I've used it to write the audio/visual scripts that later became the promo and tutorial movies for my games. There are several very cool features in Celtx like a built-in database for keeping track of character details, an index card view that makes reordering scenes easy, and an easy PDF export. I've always thought this program was almost perfect for novels. It just needed a little more attention.

Well, it just got that attention in the new version 2.9 that was released on February 8, 2011.

Up to now, I've been using almost ancient tools to write my stories (ancient in computer terms, not ancient as in 'abacus'). First I have the actual novel, written in OpenOffice.Org's Writer. Next I have a sort of ad hoc database, stored in a multi-page spreadsheet in OpenOffice.Org's Calc -- one sheet for a chapter list and summary, one for character details, and a third for keeping track of revision history. Finally, I had a simple text file for storing notes on future ideas that hadn't found their way into the novel yet.

I've always wanted a program just for writing - one program to rule them all, if you will. Celtx gave me that for writing screenplays, but fell short for writing novels. Now they have specific novel support, and things are much better. I spent some time over the past few days copying my unedited second novel into Celtx to see how it works.

The "Master Catalog" is still there, allowing me to easily keep track of information about my characters, locations, and anything else I can dream up. This works as well as it ever did, although some of the fields they provide just don't apply to me yet (I don't spend much time thinking about parking on Mars but I imagine it's better than at my current apartment). Having access to a place that lets me store more information than a spreadsheet and in a much more readable format is a boon. It even lets you import pictures, so if you have a favorite actor you envision as your character or some concept art you can add those to your character card for future reference.

Next is the "Novel" component. This is a simple text editor with some custom header areas. This is not as robust as Writer or Word, but it is more useful than notepad because of the way it's tied in. Fill in a chapter header and you instantly have an entry added to the Chapter List on the left side of the screen. This does two things very well: lets you easily add chapter entries and allows for easy reordering. The index card view works even better in that regard, since it gives you a nicer view of your chapters and lets you drag and drop them to change the order.

This is not to say the software is perfect, but it has come a long way toward being my one-stop shop for novel writing. What I feel is missing from Celtx is this:

1. Word Count -- I keep track just to see where I'm at and what sort of progress I'm making. You can select text and right-click on it to see the word count. Effective, but hidden. I'd prefer to see the word count in the chapter list and have an overall total displayed somewhere as well.

2. Scenes -- Having each chapter be an item in a list and an index card is great, but each chapter is not one scene. I usually have several scenes in a chapter and would love to have an interface to let me move those around and insert new scenes more easily.

3. Export -- I want two methods of exporting. First, a fully formatted novel ready to send off to CreateSpace for printing (using my own custom template, if possible). Second, a fully formatted novel in DOC format ready for me to send to Smashwords.

Celtx has worked well for the few projects I've created with it. This novel writing component is a huge step toward making me want to use the program full time. It's missing a few things, but considering that this is the first official version to support novel writing at all, it's an exceptional effort. It's even motivated me enough to look into writing add-ons to get the additional functionality I want.

Wizardry and Wild Romance

I always love finding a good critical book about fantasy. I love reading fantasy and I love reading about it. I love hearing what authors and established critics have to say about the genre and its craft. That said, how could I not read Michael Moorcock’s WIZARDRY AND WILD ROMANCE: A STUDY OF EPIC FANTASY? I really had to read this. And I did.

Originally released in 1977, Monkeybrain Books re-released an updated version in 2004. This book did not go on about the forgotten greats of the genre, it commented on the best Epic Fantasy of then and now. It focused on what makes them great, and noted that the things that make books and authors great changes over time. This is a true study of Epic Fantasy.

Moorcock begins explicitly with a warning in his foreword. He is only writing these collected essays from his own opinion and observations of currently available romantic epic fantasy, he is discussing it and not defining it. He was wise to do so. I always get a little leery when anyone, even experts, start spouting about what they think is great without explaining themselves. As much as I want to take their well-learned word for diamonds, sometimes I only see dust.

Moorcock’s discussion is separated into six different categories: origins, landscape, heroes/heroines, humor, children’s books and genre deviations. Perhaps these are the most important craft elements of epic fantasy? In each section, Moorcock highlights the authors and books that represent the best work in each.

Despite being discussed in separate essays, his opinion is the same throughout. He asks for more. More attention to the landscape of a story, more attention to the characters, more consideration of humor. He lauds the authors who do it well, frequently the same people across the categories. And what is more, he provides excerpts! I wish more critical work about fantasy would do this. Moorcock says something is great and then says look at it for yourself so you can see how he formed his opinion of it. Nothing explains the quality of the words better than the words themselves.

While he mostly focuses on the strongest examples of the literature, he frequently reminds that there are hoards of imitators out there, looking to get rich from an easy, formulaic story and diluting the good reads. These are the authors who pay little or no attention to the above categories. He occasionally provides excerpts of these as well, for contrast.

By the end of the book, Moorcock has shown a timeline of the life of the genre within this book. Beginning as riffs on the gothic novels and chivalric romances, squalling through Sword and Sorcery, finding a firm foothold on the Tolkienian other-world stories, and coming into maturity within the walls of urban settings. At each point, Moorcock describes the genre’s historic connection to humanity, be it reactionary to a war or a specific artistic movement.

Where will epic fantasy go after the city? Out to space? Or even further back, to the dinosaurs? One thing is for sure, literary forms frequently change, but good craft will always hold a book together.

this review is cross posted at Wandering around the Words