I failed to post on Wednesday, I know. Something came up that has had me too stressed out to write this week. I think I’ve formulated a plan, now, and maybe I’ll be able to get back to writing. Generally, once I have a plan and can get started on it, I can relax. And start writing again.
Meantime, I’ve been thinking about genre, some. Well, several things kind of came together to make me realize something. It has to do, among other things, with what genre to put MAGE STORM into.
I’ve always framed MAGE STORM, to myself, as an epic fantasy, because it does have an epic problem, epic stakes. But . . . in other ways it doesn’t fit the typical epic fantasy mold.
The more I think about it, I’m not sure that’s how readers will see it. It seems to me, that readers of epic fantasy have come to expect the great climax that saves the world and then everyone can go home and get on with their lives. After all, that’s the model Tolkien set up with THE LORD OF THE RINGS, arguably the archetype of epic fantasy.
But . . . well, here’s how I see it. Tolkien fought in World War I. That’s how he saw war. The men–it is all males in LotR–put their lives on hold, go off and save the world, or their corner of it, and then go back home. Only, well, in my lifetime, that hasn’t been how war–or military conflicts, since we haven’t had a declared war–works. It goes on and on, sometimes into the next generation. And, sometimes, no one wins; they just agree to stop fighting. And, at the same time, many of the other kinds of problems we try to tackle are not the kind that can be solved in one blow.
It’s entirely natural and right that authors today should write stories that reflect our reality–even into fantasy realms we make up out of whole cloth. It’s part of what speculative fiction does–reframe realities in a different, more distant setting so, sometimes, we can take a clearer look at the issues. See the forest without being blinded by the trees.
But, there’s still that expectation of what epic fantasy will be like. And MAGE STORM isn’t going to fit that mold. There isn’t going to be one great climax where everything is solved. More like incremental steps and strategies for improvement.
So . . . I’m still left with the question. When I finally finish MAGE STORM and prepare to publish it, what genre do I call it? It’s certainly not sword and sorcery (no swords at all, for one thing). What kind of a bird is it?
Meredith Mansfield, Author 
I think that we’re in a new age of epic storytelling, in contrast to *dramatic* storytelling. People’s consumption of serial television like Game of Thrones has conditioned them to expect stories to to be long, and for characters to have complex arcs that don’t necessarily resolve neatly. This is an outgrowth of ensemble television shows starting with Hill Street Blues in the 1980s, in which each episode has overlapping vignettes featuring different characters.
Prior to that, most of the 20th century’s pop culture storytelling was influenced by drama. In drama time is a scarce commodity and you have to use it sparingly. Every TV show episode was like a little three act play in which the main character started in more or less the same place and ended in more or less the same place, with details and supporting characters varying from episode to episode — thus so many shows about detectives and doctors, who bring a formulaic approach to other peoples’ problems.
Genre novels were also influenced by the need for efficient story telling that trimmed word count to typically 100,000 words or less. A 400,000 word printed novel costs 4x as much to produce, ship, and shelve. The first Harry Potter novel was 77,000 words long; few publishers would risk publishing a quarter million word behemoth like Order of the Phoenix unless they knew it would sell.
I actually prefer compact stories with a dramatic structure, but epics have their advantages. A Song of Ice and Fire uses the sprawling structure of an epic to do a kind of sociological storytelling: characters’ actions are a product of their circumstances, they don’t have much psychological agency. Lord of the Rings is an intermediate work presenting elaborate parallel stories exploring differences in character: Gandalf/Saruman, Theoden/Denthor, Aragorn/Boromir. Can’t do that in a tiny, watchmaker plot.
The thing is, both styles of storytelling, epic and dramatic, are hard. They’re hard in different ways.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“The thing is, both styles of storytelling, epic and dramatic, are hard. They’re hard in different ways.”
All storytelling is hard in some way, but worth it. 🙂
And, fortunately, we are now released from the mathematics of printed novels. A story can be as long as it needs to be. Or can be serialized. Or . . . .
I really hope you’re right that readers are becoming open to stories that take longer to resolve.
LikeLike