Subtitles

"Hang on to me and I'll hang onto you..." -Carbon Leaf, Deep Blue Sea

No, not the kind you're thinking of. They kind that come after a colon in a book title, preferably to help delineate the chunks a longer-than-one-book story has been broken into. Like Dragonlance: Dragons of Spring Dawning. Or Somethingvaguelyhauntingandprofound: A novel. Depending on your genre preferences.

Anyway, awhile ago (months, really. I should have posted this long before. Mea culpa.) I came up with working subtitles for the four parts of Soulwoven. I'll share them in a moment, but the interesting thing that came out of the subtitles is that they are helping me immensely in focusing the books. The more I tell of Soulwoven the more it tries to do what epic fantasy inevitably does---sprawl out and out and out, and the more picky I have to be about choosing which stories to tell and which to leave untold. The subtitles remind me of the themes I'm working with. They help me decide which episodes should begin and end the book-length chunks of the story I'm writing. This is not a development I predicted. I simply decided one day that if I wanted to maintain any sort of control over the titling of what would eventually be four or more books, I ought to make a real attempt to title them. The focus was just a happy side effect.

I share this in the hope that somewhere out there someone will read it and think "Aha! That's what I need!"

It may not be true. Or it may. But either way it's worth noodling.

And oh yes, the (working) subtitles are:
Soulwoven: Exodus
Soulwoven: Exile
Soulwoven: Redemption
Soulwoven: Brotherhood

I like 'em. Someday it will prove interesting to see if a marketing department does too. :-)

Limitations of Fantasy

"We were fated to pretend..."-MGMT, Time to Pretend

Alright, so I post often about all the great things that fantasy stories are uniquely suited to do. As a writer of fantasy, I feel like it's my duty to defend my genre, especially since I've seen it slammed over and over again by more literary-minded folks.

But it's worth taking the time to recognize the limitations of the genre as well, and as I was reading The Golden Compass last week, I came across one: fantasy narratives are forced to spend a great deal of time describing the worlds they take place in.

I've been over some of the ways this particular facet of fantasy can be useful. It's great for telling stories that revolve around discovery and growth, because the most natural way of describing a world is for one or more characters to learn about it as the narrative progresses. But it has limitations as well--one of which is that there are really only so many ways to squeeze in world-building details.

Inevitably, you're going to wind up using some of the same tricks that other authors have before you. And if your reader has read enough fantasy, they'll start to recognize some of them. That's never a good thing, even if most readers will forgive you (I mean, if they've read enough to recognize the tricks, they must love the genre) and may be one reason why some people I speak to think of fantasy as full of cliches. Read the wrong three novels in a row and you may get the same trick three times in a row--an unfortunate coincidence that might turn you off of fantasy for life.

So! In recognition of this deadly danger, I intend to compile a list of different ways of revealing world-building information, as well as different twists that can be put on it. Help from the peanut gallery is encouraged.