RG Williams

There’s no way to introduce this week’s subject in a pithy way without coming across as someone who doesn’t take serious issues, well… seriously. And since my short story this week was sprinkled with racial epithets, I’m sure you can understand my approaching the delicate subject of race with just that: delicacy.

So, here’s the bottom line: racial stereotyping is wrong, m’kay? It’s unacceptable in real life, so why should we tolerate it in our writing? It doesn’t matter how supposedly flattering the stereotyping is, if you say that the Chinese are good with maths, the Germans with organisation or the French with love-making; you’re still painting an entire people with broad strokes of sweeping generalisation.

In modern society, it’s offensive to the race in question. In writing, it makes for shallow story telling.

And yet the fantasy genre, along with perhaps the science fiction genre to a lesser extent, is often woefully guilty of racial stereotyping. Last week’s issue of affirmative action goes hand in hand with this: many writers, in satisfying this phantom obligation to foist fantastical races upon their stories, end up portraying those races in broad, generalised terms. It goes back to the simple matter of resources: the more you put into your story, the less you can actually focus on. So, if you shoe-horn in Elves, Dwarves and what-else-have-you in, then in order to preserve space for your actual narrative any attempt to examine and analyse these races is going to be done in expansive terms. And your story is going to suffer for it.

I’ve always have a personal beef with fantasy stories’ depictions of Elves. They’re irritatingly good at everything as a race. They’re frequently the fastest, strongest, smartest, most magically competent race in a writer’s setting. But what I find intolerable is not so much their universal superlativity in all fields, but the fact that it seems to be something that applies to each and every one of them. It’s the broad stereotype that annoys me: each and every one is a superior elder being possessed of deep spirituality and, usually, some profound connection to nature. The same with Dwarves as gruff, recalcitrant blacksmiths with a penchant for drinking and a bad mood. Or Halflings as ebullient, gregarious farmers with a penchant for drinking and a seemingly irrepressible good mood. Or Orcs as single-minded, quasi-animalistic, blood-thirsty savages.

Starting to get my drift?

Now, of course a race is going to have generally shared characteristics. But it’s more than a matter of ‘Dwarves are gruff and surly because they are Dwarves’. If you want gruff and surly Dwarves they you need to give them a reason to be that way. Some rationale in their racial history, culture and/or psyche that makes them generally prickly towards others. And there’s the operative word: generally. It may sound obvious, but you cannot make, or more importantly portray, all Dwarves in this fashion. And you can’t just make the Dwarf attached to the protagonist group different and think you’ve gotten away from the problem either.

Put it this way: when you’re dealing with fantasy races, sit back for a moment and ask yourself whether you’d be able to get away with what you’re planning in the real world. Saying the Dwarves are generally mistrustful of outsiders and perhaps have a slightly grim outlook on matters is, in real life terms, similar to saying that Americans prefer more conservative politics or Japanese culture possesses a greater focus on law and order. But portraying each and every, or even a great deal, of Dwarves in that way is coming dangerously close to portraying a good deal of Americans as gun-toting, bible-bashing red-necks, or the Japanese as honour-bound subservients.

I guess that’s what I’m trying to get around to saying: culture is, by definition, a broad-stroke generalisation that will always have exceptions to the rule. As a writer, it’s your obligation to show those exceptions, to demonstrate that a race isn’t a single, uniform body that marches to the beat of one drum. Not all Dwarves are going to be surly and stand-offish, or be interested in mining or metallurgy, despite general cultural and socio-historic indicators to the contrary. That’s the difference between cultural statements and racial stereotyping: one provides a useful focal point to anchor a reader’s understanding of a race (if a reader is informed about certain cultural, social and historical predilections towards certain features, it frames any subsequent information the writer will give them about groups or individuals), while the other creates shallow, generic copy-and-paste automata.

This is something that, the more I think about it, the more I really ought to be worried about this operating on Crescent Knife. You see, it’s easy to say ‘I want this setting to be filled with humans pushed to the brink, caught in a life-long desperate fight for survival’, but that risks falling into what I’ve just described. It flirts with the boundary between a general cultural statement that mankind is struggling to live from day to day, and a quickly-tiresome clichéd depiction of each and every character in my story. The fact that a ‘fight for survival’ cultural paradigm offers a lot of different manifestations goes a small way, I think, to avoiding this, but nevertheless the danger remains. There always need to be exceptions, not to prove the rule but to actively disprove it. Even in a constant life-or-death, there will always be exceptions. Those who try not to give in to baser survival instincts, who rebel against generations of self-interest and the stand-alone complex.

The resistance, for example, is more than just a means to an end. It goes beyond an effort to survive by redistributing wealth and power. At its most fundamental, it’s an enraged cry that people should not be forced into a situation where they have to backstab one another, and an active demonstration that cooperation can still get something done. Or the last remnants of the Churches, clinking to their husk-gods and their dusty teachings, sacrificing their own well being to stay true to a higher cause.

Stereotypes go beyond being potentially offensive clichés. If everything is uniform, then there’s nothing interesting to examine as a writer. If every last human in Ivarda was a self-obsessed pragmatist driven by his/her survival instinct, then it all smears together into an unrecognisable blur. Variety is the spice of life, and it punctuates the population of a world. Culturally, I will certainly say that humanity is pushed to the bring, but to let that then inform each and every individual is shooting myself in the foot. It reduces the difficulty and tragedy of the struggle to something bland and commonplace. But if there are exceptions, groups and individuals who break from that cultural norm, then it makes those who haven’t all the more tragic, and those who do not necessarily heroic, but outstanding in the most literal sense. They stand out and interest the reader, they make him ask how and why they’re different.

Perhaps other fantasy races won’t feel this as profoundly as I’ve doe with Crescent Knife, but the point is nevertheless valid. Mistaking a broad cultural statement for a blueprint to even a majority of your race is going to lead to a people your reader doesn’t care about. They see one, they’ve seen them all. It takes more effort, no doubt, but a race needs to be, and be seen to be, full of dynamic differences. It may complicate the story with more conflicts than otherwise, and require more exposition to weave into the narrative in a subtle fashion, but in the end it’ll pay dividends.

Please, take this to heart. If I have to read about one more insufferably homogenous race of Elves I swear I will eat my laptop.

So, last week’s spiel was all about masking the plot purposes of cities behind a veneer of history and development. This week is, perhaps, an inversion of that: giving history and development to something that doesn’t have a purpose.

I’m talking about races.

As soon as you think of the fantasy genre, your mind jumps to fantasy races, doesn’t it? Elves, Dwarves, Men, Hobbits/Halflings/Vertically-Challenged-Hirsute-Creatures (or whatever you wish to call them). And who can blame you? It’s practically been a given since Tolkien; a trope that most writers of the genre have bought into at least once in their careers.

But why? Why do writers fill their worlds with strange creatures and alien cultures? The answer, many times, seems to be nothing more than ‘just because’. Because that’s the perceived obligation from fantasy stories. Because it helps the author establish that this is, in fact, a weird and wonderful world apart from ours. Because the author doesn’t feel that his story is creative or fantastical enough without them.

You know what it ultimately boils down to? A literary version of affirmative action: authors introducing these different races to their stories purely because they’re different races. They serve no ultimate purpose to the plot that the central race, say Humans, could accomplish. They exist purely to be other.

I’m going to put forward a rather controversial point. Books are not video games.

Woah, right? I’m gonna let you take a moment to collect the pieces of your mind that have been scattered across your room after being blown by that point. In your typical fantasy video game, plot elements are introduced for one of two primary reasons: story and gameplay. And races, more often than not, fall into the latter category: the plot involves Elves, Dwarves, Humans et cetera not because the story demands it, but because the gameplay requires a player be able to choose which he wants to play for sundry cosmetic and mechanical reasons.

Much the same is true with ‘affirmative action’ in fantasy. The writer wants a race that looks and behaves differently from the norm and so introduces them into the story. In this way, Elves and Dwarves serve no purpose to the story beyond being just that: different. There is nothing gained from their presence in the story beyond difference.

I’d like to take an example from a game. The first Dragon Age ascribed to the traditional triumvirate of fantasy races: Elves, Dwarves and Humans. It gave the game’s story a degree of diversity, but in the end the races had little impact on the story being told. The Elves were a downtrodden race that lurked in ghettos, the Dwarves a stoic, mistrustful people under siege from demonic infestations plaguing their cities. It allows the story to move to different locations and throw the central characters into different situations, but beyond that it serves no greater purpose. In gameplay terms, yes, it’s very useful to inject variety into mechanics and levels. But in story-telling terms there’s no real point to them. They don’t fulfil any role that the central race could. It might just as well be a subset of Humans that are downtrodden and lurk in ghettos (gee, maybe that’s not such a fantastical idea, huh?), or a colony of Humans having to deal with constant infestation.

My problem isn’t that fantasy races are introduced because they’re different. Of course they’re different. But that difference serves no purpose. It is a means without an end. Bad fantasy writers seem to think, ‘oh, I’ve introduce a strange new race to my setting’ and think that’s the end of it. The question then becomes, ‘okay, what are you going to make with that difference?’. How is that difference going to impact your story beyond its mere difference.

Writers are quick to borrow the ‘Tolkien triumvirate’ of races, but slower to borrow the reason behind them. Tolkien wasn’t exactly a writer who was shy about giving his races a vast amount history and development, but they never existed in The Lord of the Rings, say, purely for the sake of being something outlandish. Tolkien’s Elves, for instance (and this is a Kodak moment, because it might be the only time on this site I actually complement Tolkien’s Elves) actually served a greater purpose in the story. They were a race in their twilight years, who had come to terms with the fact that their wisdom and power would fade from the mortal world. While I have plenty to say about said ‘wisdom and power’, they provided an excellent counter-point to Mankind, who fought to the last man in a desperate war for survival. The Elves were content to go quietly into that good night, while Humanity was going to kick and scream until the end. It gave the story a beautiful dynamic of one race passing the torch to the next: yes, the Elves had once stood alongside Mankind in the battle for survival, but now their time is passing and it’s up to Humanity to step up to the plate alone.

Similarly, the Dwarves, although they played a miniscule part in the main story (if memory serves, Gimli is the sole (living) Dwarf in the entire series), they nevertheless exist to do more than just ‘be different’. The whole Elf/Dwarf rivalry, and Gimli and Legolas’ overcoming of that, serves as an excellent vector for the unifying power that conflict and adversity can have on disparate peoples (which, given the context of its writing, is hardly surprising).

Tolkien didn’t just throw in Elves and Dwarves because there was some well-established fantasy trope (although he is massively responsible for that resulting trope). He didn’t introduce them to the world because he needed it to appear more fantastical and outlandish. They served a greater purpose to the story.

This is something I had to sit down to ponder on for a long while when I first started developing the idea of Crescent Knife. The siren song of having additional fantasy races kicking around the story, thus giving a writer a lot more resources (remember those?) to work with, is massively tempting. But I quickly realised that there was nothing that additional races could do that the ‘central race’, in this case Man, couldn’t do on its own (if not better). A city driven to betrayal and duplicity, with neighbour conspiring against neighbour, every man for himself and no moral scruples getting in the way of survival? How would introducing Elves or Dwarves into that help? Is it not actually more effective to see Man screwing over his fellow Men; isn’t that more indicative of the level to which the citizens of Ivarda have sunk in their desperate struggle just to stay alive?

So yes, I decided that Crescent Knife was going to be Humans-only. No fantasy affirmative action. To an extent…

I’m currently toying around with the idea of a quasi-race (perhaps ‘sub-species’ is a better term): the ver-men. It’s a working title, an obvious attempt to play around with the word ‘vermin’, because that’s what this sub-species is: feral humans who, over the centuries, have regressed (de-evolved is an ugly term) into a state where they’ve begun to resemble rats, cockroaches, wild dogs, spiders… your typical city pests only with much greater cunning, aggression and size. And I’m not putting this in just to make Ivarda feel like a weird, different city. These ver-men serve a purpose beyond being weird and different; they’re a constant reminder to the inhabitants of what survival can mean, the living, hunting and killing embodiment of the dangers of that particular instinct taking over completely. The unspoken threat that there might be worse fates than death. Just as the Mist outside the walls serves as a constant looming threat from without, the ver-men are going to be a constant, festering threat from within – not just from within the city, but from within every man himself. Ultimately, I’m not introducing them to be different. I’m introducing them to be profoundly, terrifyingly the same.

When I was younger, I was utterly stoked for the release of a computer game called Rise of Nations. It was a sort of real time civilisation simulator that had you building your own personal empire, city by city, while amassing resources and either negotiating or warring with neighbouring empires. What had me really itching to play this game was the prospect of being able to take a patch of land, plant a few hovels and slowly build it into a fully fledged city. I’d always had a thing for designing interesting layouts of buildings in other real time strategy games, and the opportunity to take that to the next level by designing an entire city was irresistible.

When the game came out, I was drastically disappointed. As it turned out, the much-anticipating city-building mechanic was actually quite sparse, consisting of the player placing down a central ‘city’ structure and then building a few choice additions around it: marketplaces, ports, fortresses and maybe one or two interesting landmarks if you have the cash to spare.

This past week, in expectation of my weekly musings on the craft of fantasy writing, I’ve been reminiscing about my experiences with Rise of Nations and paying more attention to my surroundings than I usually do on my daily walks to and from University (although, more attention than barely any isn’t saying much). That’s because I want to round off my informal opening trilogy of musings about setting with a discussion on cities. City-building, in particular.

Building a city can be the easiest part of writing a fantasy story. Like in Rise of Nations, you only need a core body of residential buildings supplemented by whatever the plot or setting requires that city to have: a marketplace, a port, a fortress and maybe one or two interesting landmarks. Throw that all together onto a map location and boom, you have yourself an easy city.

Here’s the catch. Writing, like all good alchemy, is all about equivalent exchange: you get out as much as you put in. If you put in the bare essentials to build a city easily, that’s all you’re going to get out. If all your city boils down to is a central body of buildings with a few extra add-ons scattered throughout like salt over a bag of chips, your city’s going to closer resemble one of the old Wild West film sets made up of building-fronts and nothing else, rather than an actual living, breath, thriving (or faltering) community.

As it turns out, however, a lot of fantasy writers fall into this groove. I’d comment on Eragon, but I picked on Paolini last week and I really don’t want to beat the same drum twice. But the point remains: if you treat your city as a generic lump of necessary homes and halls, with whatever the plot requires stapled to the city, you’re not going to have a very convincing location either on your hands, or on your map.

A city is for life, not just for a chapter. No matter how passing a glimpse the reader is given of a city, they’ll be able to tell whether it’s plot convenience in disguise or an actual developed settlement. Because readers are canny bastards like that. But there was a key word in that statement: developed. Cities don’t just spring up because some higher authority wills them; they develop. They grow based on external stimuli and internal desires, changing and learning and adapting. Cities, in the end, are just very big characters with an inability to talk.

One of the earliest examples of a truly developed city I ever read was the alternative London in The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray. Following the appearance of monstrous, quasi-demonic creatures in the wake of a British/Prussian war, London has sealed off everything south of the Thames and currently exists in a state of siege as these creatures slowly but surely breach this quarantine on a nightly basis. The abandoned southern city has a hollow, echoing feel to it, while the northern half of the city tries to carry on beneath the looming spectre of this supernatural threat. The police are over-worked and verging on draconian policies, few dare venture out after dark unless it’s urgent, suspicion and superstition abound.

This is a city that’s grown from its history, evolving and producing its own unique atmosphere and feel, and indeed population. Yes, it provides the plot with the necessary elements (secondary antagonists, dangers, complications), but none of it feels contrived purely for the sake of advancing the plot. When the protagonists need to capture one of these monsters and go down into the sewers to make the attempt, it doesn’t feel like the monsters are suddenly crawling around in the sewers because the protagonists need one – it’s a logical point given the fact that these monsters are trying to infiltrate past the quarantine. Similarly, when the protagonists are constantly road-blocked by a police officer, it doesn’t feel like forced conflict because, hey, if I was a bobby in that city I wouldn’t want a bunch of private investigators and monster hunters running around unchecked either.

Let me put it this way. You wouldn’t introduce a character, no matter how small and ancillary, without having some idea of his personality and back-story. He isn’t just going to act as a mannequin upon which you hang plot threads. The same is true with a city. Yes, you need something from the city, a castle to breach or a port to carry the heroes across an ocean, but you can’t just staple those elements onto the city. And you can’t just give reasons either. Sure, the city has a castle because it borders upon uncivilised wild-lands, or it has a port because it’s next to a large body of that slightly bluish wet stuff most worlds call water. No shit. There has to be a history to it, and some sort of personality, if you want your readers to not just accept the city, but believe in it. The city has a castle, but it’s been worn down by decades of attack, or the enemy has developed new tricks to get around it. The city has a port, but it’s been retrofitted from military shipyards, or it’s being abandoned because there’s no good fishing to be had any more. These may not impact your story any more than the little flash of back-story you gave that smuggler in chapter 3 (his father was an alcoholic and so he got into smuggling because he realised there was always going to be a demand for booze, say). But the point isn’t to impact your story. The point is to make your story more than just a connection of happy coincidences that let it progress. You want your reader to believe that there’s more to your world than the bare essentials required for the plot to advance: the inclusion of details means that these necessary elements aren’t regarded as glaring necessities, but logical parts of a developed whole.

I’ve really been feeling this point weighing down on me with Crescent Knife. Limiting myself to just one city as the entirety of my story’s setting, it’s obviously of major import to me that this city is more than just a constellation of useful features to get from plot point A to B in X number of chapters. I’ve needed to develop an entire back-story to develop the city, to make sure that everything I end up using to further my story doesn’t appear as something shoe-horned in because I need it to be there, but something that’s organically grown from what the reader knows about the city.

The really great thing I’ve realised about Ivarda, and something that happened unintentionally, is that it came into my head after the original idea about the Mist. That was where Crescent Knife began, and everything else has grown around that concept (which is ironic, given that I have no real intention of exploring the Mist – I like the idea of it always being an unexplained, unresolved phenomenon). This means that the city, Ivarda, has already been developing in my head based on this cataclysm that befell it. Yes, there’s an overcrowded Lower City that is fermenting with ill-will towards the Nobility and a constant breeding ground for resistance movements, and that’s a great source for me as a writer to develop grey-shaded characters who can either help or hinder the protagonists depending upon how they fit into their guerrilla schemes. But hopefully it won’t come across as just ‘there’s a resistance because I need an organisation that can’t always be trusted, but is occasionally useful’. Rather, it comes across as part of a logical development of the setting. Similarly, yes there’s an underground complex of ancient machines that allows pretty much anyone that knows their way around to move undetected through most of the city, but since Ivarda was once the capital of an empire at a pinnacle of technological and magical development, it comes across as a logical element of the city, rather than something I’ve forced it to avoid the occasional plot problems when I need characters to move around unnoticed.

Some may say that all this really boils down to is glorified window dressing. That ensuring your cities have little historical quirks to make the necessary plot point developed and organic is nothing more than adding a little trim and tassel to doll up your plot. I’d like to think that yes, that’s exactly what it’s doing. That’s what engenders the willing suspension of disbelief in readers. Putting in those details, that extra effort to show that a community doesn’t just exist one way or another because the author needs it for some meta-plot reason, but because of reasons grounded in the world itself, is what immerses the reader in a story. So the next time you sit down to write about a city your characters visit, by all means ask yourself what you need that city to do for your plot. But don’t just then tack those essential elements onto the city and think you’re done. Take the city and nurture it into what you need it to become. It needs a history and stimulus – that’s the sun and water required to make it grow.

Last week I dusted off my soapbox to talk about how, as writers (especially of fantasy), we make choices in creating our settings that logically limit the resources we can bring to bear in the writing process. I want to continue that discussion this week, but instead of the setting’s fundamental elements limiting our resources, I’m going to focus on the scale of the setting.

Here’s the bottom line: size does matter.

Don’t misinterpret this comment. Saying that size matters doesn’t mean that bigger is better. It isn’t, at least not as a general rule of thumb. Like everything else in writing, and particularly in fantasy, it’s a matter of preference, and each side of the divide has its own merits and flaws.

The problem, however, is that there seems to be an engrained belief in the fantasy genre that a setting has to have a big scale. Huge, trans-national, globe-trotting adventures that take the protagonists from one corner of an expansive map to the other (and, occasionally, back again). Why do you think so many fantasy books nowadays have a two-page spread dominated by an actual, fully-detailed map. Because the setting is so damn huge and the story takes the reader across most, if not all, of it that the reader needs an external guide to the world’s geography to understand and appreciate the scale. Not to mention know what the hell is going on relative to everything else.

A big scale can really be excellent for a setting. It explodes the number of resources you can have at your disposal: each city, each geographical landmark, each nation can have distinct and interesting details to lend your world and your story a real diversity and vibrancy. Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series is a perfect example: as a setting, its scale is broad enough to cover both a post-Edwardian modern industrial nation and a more medieval nation steeped in magic and ravaged by undead scourges. Each is its own intriguing world with custom and history, but the ways in which the two interact is where some of the best moments of the trilogy can be found. Obviously, a setting with a scale limited to just one of these nations wouldn’t be able to achieve this.

There’s a reason a lot of fantasy writers are drawn towards large scale stories. They let us do more. Gram for gram, they give us more resources to work with. Each different location we include allows us to paint an entirely new picture, dream up strange new architectures, geographies, inhabitants, rituals and the like. The problem is, by letting us do more, they also mean that we do less.

Simply put: the greater your scale, the less your focus. If your story is a grand quest across the world then yes, you will get to show the reader dozens of interesting and different landmarks and locations. But if the characters are only in the city-that-just-so-happens-to-be-a-bridge-over-a-river-of-the-souls-of-those-who-died-in-battle (for example) for three chapters of your book, you’re simply not going to get the opportunity to get into any real detail about the nature of this intriguing concept. Ironically, because your scale is so large, your opportunity to focus is actually rather narrow and thus the resources available to you from exploring this location aren’t viable. Each of those vibrant, diverse paintings is ultimately reduced to little more than one of many backdrops.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is no obligation as a writer, of fantasy or any other genre of story, to focus on the setting to any great detail. The events that take place in it and the characters that call it home are certainly things you should be focussing upon, but many writers happily and successfully leave the setting as a backdrop for the action and development to play out on. Take Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy: the scale of these books by the end is enormous, spanning across dozens of parallel universes. As might be expected, there is very little focus on these worlds in the course of the story; the main focus is on the central characters and the cosmic events that transcend the multi-verse. Even the alternative, Church-dominated Earth that the entire first book takes place in isn’t really explored much beyond an expository paragraph and a few oddities mentioned in passing here and there. And that’s fine. Hell, it can even be intriguing for the reader: why does this world have talking, heavily armoured polar bears? Why does that world have quasi-motorcycle elephants?

Large settings can be excellent, and the lack of focus need not be a disadvantage. It can be its own resource. What little details you do include about a city or landmark can tantalise the reader, make them wonder at all the background to this location that they’ll never know for sure. A degree of ignorance isn’t just blissful, it can be fascinating in its own right.

But there’s a flipside to the coin. You can’t have your cake and eat it. If your story whisks the focus from one place to another faster than you can say ‘there and back again, a Hobbit’s tale by Bilbo Baggins’, you can’t expect your readers to feel particularly attached to any of these locations. Like it or not, you’ve limited your resources in this regard.

Tolkien provides a perfect example of this. Now, be careful, there are spoilers incoming (although I’ve yet to meet a human being who hasn’t read The Lord of the Rings). At the end of The Return of the King, Frodo and his vertically challenged brethren return to the idyllic agrarian utopia of the Shire to find it ravaged by Saruman. It’s clearly supposed to be a grand tragedy: the heroes returning home to what they presumed was a safe land protected from the wars and atrocities of their adventures, only to find it worse hit than many of the other regions they’ve encountered.

I’m gonna be speaking from personal experience here. The problem with this tragedy was, simply, that I didn’t care. I hadn’t seen the Shire since the opening of the first book and, after a trilogy that had taken me under mountains and through forests and across battlefields, it was really just another location to me. Sure, the characters had an attachment to the place, but since there had been no real effort to build a similar attachment in me for the Shire, the fact that it had been desolated by industry wasn’t some grand tragedy. It was just another event, happening against another backdrop.

The same problem happens in the second book of Eragon. The army of Lord Evilking (note: name may not be totally accurate) invades a similar idyllic agrarian utopia that is the protagonist’s hometown and the inhabitants are forced to flee. It’s supposed to be a grim, brutal display of Lord Evilking’s wickedness, a real measure of his moral bankruptcy, but again, I didn’t really care. Yes, his army of highly trained bastards were routing the peasants and that was a bad thing, but I had zero attachment to the village or its inhabitants. Said village and its inhabitants had formed a backdrop in the first book for the opening half dozen chapters and I hadn’t seen either since. There had been no effort made to emotionally invest me in the village, to make me care when it was sacked and burned because it was just one place amongst many the book had used as the backdrop to its narrative.

I want to avoid this as I plan and write Crescent Knife. Thankfully, I’ve bound my hands on this one. The focus is fixed: there’s one city, Ivarda, and that’s it. Everything beyond its walls is an uninhabitable ruination covered by the life-stealing Mist. I can’t focus on anything beyond the city, and I’m treating that as a good thing. I want this city to matter as much to the readers as it does to the characters because, again, that’s all there is. It’s not just a matter of giving the setting a claustrophobic, oppressively tight focus that allows me to explore the city, its architecture and history and customs, but imparting a sense of preciousness to the city itself.

I remember watching the remake of Battlestar Galatica a few years ago and feeling a similar sensation from the series’ scale and focus. By focussing on only a handful of spaceships carrying the remnants of a now-endangered species, the series was able to not only  create a constant source of tension as the survivors of nuclear armageddon balanced on a perpetual knife-edge of danger, but also a feeling that every last vessel was important. It wasn’t just that the narrow scale allowed for the setting of this survivor fleet itself to be developed enough that the audience grew attached to it. The fact that the narrow focus was born from a general absence of anything else to focus on added its own resource to the mix.

That, to me, is the key thing I learned when I was considering the scale of Crescent Knife’s setting. The problem I had with The Lord of the Rings and Eragon was that the villages I was supposed to feel attached to were just one of many backdrops that had been paraded past me during the story. With Crescent Knife, I’m not just focussing tightly on one city because that’s where the action happens. It’s not just one of many potential backdrops that I could have chosen. It’s the only one. It’s all that’s left. The focus resources that sort of scale gives me doesn’t just allow me to make the audience grow attached to the city. It gives me a resource that is incredibly hard to replicate in a story with any sort of larger focus. It allows me to make the city special, sacred, even precious to its inhabitants. The city becomes a quasi-sacred life-giver, a sort of guardian spirit.

And I think, when it comes to scale and focus, I’d rather choose that over all the cities-that-just-so-happens-to-be-a-bridge-over-a-river-of-the-souls-of-those-who-died-in-battle that an entire map can offer.

Writing is, when you get down to it, all about resource management. The blank page you see when you sit down to write a new story is indicative of the limitless resources you as a writer have at your fingertips. The problem is that those resources don’t stay limitless for long: each and every decision you make about your story will slowly whittle down the resources you have available. The characters, the themes… everything that makes up your story will limit what resources you have at your disposal. That’s the rule.

Here’s the dirty little secret though: rules are meant to be broken. Or at least bent.

Let’s take setting an example. Setting can be a huge limitation on what resources you have to work with. The traditional fantasy setting is what you might call, in the vein of A Clockwork Orange, ‘medieval plus’. That is to say, the general historical setting of the medieval period (knights, royalty, poor bodily hygiene) plus a fantastical element (magic, bizarre critters, capricious gods and the like).

Consider a generic ‘medieval plus’ setting. It’s a Europe-sized world with, say, four kingdoms that exist in a constant state of mistrust, political manoeuvring and backstabbing. Wild, savage orcs roam the hinterlands around these kingdoms, elves sit in their forests singing and generally being ineffectually introspective, dwarves drink and mine beneath the mountains. Maybe, if you want to get really exotic, there’s a dragon or two.

Now, I’m not saying that you can’t write an interesting story set in this world interesting. You can, and more power to you if you do. But you’ll never be able to escape the fact that your setting has limited your available resources. You won’t be able to have, for example, a chrome plated death-cyborg rampaging around the marketplace of a sleepy little hamlet. At least, not without your readership coming back to you and asking what the hell you’re playing at. The fact that you’ve included something from an entirely different setting stands out like… well, like a chrome plated death-cyborg in a sleepy hamlet marketplace. By choosing the generic ‘medieval plus’ fantasy setting, you’ve limited the resources you can acceptably use in your story.

This has never sat well with me. I’m a man who likes having his options open. Not just because it means I can throw new and strange ideas into my stories with gleeful abandon, but because I believe it makes a story more interesting. The less resources you have available, the more predictable your story becomes. I’d put good money on most anyone being able to guess how a plot set in the world described above will play out. Why? Because we’re used to the resources available in such settings and that means that stories in those settings risk becoming predictable. No matter how much effort a writer spends developing a unique history to that world, he’ll be hamstringed (hamstrung?) by the fact that his history is composed of building-blocks that we’re used to. The problem is felt with particular keenness among fantasy writers because we’ve been choosing settings that give us the same basic resources that have been used since Tolkien and earlier.

How do we get around this? Well, we have two choices. The first is to choose settings that give us resources that readers are altogether less used to. I’m of the ever-growing opinion that this is behind the (relatively) recent rise of interest in the Steampunk sub-genre. In Steampunk the resources available are still comparatively new and unexplored, which means that writers have a greater chance of penning stories that capture and hold the reader’s attention because, simply put, it’s all still new.

You might see where this choice is going. Simply choosing a new setting may give you new and interesting resources to work with, but it: a) still limits your resources, and b) won’t stay new and interesting forever.

Thus we come to the second option. It’s simple and obvious on paper, and a complete pain in the ass to realise in practice. Create your own damn setting. Don’t find a setting that’s still new and interesting. Make a setting that’s new and interesting.

I think I need to clarify this point. I’m not saying build an entirely new setting from the ground up; you’re welcome to try, but it seems (to me at least) to be an inescapable fact that every setting will, to one extent or another, draw inspiration (and thus resources) from pre-existing settings. No, the real trick is finding a way to tweak a setting so that you can introduce new and unexpected resources.

Let me give a few examples. In gaming circles, Skyrim has been creating a massive hubbub recently for being an excellently put-together gaming experience. I spent most of Christmas playing it and massively enjoyed it. But a part of me was stepping back and examining it in terms of story-telling. And, for the most part, it conformed to the ‘medieval plus’ setting: a few factions eyeing each other up suspiciously, elves being insufferable, orcs gnashing their teeth at the borders of civilisation. There were even a few dragons (well, technically wyverns, but I was almost beaten around the head for belabouring that point…).

But here’s where they changed things up, where they built a new setting that allowed new resources to surprise me as an experiencer of their story. In Skyrim’s setting, there are no dwarves. At least, not any more. Some mysterious calamity befell them at some point in the distant past, removing the entire race but not, and here’s the crucial part, the remains of their hyper-advanced empire. So, when I was exploring one of their ruined cities for the first time, and I came across what was effectively a chrome plated death-cyborgs left over from the dwarves’ techno-kingdom. I barely had time to say ‘oh, that’s a surprise’ before it boiled me in my armour with a blast of super-heated steam.

Or look at Harry Potter. At its heart it’s similar to many other fantasy stories (lots of magic, fair few monsters) but Rowling modified the setting in two important ways. Firstly, she placed the setting parallel to the modern real world, allowing for an interesting interplay here and there between the ‘wizarding world’ and the ‘Muggle world’ (Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and the Prime Minister’s briefing at the beginning of Book Five spring to mind). Secondly, she placed the setting’s focus inside a school, introducing the new resources of classes, teachers, house-rivalries and, perhaps most lastingly of all, schoolyard sports.

A third example might be Twilight, where Stephenie Meyer took a standard vampiric setting and introduced new resources by making the central characters nothing like vampires at all…

Okay, that was an easy jab, but the point remains. By combining settings in a sort of world-building alchemy, you can produce an entirely new setting with resources from its constituent parts. And while individually the reader might be familiar with those resources, when brought together the new interactions offered make things new and difficult to anticipate.

That, at least, is what I’ve been trying to do with Crescent Knife. I’ve always enjoyed the ‘fallen empire’ setting in works like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Warhammer’s 40,000 setting and, to a slightly lesser extent, Frank Herbert’s Dune. There’s something massively attractive about a world that has passed its peak and, while retaining many wonders, has forgotten where they come from or how they truly work.

Crescent Knife is set in the slowly decaying city of Ivarda. Thanks to its miles-high walls, it is the only city to have survived the coming of ‘the Mist’, a strange phenomenon that has scoured the rest of the world of life. Before the Mist came, Ivarda and its empire was a place of enlightenment, possessing mastery of technology and magic, but after millennia besieged behind their walls this enlightenment has dimmed to a faint ember. Relics of their advanced technology remain, but there are either poorly understood or completely misunderstood.

So far, so generic. So I decided to throw some of the standard fantasy setting resources into this mix and see what came out. Magic and an accepted theology are often key staples of fantasy settings: mages are experts in magic and the gods actively manoeuvre mortals in elaborate plans spanning centuries. What happens when you mix that with a fallen empire setting? Well, in Crescent Knife, the mages are a desperate order of covetous scholars, using their magic to hoard knowledge in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of history. But with each passing generation the knowledge fades, more magic is forgotten and the task becomes simultaneously harder and more futile. The gods, meanwhile, have experienced a similar fall: dependant upon the worship of a people now far more concerned with day-to-day survival, they have grown frail and starved, weak shells of their former glories attended too by only a few, desperate souls in otherwise abandoned churches. In their absence, born from the primordial fears and sufferings of the population, a new race of gods has replaced them. Afraid they will end up like their predecessors, these capricious entities seek, like the citizens of Ivarda, to secure their daily survival, which they do so by ensuring that the atmosphere of dread and drudgery that birthed them is sustained.

I’d like to think that this sort of setting will keep readers on their toes. Far from being the usual masters of the fantasy setting, the mages and gods are just as desperate, if not more so, than the common population, and that makes them altogether more dangerous, unpredictable forces in the setting. They also allow for different lenses through which to see the desperate battle for survival in this slowly-disintegrating world. All-in-all, I reckon, some useful new resources to play around with.