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like the speech of a real live human being. The spoken word is
different from the written word. Try to narrow that difference.
Next, learn how to compress time gracefully. You can't record
your hero's every breath. 'Several days later it started to snow' is
good. It skips time and gives a weather report simultaneously. 'The
following spring' isn't bad. 'Ten years later' is OK if you're not right
in the middle of something important. 'After several generations' or
'About the middle of the next century' skip over big chunks of time.
I've devised a personal approach which I call 'authorial distance'.
I use it to describe just how close I am to what's happening. 'Long
distance' is when I'm standing back quite a ways. 'After Charlie got
out of prison, he moved to Chicago and joined the Mafia', suggests
that I'm not standing in Charlie's hip pocket. 'Middle distance,
obviously, is closer. 'The doors of Sing-Sing prison clanged shut
behind Charlie, and a great wave of exultation ran through him. He
was free!' That's sort of 'middle', wouldn't you say? I refer to the last
distance as 'in your face'. 'Charlie spit on the closing gate. "All right,
you dirty rats, you'd better watch out now," he muttered under his
breath. "Someday I'm gonna come back here with a tommy-gun an'
riddle the whole bunch of youse guys." Then he swaggered off
toward the long, black limo where Don Pastrami was waiting for
him."In your face' means that you're inside the character's head. Be
advised, though, that it uses up a lot of paper. (See Belgarath the
Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress. First person is always in your face.)
I try, not always successfully, to keep chapters within certain
parameters as to length - no less than fourteen pages, or more than
twenty-two - in typescript. I try to maintain this particular length
largely because I think that's about the right length for a chapter. It
feels right. Trust your gut-feel. Your guts know what they're doing
even if you don't.
Don't write down to your readers. Don't do a re-write of Run,
Spot, Run! Belittle your readers and you belittle your work and
yourself. Epic fantasy is genre fiction; so are mysteries, westerns, spy
books, adventure novels and bodice-rippers. This does not mean
that we can ever afford to say 'Aw, hell, that's good enough,' because
it won't be. Write anything you put on paper as good as you can
possibly make it. 'Good enough' stinks to high heaven, and 'It's only
a fantasy, after all,' will immediately enroll you in that very large
group known as 'unpublished writers'.
Everybody in the world probably believes that his own language
is the native tongue of God and the angels, so I'll offend people all
over the globe when I assert that English is the richest language
in human history. Its richness doesn't derive from its innate beauty
or elegance of expression. Its structure is Germanic (Frisian,
basically, with strong overlays of other Scandinavian tongues). West
Saxon, the language of King Alfred, wasn't really all that pretty to
listen to, and it'll sprain your tongue while you're learning to speak
it. English is a rich language because the English were the greatest
pirates in history. They stole about one fifth of the world, and they
stole words and phrases from most of the languages of the world
as they went along - French, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Zulu, Spanish,
Apache - you name it; the English stole from it. My eight years of
exposure to college English gave me an extended vocabulary (my
cut of the loot, you might say), and when it's appropriate, I'll use it.
The youthful, marginally educated reader is going to have trouble
with such sentences as 'Silk's depredations were broadly
ecumenical.' That might seem a little heavy but it said exactly what I wanted
it to say, and I chose not to rephrase it to make it more accessible to