Category: Writing

As a child, one of my favorite elements in any fantasy novel was the song. From Redwall to Rivendell, the ringing of rhyme was a sure sign of goodness, truth, or beauty. Power absent from average speech imbued poetry. It was a higher language, a more perfect expression of thought: vehicle for frigid spells, warm revelry, and bittersweet longing alike.

As an adult, my delight in the poetic has only grown—not least because I now appreciate how difficult it can be to create.

Sadly, it seems the songs are falling silent. Whether due to a decline in writerly talent or a deliberate aesthetic eschewal, poetry is relatively absent from today’s popular fantasy. While songs may be referenced, rarely are they written. I imagine this has something to do with the ill fate of rhyme itself in a society that’s so severely attenuated the need for manual memory. I also suspect nihilism is involved: i.e. that uninhibited displays of un-ironic enthusiasm have become a bit of an embarrassment. That sort of thing is for kids, not Dark & Gritty Adults™ who stand aloof from a meaningless existence.

But the lure of fantasy is the lure of the past. It’s the thrill of rediscovery, the vicarious scratching of that itch in the back of the mind which whispers that ancient knowledge has been forgotten and former greatness lost.

And so I say to my characters, sing away! The song of your people is also that of mine.

These days, the prevailing school of thought regarding prose in commercial-grade novels—at least if one takes the self-help industry as representative—emphasizes speed, efficiency, and comprehensibility. Shorter words. Shorter sentences. Shorter paragraphs. Shorter books. Faster writing. Faster reading. Faster buying. Faster fandom. The novel as commodity. The author as commodity-generating machine.

Now, this emphasis has plenty that recommends it, especially to full-time writers. After all, writing is just as much a business as it is an art, and economic realities exist whether we wish them to or not. But for those such as myself who strive to create art for its own sake, the relative ease with which a novel slides down a reader’s gullet is no measure of its value.

My primary consideration whilst hashing out syntax isn’t ease of reader ingestion, or conformity to aftermarket guidelines concocted in sterile theoretical environments by unaccomplished critics, but rather something that seems almost completely ignored in the modern writing-about-writing industry: accent. Not the accent of dialect, but that of pronunciation. The framework of emphasis. The pattern of stress. Poetry.

No idea has only one potential permutation. Each and every sentence I write can take a hundred forms. As a writer, it’s my privilege not only to express a given thought, but to shape and tune its delivery. This means I pay attention to whether my language flows. Which entails more than simply varying the length, voice, and clausal configuration of my sentences.

As a particularly flamboyant example of what I mean, here’s an excerpt from Chapter 19 of A Sea Sought in Song:

Then, with one last glance at the sky, she turned and ran.

Up the hillside, though the grass. Around the standing stone and past the stern inscription there entombed, to meet the path beside which bloomed the heatherfire, summer’s outlier, and thence across the Tarn Ford Road to a recessed doorway through which flowed a scent of scones. Rhinya yanked open the latticed door and slipped inside.

Now, I doubt anyone would characterize this passage as especially easy to ingest—after all, it does feature a rather lengthy sentence—but wouldn’t you say it tends to tumble off the tongue? There’s something about it that fairly skips along. Here, let’s rearrange it:

Up the hillside, through the grass.
Around the standing stone and past
The stern inscription there entombed,
To meet the path beside which bloomed
The heatherfire, summer’s outlier,
And thence across the Tarn Ford road
To a recessed doorway through which flowed
A scent of scones.

The meter isn’t perfectly consistent, but it’s close. I originally composed this passage in the above format for the sake of scansion, and then collapsed the line breaks to form a normal-looking bit of prose. I wanted to subliminally convey the sense of a sprightly, skipping girl without having to spell out the manner of Rhinya’s ascent.

Of course, this approach took me much longer than if I’d simply described the relevant action and called it good. And more often than not, that’s all that’s needed. But language is capable of doing multiple things at once. Accent isn’t just for poetry recognizable as such. It’s the ball-peen hammer of a writer’s workshop: it allows for fine adjustments after a rough shape has been hewn.

For many writers, art is incidental. But for writers who strive for artistry, no aspect of language capable of making words skip should itself be skipped.

One of the great pleasures of writing fantasy is the leeway it affords to layer the setting. The sovereignty of an author over his secondary world allows for seemingly insignificant props or brief asides to be imbued with world-historical significance. And the awareness of this among genre-savvy readers, in turn, allows a careful author to conjure visions of significance with minimal effort. A narrow hallway lined with padlocked doors becomes a catwalk over vast and unfathomable depths. We just know there’s more to the story.

Of course, because this fragile imaginative construct is built on trust, it will disintegrate without tending. There must actually be whole worlds behind at least some of the doors. Tolkien set a high bar: none of his doors were facades, even if we weren’t able to gain admittance to many of them until after his death. Fortunately, one doesn’t need to write deep backstory for literally every little mystery in order to cultivate a sense of readerly awe comparable to that which I experienced upon entry to Middle-earth. Kick open some of the doors, and we’ll assume the others function as well.

But a door is just so obvious. What about those hairline cracks in the wall?

A hallway without doors invites much closer scrutiny. Either the author is unimaginative, or ridiculously sneaky. Wait—what about that name? Is that significant? Or that tree? Or that rock? Or that half-heard snippet of a ditty sung by urchins down an alley? It’s this sort of investigatory potential that makes innocuous-looking stuff like The Kingkiller Chronicle so rereadable.

I love doing this. It’s my hope that my novels not only withstand a second reading, but grow ever more enjoyable as previously-unseen connections get made. In fact, I often hamstring myself by burying my clues too deep, forcing myself to excavate them during revision. As a genre-savvy reader myself, I’m always leery of giving too much away, and have to consciously take risks for the sake of reader accessibility. But while some readers may instantly identify what I’ve hidden, I’m confident that, for others, the experience of backtracking through my hallway whilst peering at the wallpaper will prove rewarding indeed.