Friday 24 June 2011

Ways to Spin Out a Multi-Volume Fantasy Epic. 1/983

One technique much favoured by fantasy novelists is the dream sequence.  Your character can have a nasty nightmare about what's coming, a whole host of creepy premonitions causing him to wake up in terror, then have the actual event happen and then be so traumatised they dream about it over and over again.  Judicious use of this technique can get you ten times as many pages out of any event than you ever dreamed possible.
To see this technique in the hands of an expert look at any section of G R R Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' narrated by Bran: odds on he'll start by having either a premonition of what's coming or a nightmare about what has happened and any significant event in his storyline will be described half a dozen times in different tenses.  Repeat fees used to be a perk of TV writers but the shrewd novelist can use the same incident over and over again, and as the buyers of fantasy novels think weight = merit don't hesitate to kill as many birds as possible like this.  (See also tip 48, "Pad, pad pad," croaked the raven.)
For more inside tricks of the fantasy novelist try 'the Fantasy Novelist's Exam' and wonder how some of them avoided plagiarism cases.  "Mountains of Dhoom, my Orc" as Mr Royle might say.

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