It is interesting to me to go back and read some of the great fantasy books of the past for guidance on my own writing. My memory is always of great storytelling, and I approach the books with tempered expectations for just that—great storytelling but perhaps not great writing. However, I’m finding an odd thing, which is that the style is what is surprising me, not the poor writing.
Most of the old fantasy classics, from Tarzan to the Grey Mouser, are written in an intensely narrative style. There is very little dialog and long blocks of paragraphs with description of not just what the world looks like, but what is going on. I’m finding this quite disconcerting, because my style is much more breezy and action-oriented than narrative.
This is giving me pause and making me somewhat nervous as I’m basically writing without a net. The storytellers that have inspired my love of fantasy are writing in a completely different style than me. It almost feels like I’m doing it wrong.
On a practical level, they are able to contain more story in smaller chunks of text. Where they may write, “The Grey Mouser argued with the bartender,” I would write out the actual dialog and describe the action. This worries me as a key issue I saw in the evolution of my novel is one of pace. It takes a lot of words to create a story where you are living the action rather than describing it.
In my current novel, I’m roughly 50,000 words in, and my protagonist has just fled danger and arrived in a safe spot. That’s a lot of words for someone to do little more than travel and meet some people. I’m also feeling it as I write the arrival scenes. The level of detail and conversation needed goes on for pages, but I’m unsure if this is bad. It feels right, but I think I need to read more contemporary fantasy to get a better vibe.
Particularly, I think Stephen King would help. His style is closer to mine, I think. Also, the final Harry Potter book has a long section of Harry and Ron wandering from danger to danger. That’ similar to the opening of my book.
It may be that I’m overthinking things and that I’m simply writing in a more contemporary style while being inspired by the thick narrative books that I loved from my youth. That’s not a bad thing, but it sure is tough to parse as a writer.
