Fantasy novels usually begin well enough.
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I have a page-number fetish. In my earliest writings, there was always a thought in the back of my head: “Make it longer—make it better.” When I was nine, I wrote a sci-fi story ten pages long and thought Wow, I am Big Stuff, because I wrote something ten pages long. A few years later, I wrote a fragment a hundred pages long and congratulated myself on my achievement.
I look back and smile. It’s natural for young writers to want to tackle big projects, to want to write something epic. To be the next J.R.R. Tolkien. (Am I the only one who’s had a fantasy about earning my own double-R middle initials?)
Later, my page-number hangups went the other direction. After reading a handful of epic fantasy tomes—to call them books would be an understatement—I found myself drawn to brevity. It’s all very well to write an 800-page book, but consider: if you edit out 300 pages, you’re left with enough room for Wuthering Heights or Brideshead Revisited.
Over the Christmas holidays I read E.M. Forster’s Howards End, which finally put the issue in place for me. The novel isn’t even 300 pages, yet it took me weeks to complete—people live, people die, people make trouble for each other, and the plot makes no sense at all while it’s happening. But at the end, all the connections had a sort of transcendental logic to them—I was moved, though I am hesitant to say I know what it “means.”
And, though it sounds odd, I’m glad it took me weeks to read.
Because it would have made no sense if I had devoured it in 24 hours, as I did N.K. Jemisin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
In a word, tempo.
Plot length and twistiness don’t matter much to this reader. But a living tempo is crucial.
Take Patrick Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind. Readers didn’t love it because it had a great plot. It meanders: a dragon got involved somewhere, along with a fickle woman and a library. In retrospect, I’m not sure what went where. But the tempo breathes, and the characters live within and between each breath. The story moves spontaneously and a lot of scattered events happen, giving it a stronger sense of reality. The underlying tension comes not from the plot, but from the leitmotif that ties the work together: the ominous dissonance between Kvothe as a child and Kvothe as a deadbeat adult.
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Notice how if I were to stop the post here, it would feel incomplete—like a handful of puzzle pieces dumped on a table and half-assembled. There are ideas—“plot points”—and maybe even a few unexpected twists, like this paragraph. But the bits of the journey don’t yet have a culminating moment, an unexpected peak where one can stand and see the scenery.
Plot fills pages and leads to a moment of ultimate tension. But tempo—pulse—demands that the climax must complete all that comes before and after.
This is why epic fantasy bothers me sometimes. After all the plot twists, after all the
worldbuilding, after all the lavish character “development,” I sometimes find myself wondering if any of it mattered. After the plot has corkscrewed eighteen times, and all the characters have become demigods, and the war has engulfed the entire world, I find myself wanting a few likeable, dynamic characters. And preferably thrown together in a series of events that follows a living pulse.
And I’d like a denouement that not only lasts long enough to settle the plot, but also lasts long enough to settle the characters. Because no story is sensed through the eyes and the ears and the fingertips of the plot. Plot is abstract. It is the characters who see the story, who interact with it moment by moment, who touch and talk and grieve and play.
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Coincidentally, this is why I’m still an amateur. Because, even though I’ve been at this computer for hours, I still can’t make this piece breathe coherently. Not only is there questionable tempo: my plot sucks.
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