POV and long series

So, after remembering recently that Swan Tower exists, I thought, sure, I’d go over there and check it out. Marie Brennan has collected A LOT, the majority, of her essays into a series of books call New Worlds. She writes those essays over on her Patreon, and then collects and publishes them as the New Worlds books. Wow, seven, I see. I proofread one of them, but I don’t remember which. I do remember I was excited to trip over a typo in the hope I might actually be helpful. She cleans them up before collecting them, so I think I found two typos in the whole book. Maybe those were actually facts to query, actually, rather than typos.

Anyway, Marie still does have some essays at Swan Tower, including this one: Epic POV

I’ve noticed that one of the things which makes it hard for me to get into various epic-fantasy-type novels lately is the way point of view gets used. As in, there are multiple pov characters, and shifting from one to the other slows down my process of getting invested in the story.

But hang on, you say; why “lately”? Why didn’t that bother you in your epic-fantasy-reading days of yore?

Because — and this was an epiphany I had at ICFA — the epic fantasies of yore weren’t structured like that. Tolkien wasn’t writing in close third person to begin with, but he pretty much just followed Frodo until the Fellowship broke at Amon Hen; he didn’t leap back and forth between Frodo in the Shire and Aragorn meeting up with Gandalf and Boromir over in Minas Tirith and all the rest of it. 

And yes, this is a problem for me in some epic fantasy as well: the author switches pov far too often for me to get emotionally invested in the characters and therefore I don’t get interested in the story. This is why, when I have multiple pov characters, I tend to stay with one character for about 30 pages before switching, rather than five pages. There’s a tendency toward really short chapters these days, which I dislike to start with, but REALLY dislike if the author is switching back and forth among multiple characters that fast.

So here I am, finishing up a 400k + story with five pov characters. (Plus, in SC #3, some very tiny sections, not full chapters, from other points of view). Chapters through most of Silver Circle tend to be about 15 to 25 pages long. A few are shorter. While I think about this, let me see how it wound up at the end …

SC #1 — 15 chapters; SC #2 — 24 chapters; SC #3 — 29 chapters

Natividad — 5 chapters; 4 chapters, 7 chapters = 16 total

Miguel — 4 chapters; 8 chapters; 4 chapters = 16 total

Alejandro — 3 chapters; 4 chapters; 5 chapters = 12 total

Justin — 2 chapters; 3 chapters; 8 chapters = 13 total

Ethan — 1 chapter; 5 chapters; 4 chapters = 10 chapters

That’s not even, but it’s not vastly uneven. I don’t want to say too much about how and why I switched pov when because some of that constitutes spoilers. A lot of it is also just me feeling that it’s time to switch to some other pov — or that switching right then creates a fun cliffhanger at the end of a chapter.

Maybe I should warn you that more than half the chapters in SC #3 end in fairly dire cliffhangers, which I hope you will enjoy! Some of them are resolved quickly in the next chapter, some not for several chapters — it depends, but, basically, from chapter 10 onward, it’s one cliffhanger after another. I must admit that I really enjoyed that, but you might not want to start chapter 10 at bedtime.

Anyway, as a rule, when I said to myself, “Okay, this next chapter will be SHORT,” it would be over 15 pages, closer to 20; and is anyone surprised? Of course not. (Not even me, by now.) Without checking, I’d guess that the average chapter length is around 20 pages, even in the third book, where some of the chapters honestly are short, particularly toward the end. The epilogue, however, is not short. It’s about 70 pages.

This topic sort of leads into a different post at Swan Tower —

How to Write a Long Fantasy Series, and at this point I have TWO LFS, of course, Black Dog and Tuyo, which makes me wonder whether I’ve followed any of her advice about this.

My purpose here is to talk about the specific challenges of writing a long epic fantasy series — here defining “long” as “more than a trilogy, and telling one ongoing story.” 

The Tuyo-Tarashana-Tasmakat trilogy actually does count because for the rest of my life I’m going to think of that as a five-book series, as it obviously should have been. The other books in that world don’t count. I don’t exactly consider five books a “long” series, generally speaking. I think I consider a series “long” about the time it hits eight or nine or ten books.

Black Dog totally counts either way. It is all one ongoing story, even though some of it is contained in shorter works.

Marie continues: I do not pretend this is in any way, shape, or form a recipe for commercial success with an epic fantasy series. After all, most of this is a checklist of errors I feel Jordan made [in the Wheel of Time series], and you could paper the walls of Tor’s offices in fifty-dollar bills with the cash he made for them. Nor am I claiming artistic failure awaits if you fail to heed this advice; you might squeak through on luck, or just really good storytelling instinct. But I do feel that bearing these points in mind can help the would-be writer of an epic series avoid falling off some of the more common and perilous cliffs.

I laughed at the idea of papering Tor’s office with $50 bills, but I’m sure Jordan could have done that with $100 bills, actually. Or $1000 bills, if such a thing exists. Google tells me that $1000 may be in circulation, but are not being made now. Anyway, then this:

On the basis of my re-read [of Wheel of Time], and comparing to other series that attempt similar tasks, I have come to believe there is a single, fundamental principle, underlying all the other points I’ll make throughout this post, which governs the author’s ability to keep the narrative from spinning wildly out of control, to the detriment of their story.

I’m dying to know. What is this principle?

PICK A STRUCTURE, AND STICK TO IT

Most of us, when we set out to write a novel, have at least a vague sense of how long it’s going to be. We can be off in that estimate — In Ashes Lie ran about thirty thousand words longer than I originally intended — but generally speaking, you know that you’re aiming for 60K or 100K or 200K, and you use that to guide a thousand decisions you make during the process. Should you introduce new subplots, or is it time to start tying things up? Does your protagonist’s next action need some complications in its path, or would it be better to just handle it offscreen and move on to more important things? Can you bring in a new character for this strand, or should you find a way to take care of things with the characters you already have? These are questions of pacing, and we’ll come back to that a bunch of times along the way. But you can’t gauge your pace when you don’t know how long the race will be: at best, you’ll end up going through the whole thing with a steady, slogging, workhorse pace that (to switch metaphors) loses all sense of dynamics.

Pick a structure, and stick to it. By “a structure” I mostly mean “a set number of books,” though I allow that there might be other ways to conceive of it.

***

I am here to tell you that I did not follow this rule at all, that I have never followed this rule, and that when I have a “vague sense of how long a story is going to be” I mean REALLY REALLY VAGUE, as in I don’t actually have that sense. I knew Suelen would be short, but I thought it would be half its final length. I thought Tasmakat would be long, but, but I thought it would be half its final length. I routinely underestimate by 40%, but for Silver Circle, I underestimated by 70%. I mean, I just picked up a calculator and did 180/440, which is roughly the number of words in K that I expected vs the total actual K., and there you go, approximately 70% longer than I thought.

I introduce new characters because I feel like it. I never think, “could I do the same thing with the characters I already have,” probably because I hardly know what I’m going to do with any of the characters anyway, so there’s no point of thinking of anything that way.

I think introducing new characters is a way of sparking my own interest in the story. Once I’ve got them, I routinely realize a new character can play an important role I didn’t see coming. Just as often, I like a new character and deliberately look for something important that character can do to justify his existence. That was especially true of Tano in the Tuyo series, and in Silver Circle, it’s true of Gris.

Sometimes — often — I set out to tie off a loose thread and the thread does not prove very easy to tie off. This expands word count too.

Here’s Marie Brennan’s next point, which she considers secondary but I consider primary:

Control your points of view.

She’s talking about pov scenes from minor villians in Wheel of Time:

But let’s pretend for a moment that the information here is actually vital. Does that justify spending time in the head of this minor villain?

No. Because here’s the thing: switching to Carridin is lazy. It’s the easiest way to tell us what the bad guys are doing — and I do mean “tell,” given that most of the scene is Carridin thinking rather than acting. Had Jordan restricted himself to a smaller set of pov characters, he would have been forced to arrange things so that his protagonists found out what Carridin was doing. In other words, they would have had to protag more. And that would have been a better story.

I don’t think anything justifies villain points of view, as a rule, because I hate them and I don’t care why the villain is doing whatever it is. Or if I do, that doesn’t mean I want to be in his head, watching him do it.

But as for the broader point, in Ryo’s trilogy, this took care of itself from front to back. One point of view. One. And the closest possible pov, too.

I like and often write with two points of view per book. Natividad and Alejandro for Black Dog, Natividad, Justin, and Alejandro for Pure Magic, Natividad, Miguel, and Alejandro for Shadow Twin. Miguel was really fun there and that’s why I kept going with him as a pov character. Natividad and Miguel for Copper Moutain.

Meanwhile, Justin picked up the pov again in a novella, plus Ethan turned into one of my favorite pov characters in the story collections, which I hadn’t expected, but there it was.

For Silver Circle, I had the broadest plot in mind, but I mean the broadest possible arc, REALLY BROAD. I felt I should start with Natividad, as she’d been the original pov protagonist for the series. I wanted to keep Alejandro as a pov protagonist, Miguel had become really important and wasn’t going to step back, Justin both deserved and needed to step back in as an important character, and I really liked Ethan. That’s why I wound up with five pov characters, and no doubt that’s why Silver Circle stretched out, and no doubt Marie Brennan would click her tongue and say, “If you had more discipline as a writer, you’d have prevented the pov from expanding so far and kept that book at 180,000 words,” and she’d be right, probably, minus the fact that I wasn’t going to ditch any of those five so why bother even thinking about it.

I think the big thing, the place where I just operate orthogonally to Marie Brennan in this regard, is that I don’t think you need to have the overall structure or length in mind from the beginning. I mean, I really don’t. I think it’s your job to tighten up the structure as you go, or after the fact, or once you see where you’re heading; and in any case, I think you don’t need to pick a structure and still to it as long as you can tighten it up as you go. In order for that to be true, it probably helps to be fine with letting the length expand; and it’s definitely nice to be able to write fairly fast, so that when the story turns out to be 440,000 words, like Silver Circle, and OMG, seriously, but the point is, the total time invested in the whole thing, from start to finish, including proofing time, will be just about exactly ten months. And that’s a long time, but it’s not the end of the world to spend 10 months on a single project, as long as that turns out to be three books, not one.

Nevertheless, this is probably a good idea:

Every time you go to add a new point of view character, ask yourself whether it’s necessary, and then ask yourself again. Do we need to get this information directly, or see these events happen first-hand? Can you arrange for your existing protagonists to be there, or to find out about it by other means? Are you sure?

I think that’s true because so often the author shows villain pov even though the story would genuinely be better in every possible way if the author did not do that. It spoils the tension because now the reader knows what’s coming, and there was NO NEED for the reader to be told ANYTHING about what’s coming. I don’t mean that’s always a consequence of showing villain points of view. I mean I’m thinking of more than one specific book where it happened just that way, and I was baffled why the author felt she should show the villain point of view. Of course non-villain points of view can also be unnecessary or harmful or distracting too.

And this is funny:

Given what I said above about sticking to your structure, there may indeed be times where it’s more word-efficient to jump to a new pov, rather than constructing a path by which your existing viewpoints can pick up the necessary threads. But be careful, because taking the lazy way out appears to be a slippery slope for authors. This page lists no less than sixty characters [in Wheel of Time] who get only a single pov scene each during the entirety of the Wheel of Time. Nineteen more get two apiece. Eleven get three, seven get four, and then the numbers start ticking upward faster, until our six primary characters have between fifty-seven and two hundred — just to give you an idea of scale.

And OKAY, YES, I do think it’s hilarious to introduce sixty pov characters who each get just one scene. Wow. Probably it would be better to avoid that. But you know what, I don’t think Jordan’s problem was a failure to conceptualize the length and structure ahead of time; I think it was solely a problem with letting the pov characters multiply beyond all reason. (I could be wrong! I haven’t read Wheel of Time, so it’s not like I have strong opinions about where Jordan went wrong!)

Meanwhile, Marie Brennan goes on:

Control your subplots.

Centralize.

The further you go, the less you have to show your math.

This is a puzzling phrase, so what does she mean? She means you should control the verbiage by not continually re-explaining things every single reader in creation should already know. The further you go into your series, the more exciting the story should be. Tensions mount! We’re building toward the climax! Now is not the time to stop and do the simple math all over again. Think of it like a geometry proof: once you’ve proved the basic theorems, you’re allowed to just cite them and move on, rather than having to go through every step every time.

Yes, lack of tension is not a problem in either Tasmakat or Silver Circle. I’m once again chortling about the number of chapters in SC #3 that end on cliffhangers. I DO HOPE YOU ENJOY THAT, but I expect to be costing some readers a certain amount of sleep. Chortling, I tell you.

Here is how Brennan winds up:

A story’s quality depends heavily on its shape, on the timing of various twists and revelations, the pacing of its arcs and the rate at which the characters grow; and good shape rarely happens by accident, especially on a large scale. Ergo, I firmly believe that you need some fixed points by which to navigate during your journey. Know how many books you’re going to write, hammer in a couple of pegs to say that certain events will happen at certain points, and then hold to your course. If you stray from the path, you may never find your way out of the woods.

And I would just like to note that “intuitively” and “by accident” are not synonymous and I’m filing this whole post under “useful for outliners, probably,” and then ignoring it. On the other hand, I also note that she’s not wrong about most people being able to write trilogies and stick to the three-book length, or about no one being able to invest time in writing a twelve-book series to learn how, then start over to write another twelve-book series now that they’ve learned how to do it right.

Also, one nice thing about Marie Brennan’s essays is: they are not SHORT. I mean facile. She gives you something to think about, something with some heft, and good for her. You really ought to click through and read the whole thing, including the part where she ties this in with comments from Patricia Wrede.