I recently came across the following list on Amazon: “100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.”
As a fantasy writer myself, I decided to spend the next few years reading every book on this list and record the lessons I learned from each volume on how to be a great writer.
PLOT: Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.
…Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.
Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity.
Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar’s niece, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan’s motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war. – goodreads.com (greatly condensed)
WHAT I LEARNED: As I mentioned in this series’ previous entry, these blog posts aren’t meant to be reviews or critiques. They are a series of lessons I have taken away from some of the best science fiction and fantasy novels ever written. That being said, it is possible to learn how to be a great novelist from other writers’ mistakes or, in this case, missteps.
When The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson was published in 2010, the cover stated that it was “Book One of The Stormlight Archive.” This first volume alone features dozens of characters, a variety of locals and scenes that take place across millennia. The book itself is over a thousand pages long (hardcover edition) and features maps, illustrations and end notes. In short it sets itself up to be the next great high fantasy series alongside The Lord of the Rings (LOTR), The Song of Ice and Fire (SOIAF) – AKA Game of Thrones – and The Wheel of Time (WOT), a series Brandon Sanderson himself completed in 2013 after the original author, Robert Jordan, passed away.
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Before I go any further I should say I did enjoy much of this book. As the story progressed I found myself invested in many of the characters and drawn into the complex plot. However, I have to admit that I have some serious reservations when it comes to the novel’s opening chapters which gave this saga a rough start.
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Here is a brief outline of The Way of King’s beginning chapters.
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-PRELUDE TO THE STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE: A chapter set before the prologue. That’s right, this book is so epic there’s a chapter before the prologue.
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-PROLOGUE: We then jump 4,500 years forward to the actual prologue, which is told from the point of view of an assassin murdering a king.
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-CHAPTER 1: We jump forward 5 years. The opening chapter is told from the point of view of a young man going into his first battle.
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-CHAPTER 2: We jump forward eight months. This chapter is told from the point of view of Kaladin, the young man’s commander. We learn that the young man from the previous chapter is dead.
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-CHAPTER 3: This is the first chapter that does not jump forward in time. But it is set in a different part of the world and is told from the point of view of Shallan, a new character.
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-CHAPTER 4: We get a second chapter told from the point of view of Kaladin, which finally anchors him as a character we will be following throughout the text and not just a one time only POV.
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So we are a total of six chapters (including the prelude and prologue) and nearly sixty pages into the novel before we are even certain who is the main character. Granted, it’s not unusual for an epic fantasy novel to begin with a prologue. The Fellowship of the Ring does it, The Eye of the World (the first book in the WOT) does it and so does Game of Thrones. Every one of those books begins with a prologue, but they then moves on to a first chapter that quickly establishes the characters we will follow for the rest of the volume and later series.
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The Way of Kings‘s opening chapters are loosely connected at best. What’s more, even as we go further in the book the main character’s stories have little to do with one another. Two of the characters are geographically close to one another but their problems and goals have very little in common. Most other series, no matter how vast, at least have one character or problem that brings everything together.
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For example, in LOTR we have The Ring of Power. Some of the characters go off on their separate adventures but the saga keeps returning to the One Ring and how it can be destroyed.
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WOT is all about the main character being The Dragon Reborn, a messiah-like figure who will lead humanity into the final battle against the Dark One. No matter how overwhelming or bloated the series became it kept returning to this path.
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SOIAF has a much looser focus but it’s all about who will control the seven kingdoms of Westeros. Most of the characters are in one way or another involved in the fate of the continent.
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The Way of Kings lacks such a focus, at least until the final chapters. There are three main characters who almost never meet and their goals have little to nothing to do with one another. Much of the book is so scattered it feels less like a single story and more like a collection of stories (each long and complex enough to be their own novel) that all happen to be set in the same world, sort of like a high fantasy version of Pulp Fiction, which may sound badass but becomes less appealing when you remember this scattershot novel is over a thousand pages long. A thousand pages without a clear focus or goal or connection between the story lines does get tiring.
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So, what can we take away from all this?
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1) Many of us want to be the authors of epic fantasies, but keep in mind we shouldn’t make them more “epic” than they need to be. I don’t know if Brandon Sanderson really needs ten books to tell The Stormlight Archive (I have not read either of the two published sequels), but I can tell you that this first volume could have used some serious editing. The author could have easily told this story in six hundred pages. If your novel needs to be a sprawling epic, let it become a sprawling epic but don’t force it.
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2) As I’ve mentioned before I have heard MANY agents say that they are turned off by prologues. If your novel has a prologue, seriously ask yourself if it is necessary or if the information given there can be provided later in the text. If at all possible start your story off from the central character’s point of view and give us the history of your world as we progress. Many classic novels don’t do this, but the publication world is changing. There are fewer novels that begin with a history of this world before jumping to the actual story.
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3) It’s fine if your novel has a ton of characters spread out across the world (although make sure you don’t overwhelm yourself) but try to give them some connection. LOTR is all about the Ring of Power. WOT is all about the upcoming last battle. GOT focuses on who will sit upon the Iron Throne. In fact GOT made the smart move of having most of the first book’s main characters (with the exception of Daenerys) physically together in Winterfell for a feast before heading off on their separate story lines.
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One thing that Sanderson does in The Way of Kings that I do appreciate is that there isn’t an obvious MacGuffin. No magical sword needs to be found, no evil crystal needs to be destroyed. There are some physical items the characters are trying to obtain throughout the story but there is no overarching magical item that will spell the end of the world if it is not found/destroyed. The characters’ goals tend to be more complex than that. However, the story would have been stronger if most of the characters had a goal or problem that was somehow connected, even even they were on opposing sides. By the end of the novel their situations seem to be converging, but this gives the impression that The Way of Kings was just a thousand pages of setup for the rest of the series.
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4) Someone could read this blog entry and point out that Brandon Sanderson got this novel published and it was a bestseller, so therefore do any of these observations really matter? Keep in mind that Sanderson was already an established author before he published The Way of Kings. He had already written The Mistborn trilogy as well as a number of other novels. Therefore readers and publishers were willing to give him more leeway than they would to a debut author.
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Established authors often get away with things that the rest of us won’t. We don’t just have to be as good as the Brandon Sandersons of the world, we have to be better. Don’t just learn from famous authors, learn from debut authors who are still struggling tooth and nail, writing as tightly and effectively as possible in order to be recognized.
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I want to note that this isn’t going to be my only blog post on The Way of Kings. Over the course of the next few months I’ll return to it with other takeaways for aspiring writers, such as myself. It’s a long enough book that there are plenty of other lessons to be learned from this text. More importantly it’s contemporary enough to be very relevant to modern aspiring authors.
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When I do return to the book I’m planning to focus more on aspects of the novel I felt worked. At the end of the day, I did enjoy the book, there are a bunch of great characters and moments and it contains a detailed vivid world. A reader just shouldn’t be expected to read hundreds of pages before they find themselves fully immersed in a story.
