Sometimes you go long. And as Kate Elliot details in this Big Idea for The History of the World Begins in Ice, sometimes you go long to explain why, this time, you’ve gone short.
KATE ELLIOT:
After writing a seven volume epic fantasy series followed by an epic fantasy trilogy (in a different universe) which stuck to three books but whose final volume ran to 300,000 words, I was desperate. . .that is, desperate to write a normal length book, not a book that any intelligent author would have published as a trilogy in itself.
To be clear, I don’t regret writing Crown of Stars (the seven volume series) or the Crossroads Trilogy (whose third volume, Traitors’ Gate, is indeed 300,000 words long, but which, to this day, I believe has one of my very best and most effective endings). Not at all. There are certain narratives that work best with heft. Yet, I couldn’t really afford to keep writing such long books for a fairly modest return, maybe enough to keep publishing but not enough to be financially secure.
So I devised a clever plan: rather than writing yet another massive trilogy, or seven book series, featuring multi-stranded, interweaving plots told through the third-person gazes of multiple points-of-view characters, I would (see how clever I am!) write an epic fantasy trilogy told in first person through a single point of view. That would absolutely make the books shorter. Absolutely. I could totally expect to manage a neat and tidy 100,000 words each.
The evidence, Your Honor:
Cold Magic (150,000 words)
Cold Fire (180,000 words)
Cold Steel (210,000 words)
Okay, maybe not a brisk 100,000 words each, but they are shorter. . .for some definition of shorter. I rest my case.
But a funny thing happened as I worked on the Spiritwalker Trilogy (as the Cold Magic books are also called).
A quick review of the setting: For the Spiritwalker project, I wanted to write a multicultural world in which a mixing of cultures and people was the expected, the norm. I happen to think that when cultural change is considered across time, mixing is the norm. It goes on all the time throughout history and continues to happen to this day. Interaction and influence are what keep cultures dynamic.
In the Spiritwalker universe, cultural mixing plays out in an alternate (with magic) early 19th century Earth: an immigrant Malian culture meets and mingles with northwestern Celtic European culture, while old imperial Rome and merchant Phoenicia retain a strong influence, just to name the four most prominent cultural groups in the book (the second novel in the trilogy, Cold Fire, adds the Taino culture of the Caribbean to the mix). I particularly wanted to highlight the immense and too-often overlooked power and richness of the West African Mande traditions and civilizations, specifically the Malian Empire. An extended ice age (thus the “cold”) means the Germanic cultures of northern Europe never developed at all.
When I began writing Cold Magic, my primary goal (besides making it shorter than Traitors’ Gate) was to tell a story that would be exciting and rich, a page-turner that was difficult to put down. I wanted to tell a story in which the central emotional relationship was a female friendship (sisterhood), and one in which the concerns of a young woman finding her way in the world could include sword fighting, sewing, finding enough to eat, sex, science, revolution, spying, and fashion. I wanted her voice to carry the tale. I wanted to write a fantasy novel in which the neutral universal stance—the one that expresses the story’s highest level of privilege, which no one thinks about in this world because it is the default expectation—is embodied in a man of African ancestry. And I wanted to write about lawyer dinosaurs.
There is so much I personally love about the Spiritwalker books and stories. The characters, of course, who walk through their world with all their flaws that I worked so hard to make believable and compelling, whether the reader loves the characters or, in some cases, very much does not. The world, with its late-18th-and-early-19th-century overtones, imbued (I hope) a strong sense of a fantastical alternate-historical path and the vivid sights, textures, smells, tastes, and rhythms of this made-up world.
Perhaps most of all, I love the tone of the Spiritwalker universe. The trilogy is funny in a way I hadn’t thought I could manage in my writing, not up until I wrote them.That’s because Cat is funny, and the novels are all told in her voice. Once I let her voice speak through me, I not only had the easiest time writing her story, but it was just such a delight…
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Source: The Big Idea: Kate Elliot
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