Don't Barrage Your Readers With Fantasy Terminology (It Doesn't Help)

"My name is A'lashan Fai'r," the Dowindra said, smiling. "Welcome to Sar'boran."

I nodded, and adjusted the corfan at my side. I looked around the Fenuril, and saw other Redanda standing at their posts. Shu'fi moved among them, heads bowed as they attended to their tasks. I touched the dinfar just behind my ear, and felt more than heard the chirping affirmative it gave.

"Thank you," I said. "Please, take me to the Umbrine. I have news that will not wait."

What the shit did I just read?

If you've read your share of fantasy novels over the years, chances are good you've come across passages like this more than once. Ideally you'll only see nonsense like this later on in the novel (or hopefully down the line in the series) when the reader already knows what all these terms mean so they can properly picture a scene. Too often, though, authors will just dump barrels of fantasy terminology onto their readers' heads, forgetting that while they have lived in this made-up world for years, the reader just got here, and they have no clue what you're talking about.

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What The Hell is That?

If you review the paragraph I opened with, you realize that there's no context for almost any of the names and terms getting thrown around. What is a confar, for example? Is it a weapon? A badge of office? Both? Neither? And the person our protagonist is talking to is referred to as a Dowindra. Is that a profession? A species? A social position? What the hell is that thing behind his ear? Is it an actual cricket, like a magical creature, or some kind of bonded enchantment that connects to his brain?

You're introducing your reader to a world that's foreign to them. If you just dump them in the deep end, though, they're going to feel like they're reading an upper-level science textbook with absolutely zero foundational knowledge to understand what they're looking at.

And what the hell is this nonsense?

In order to ease the reader into your world you need to give them a sense of the familiar first. Allow them to get their bearings. For example, is your setting more urban, or agrarian? Cities and farms are concepts that readers can easily grasp, and it will give them some kind of context before you come down to more confusing details like the made up name of a city or country, districts, the ranks of the rulers, etc. Even with smaller elements, you get far more if you focus on descriptions before you assign names to things so that your reader actually knows what they're supposed to be envisioning later on when the name pops up again.

As an example, consider the following.

The stranger glanced around the room, his eyes taking in everything and everyone. His right hand never strayed far from the blade hanging from his hip. Short and curved, with a heavy guard, the steel practically hummed with power; a sleeping dragon waiting to roar into life. Though the stranger seemed a hard, dangerous man on his own, the confar announced that he was there on the orders of the guild.

This sort of thing gives your audience a much clearer image of what a confar is (a potent sidearm), and the sort of people who wield it (professional fighters in service to a particular guild). But before the item was named it was described, and given an association with an individual to help put what it is into context, and why seeing it might be kind of a big deal.

Once you've established what something is, you can just refer to it by name. Whether it's a particular fantasy species, an ethnicity, a magic item, a social rank, once you've given your audience a tutorial/introduction to it, you can cement it as part of the lexicon.

Easing The Reader In

Most folks who write genre fiction understand that they need to explain some things to readers. Common tropes and elements can usually be put in without much explanation (we get what a troll, or an orc, or a goblin is, so you only need to fill in the blanks if it differentiates from "standard" fantasy tropes), but anything that has an unfamiliar word attached to it needs an explanation to make it stick in the reader's minds.

There's another thing to remember, though... you need to pepper these things in here and there. Don't try to make your reader's do the cinnamon challenge to try to swallow everything at once.

Just three more schools of magic... you can do it!

If your readers get a lot of terms just thrown at their face right out of the gate, it becomes a distraction from the story you're actually trying to tell, and the world you're trying to build. Then instead of falling in love with your protagonist, or getting invested in the threat imperiling your setting, they're just trying to remember the difference between the Alfashni and Kekouri, and which ones have beaks, and why they're so sensitive about jokes regarding coconuts.

Space out how often you introduce new elements to the world, and try to feed them to your reader in some kind of sensical order. The easier it is to chew the lessons, the less they're going to distract or frustrate your audience as they try to get into your story.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Evergreen Content, Book Sales, and You! (Making More Sales By Avoiding Cheap Gimmicks)

If you're a fan of genre fiction, then you've probably noticed how trends tend to wash through it from time to time. Vampires were big in the early 90s, for example, and on the heels of Anne Rice they were absolutely everywhere. Then they petered out for a while. Steampunk got really big around the time the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film broke, spurred on by books like Boneshaker. Dozens of series have aped the enchanted school setting of the Potterverse, now, and we were up to our ears in YA dystopias after the success of The Hunger Games.

Numbers are up! Quick, get into that slush pile and grab EVERYTHING with a zombie in it!

Everyone has their own taste in fiction, and sometimes you're looking for a very specific flavor. But if you read a lot of the books that come out in rapid succession after something hits big, hoping to ride that wave onto the bestseller list, you're going to notice that nine times out of ten the only thing they have to offer is they belong in the same genre. They've got brass gears and clockworks, zombies, romantic vampires, and so on and so forth... but there isn't much to make them stand on their own two feet.

The problem with a cash-in book is that it's trying to imitate the identity of books that came before it. These books often lack a strong identity of their own, and thus they can feel sort of like a good book's mildly attractive cousin; not a negative experience, but not one that really sticks with you. Certainly not one you'd review and recommend to others. Even if a writer didn't set out to write a cash-in book (perhaps they just clung too tightly to the established story structure and beats of a genre mainstay, such as how roughly 87 percent of hopeful fantasy authors think they need to write a Lord of The Rings homage) they'll wind up with the same problem.

Evergreen Content, and Telling Your Own Story

There's a concept I came across as a blogger, and it's one that is heavily steeped in the marketing side of things; evergreen content. Basically the idea behind content that's evergreen is that it never goes out of style, so people are always going to be looking for it. Because when something stops being relevant, and goes stale, the traffic's going to drop off, and it stops generating income. On the other hand, something that pulls a steady stream of views, reads, and sales is always going to be an earner, allowing you to get paid for it for years to come.

Which is, of course, the dream.

Give you an example of what I'm talking about, here. The article What Was The Satanic Panic? The Forgotten Witch Hunt of The 1980s is a piece of evergreen content because it discusses a period of time in history. This moral panic is over, so the facts about it aren't going to change. At the same time, though, it's a distinct event that remains relevant since it's tied to American history, pop culture, and the stigma associated with everything from Dungeons and Dragons to violent video games. As long as there are moral panics in the United States (a trend that goes back to the founding of the country, and shows no signs of stopping), then this particular article will be relevant.

Contrast that with the blog post 3 Ways Pathfinder is Losing Its Identity With The New Playtest. This post was a flash-in-the-pan piece that was a reaction to the playtest for the second edition of the Pathfinder roleplaying game, and it had a very short shelf life. The playtest was only out for a year, so anything this article had to say was only relevant for that brief period of time... on the other hand, there was a lot of interest in the subject, and in that short period it did draw quite a lot of views and reads. But no one's come back to it since the full game was released because anything is has to say is no longer valid.

So what does that have to do with your book?

Well, take a step back and ask what the primary selling points of your book are. Is it a solid story that stands on its own as a mystery, an adventure story, or a tale of the macabre? Or is your major selling point that you have zombies in it? Because if that's the case, then you're probably not going to get a lot of traction when that gimmick is no longer pulling in audiences the way it did when The Walking Dead was a fresh network success. You might see some renewed interest when the shambling undead come back into style, but it can take years for that tide to come back in.

What Makes A Book Evergreen?

Unfortunately, this is the part where I shrug my shoulders and gesture vaguely at the market. However, I do have a few general recommendations on how to hold off your book's freshness expiration date as long as possible.

- Don't Hang Your Story Fads and Gimmicks: The key here is that it's perfectly fine to include elements that might be part of a fad, but not to make that the whole of your story. Write a spy novel that happens to have vampires in it, rather than a vampire novel about spies, if you see what I mean?

- Keep Your Story Authentic: When steampunk first started getting popular, lots of people tried to get in on the genre by randomly including brass accents and gears in their setting descriptions and cover design to widen their story's genre labels. While this gave it the appearance of being part of the genre, it was the literary equivalent of just putting on a cheap plastic mask so you could say you were wearing a costume at the bar. Rather than gluing some superficial elements onto your tale, develop what makes it truly unique; people know when they're being pandered to, and generally they don't like it.

- Make It Stand Out: There's nothing worse for your shelf life than just aping what other books are doing, even if you're trying to follow in the footsteps of the classics. While it's important to be able to look at enduring books and ask what makes them last, it's equally important to spin those into your own story instead of just trying to trace them while changing a few minor details. For example, there are probably hundreds of Lord of The Rings imitators out there, but only one of them is Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Tear Down The Monoliths (No Race, Religion, Etc. Is Universal)

How many times have you been reading a fantasy story, and you didn't bat an eye when someone started speaking elvish? How many times have you been elbow-deep in a sci-fi novel, and you were told that every member of an alien race without fail holds a particular cultural viewpoint? Now ask how many times you ground to a halt, and asked exactly how many separate, thinking, feeling individuals were painted with the same brush?

You racist son of a bitch, there is no such thing as an "orc" language!

This very same logic, applied to humans (even in fantasy settings), tends to trip our bullshit detectors. When we hear a character decry that all followers of the White Prophet are evil, there's a part of us that asks, "Really? Out of the millions of members of that religion, every man, woman, and child is a baby-killing monster? Come on." But we just accept that when we're talking about made-up races. Whether they're elves or Vulcans, Klingons, or orcs, we just accept that they are all universally the same, no matter where they're from. They share the same language, the same culture, the same religious beliefs, and more often than not the same political views.

If you really want your work to stand out in the genre, scrap this broad-brush paint job, and do the heavy lifting.

Make Your Cultures Feel Organic

When you create a culture, whether it's for humans in a fantasy setting, or for a non-human race, you need to ask what needs informed that culture. How did it develop? What reinforces its values, what are its rules, and what does it frown upon?

Now, once you've done that, you need to go to the next culture, and do it all again, from the ground up.

Now repeat until the map is full.

Once you have your cultures and races established, that's just the foundation of your world. Now you need to ask if they evolved based on other factors, with familiar and recognizable elements of one culture shifting and changing to suit a new place.

As an example, say you had a group of traditional Tolkien elves. They left their forest to establish a new colony, and traveled south. What they found was a tropical forest, denser, and larger than their northern counterparts. These new forests were also filled with older magics, and stranger beasts than the temperate woods of their homelands. They are, however, still elves, with all of the inherent benefits and abilities that makes them what they are.

So how do they change to fit their new home? Do they darken in hair and features, blending into the teak and mahogany woods? Are their clothes still as elegant and flowing as before, but now they're woven from spider silk? Do they ride leopards instead of caribou, and are they fiercer in combat as a result of the predatory mount choice? Is the bow still their weapon of choice, or have they mastered the spear, the dart, and other weapons more suited to the shorter range that's more common in the dense rain forest? Do they still stay apart from humans, or have they made alliances with local populations, intertwining their lives with the lives of such short-lived mortals?

Now look at the other aspects of their cultures. Did they bring their gods with them, or have they taken up new pacts with the spirits of this forest? Has their language changed to fit their new surroundings, creating new words to suit new ideas that weren't present in the forests of the north? What traits is their environment, and culture, rewarding and reinforcing?

It's also important to remember that nothing happens in a vacuum. As cultures interact, they'll take ideas or concepts, and change them to make them their own. There will be transfer... so ask what that interaction teaches each culture taking part. Is it that one culture adopts the fashion and greetings of another? Do certain turns of phrase just become part of everyday use? Or does one nation develop extremely precise aerial weapons, since they've been at war with a foe that rides on flying mounts?

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

There are certain shortcuts you can use to bring across ideas quickly. However, if you want to add instant depth to your world, put in different factions of a faith. Make the mountain elves different from the forest ones. Give your orcs different ethnicities and cultures to show that, while they might be universal as a presence, they are just as unique and varied as humans. And if you really want to make people flip their lids, make an island nation of surfing dwarves.

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing post. Hopefully it got the gears turning for some folks. If you want to stay up-to-date on all my releases, then follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. And if you'd like to help me keep creating content, and get some free books out of the deal, then go to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page. All it takes is a minimum of $1 a month, and I'll send some books flying your way as a thank you.