Wolf

Once again, I’m thinking about layers. Not only the layers of a novel, but the layers of history. And when you’re writing a secondary world fantasy novel, these layers of history are important.

To a degree.

I’ve written about worldbuilding a number of times so I needn’t rehash it all here, but I had to drive for six hours today and I kept thinking about how the hinges of a plot can rely on history.

I wouldn’t say that my books are typically shallow, but they don’t require you to become an archeologist or historian for an imaginary world. There are many, many reasons for that, but I actually want to try something new here for this novel. And while becoming a historian for a fake place will never be a requirement…there may be benefits for readers who do dig that deep, become that obsessive.

Or at least that’s something I’m considering.

I think of why something like A Song of Ice and Fire is so beloved, and while that answer has a million variations, I think one engine for its popularity is the ability for obsessives to dig into the fragments of history, the insinuations, and the possibilities lying between stories told within that world. I mean, Jon Snow’s parents matter quite a lot to the books and people spent twenty years theorizing about it, writing dissertations in message boards about how they’ve proved definitively with the text who fathered Jon.

The average reader didn’t need to do that. They almost certainly didn’t, but they were also able to put the clues together well before the TV show came out just by reading through the series.

That’s what I’m talking about here. I want to give enough meat to chew on, to propagate theories, but not so much that it overrides the narrative. Though, like Jon Snow’s daddy, I want that history to inform and drive narrative.

This is part of what makes the writing of this novel so different from anything I’ve written before.

Writing a novel is fumbling around blindly in the dark, but in a good way. And I’m doing that here, finding my way through this big novel and all that will come by stumbling around like Mr Magoo.

But once you begin getting these ideas about history and how to implement this layering. One thing is through songs and children rhymes and things like that. Stories that are so ancient that they filter down to becoming nursery rhymes, legends, myths, and therefore no longer taken seriously by adults.

This is how you sneak in important things that maybe the reader won’t recognize as important. This is how you fill out your world, make it feel real and substantial, without burdening your readers with explications of history.

We present the world in a thousand different ways. There’s the straight narration, of course, but then there’s all this other stuff that gives texture and verisimilitude to your world.

Anyway, I haven’t written anything in the novel since hitting 90k words. I wanted to submit a story to a magazine but first I had to write a story, so I did that this weekend to make the deadline.

But days away from a novel, while somewhat aggravating and debilitating, also give you room to breathe and discover what your story needs, what it’s truly about.

A previous brief break from the novel gave me my antagonist. Another gave me the culture of this place. And now there’s this layering of history that’ll inform everything I’m doing.