Wolf

About 300 pages into this novel, I wrote a festival scene and this scene is a full 15k words long. This is what the kids might call a flex, especially because the chapter includes a dozen songs (that I’m currently writing). These big long sequences are some of my favorite things to write, especially when it can be contrasted with much shorter, snappier chapters.

Was reading something by an author who makes a living serializing his books on Royal Road and something interesting about it was that he considered it a sign of professionalism to keep all the chapters roughly the same length. I think this makes a lot of sense for that style of storytelling. Readers like going in knowing that they’ll need ten or thirty minutes of uninterrupted reading time. Would be annoying to go in expecting a 2,000 word chapter and landing on a 15,000 word chapter (this is nearly the length of my novel Howl), that would be slightly frustrating.

And so I understand the impulse and even agree with it, given his goals as a writer and the specific style of serialized storytelling he’s talking about.

But I am ever a fan of contrast and juxtaposition. I like the whiplash quality of controlling breath by adjusting the length of sentences and even how often you give the reader a comma to pause upon, a chance to slow down, but then exploding onward once more to drive them on and on and make them run out of air and empty their lungs to keep up with the racing words galloping across the page like a thousand stallions kicking up dust and dirt.

And so this chapter is a flex in a number of ways. It’s demanding a sustained attention while also, hopefully, giving the reader the kaleidoscopic sensation of those long winding festivals days when you begin with one kind of experience and end up having a dozen different kinds with different people and there’s no real way to mesh them all together except to say that they all happened to you, that you were there.

When I first wrote the chapter, I just put placeholders for all the songs because how was I to know what kind of worldbuilding I’d need to sneak in there? More than that, I didn’t want to slow down. I needed to get the whole chapter out and down on the page, which meant sticking with the racing pace of my writing.

But now that I’m on this slow reread and edit, where I’ve already added 10k words across these first 80k words, I’m now ready to give the songs a proper shot.

I’m helped, a bit, by the Swordtember and Morktober exercises I’m keeping here. Between the two, I’ve written thirty or so poems since the start of September and will end the month of October with over fifty poems.

That’s basically a poetry collection!

Anyway, this all leads back to layering.

But just for fun, here’s a song, or the taste of one, I wrote tonight.

I saw you sleeping so serene
There between silene so clean
And all along my long walk on
Beneath the roving moon so bright
I dreamt of sleeping barrow queens
And held me breath and closed me eyes
To see thou there asleep so near
And there I lay beside thee, dear

I fear a bit that the inclusion of some rhymes with distract from the rhythm of the song, which is the actually important part. The rhyming is incidental, accidental, and more a function of chasing assonance. But I want this song to feel like a festival song, where people sing it first slow but gradually going faster and faster while others dance. The crowd forms circles clapping and stomping to the rhythm while the whirling dance goes ever faster until the song is no longer sung but rapidly chanted.

The model for the song was this:

And part of the trick, here, and throughout this novel, is presenting a lot of different kinds of poetry. Not all ballads or dances and not all somber or light. Some songs are ageless and some are new and some are from far away and some are from so long ago that they shaped culture and folklore ever after and some change and have different versions swirling around, where each town has its own spin on the song, its own words and rhythms.

I think this gets at the question foundational to secondary world fantasy:

How does one create a world?

And within that world, how do you create cultures?

All I can say is that I’m trying my best, though I don’t know that I’d recommend anyone else go through all the trouble.