The Royal Academy at Osyth Blog

Hero's Path page six, by Marvin Hill

When my agent started talking about epic fantasies, I was skeptical. My personal voyage in epic fantasy had begun well with Tolkien, drifted lazily through David Eddings, and ended with my first attempt at reading Terry Goodkind. Every now and then I’d take another stab at epic fantasies while visiting my parents; my Dad read them one after another, like eating potato chips, and I could pick one off the bookstore shelf for his Xmas present without even opening the covers. But they seemed interchangeable to me, and I could reread the same one every holiday without realizing it.

Hero's Path page twelve, by Marvin Hill

My agent had a better opinion of the genre. Epic fantasies, he told me, were not one band of picaresques roaming faux-medieval England after another. They were varied, large-scale adventures and took place in exciting and different worlds. He suggested quite a few, so I have been reading them. But it’s not large-scale adventure and different worlds that are the most striking characteristics of these books. It’s homely pleasures and happy endings.

Of course, I knew this when I was picking those random fat paperbacks off the shelf for my father. They were never going to

Hero's Path page fifteen, by Marvin Hill

surprise him with an unhappy ending. Neither would he be bothered by ambiguity about whether the good were in fact evil, or the evil in fact good. Basic assumptions about the things that make for happiness in life would not be questioned; love and family, good meals and worthwhile work, the satisfaction of manual labor and a bath afterwards, would be vividly described without being obscured by the protagonist’s angst or ambition. Characters in an epic fantasy – good characters, at least – got out of their own heads, and wouldn’t bore my father with incessant self-examination.

Hero's Path page twenty, by Marvin Hill

I, however, thought self-examination mattered. How people decided what their quest should be interested me far more than the mechanics of how they achieved it; I preferred Robertson Davies and Louis Auchincloss, authors in which the setting and adventures were often determinedly mundane compared to their characters’ vivid interior lives and dilemmas.

So after a twenty-year hiatus, I return to reading epic fantasy and find much of it basically unchanged. Its protagonists still work hard, enjoy good meals and love their horses. They still often sidestep the gigantic question of how to determine their lives’ significance; they live in worlds where options are limited, and quests are handed to them by magic or prophesy. Villains are still easily distinguished from heroes, even without a program. Exotic locales are still valued, and people who apparently never read The Arabian Nights are making a fuss about how innovative The Crescent Moon is. And my Dad could still read them one after another, like eating potato chips.

Hero's Path page twenty-two, by Marvin Hill

What I find I like best in epic fantasies is the beginning, in which the author establishes the Good Life that protagonists will be fighting for. Being able to make good and help your father, a steady job in the stables and pleasant companions, a cup of tea with a friend. These are the things I care about, and care to read about. The grand magic and exciting battles, in which monsters threatening these homely pleasures are introduced, almost triumph, and are vanquished: not so much. The more straightforward and tension-free those parts are, the more quickly over, the better for me. In fact, you could replace all those middle chapters with ***here the hero triumphs***, and I would be just as happy. Because to me, the real adventure is still the interior one to decide what your life’s journey will be about, absent quests and villains, and how you’ll turn yourself into the kind of person who can enjoy that Good Life.

I wish someone would create a subgenre for those stories.

Hero's Path page twenty-five, by Marvin Hill

The art here is from Hero’s Path by Marvin Hill, a local block print artist who also thought that the epics ended too soon, before the hero had dealt with any of the important stuff. He corrected that in his art (and, many of us think, in his life).

'we're all going to hell' by Jessica Hagy

For some reason, I’ve been running into a lot of discussion about flawed and non-flawed characters lately. Probably it’s always been out there and I’ve only noticed it because #feministSF twitter chat discussed feminist characters last Sunday and I attended a feminist forum about heroines in YA literature on Wednesday.

Anyway, the one thing that seems to enjoy universal consensus is that a character has to be flawed. I can’t remember where I read my favorite example of it, an anecdote from a writer whose hero wasn’t grabbing her audience until someone suggested giving him a limp — I like that because it is such a straightforward, unconcealed, marketing ploy.

Flaws are interesting. I don’t mean that a limp makes a character more interesting to me — I mean that the concept of flaws is interesting. Because what are they for? Are they like ornaments we hang on our characters after they’re constructed?

It’s my opinion that if you have to sit down and ask yourself ‘what’s this character’s flaw?’ it is already too late for that character. Because if you can pick a character up, snap off one of his legs, and put him back on the board, is he real or plastic? If you can simply add low self-esteem and myopia to your heroine and have her still doing the same things she was doing before, were you really writing about her to begin with?

But maybe that’s just me.  The fact is, I never think about whether my characters have flaws.  I’m told by readers that they do, and sometimes it comes as a shock to me.  Because to me, they just have problems.  At the beginning of almost every project, I fill a pile of notebook pages asking ‘what’s this person’s problem?’  ‘What’s his issue?’

My characters have problems like:

• ‘The socialization of a starving badger’ (a quote from one of my favorite reviews)
• defining themselves by their superiority to all around them
• hating the world
• lack of confidence
• being doormats
• refusing to admit they want love
• self-hatred
• fear of aging
• being oblivious prigs
• vanity
• terminal frivolity

I think all these could be labeled flaws. But that’s not the role they play in the stories. They’re not add-ons meant to round out my characters; they are the main issues in the stories. Not only would the characters be different without them, the stories would probably not exist without them.  I write – and read – to explore these kinds of issues.

When I read articles about how characters need to have some flaws or they turn into ‘Mary Sues,’ I become disoriented.  I look at my characters through a different lens and ask myself, ‘is it too much to have her be an expert in spellcraft and have a magic stove? Even when on the other hand, her apartment is a mess and she kills someone by mistake?’  I start making lists, as if each of my characters needed a vita and an antivita of equal lengths.

In the end, though, it’s an irrelevant project.  One reason the character exists because I wanted to explore her vanity.  All her other attributes, from the dust bunnies under her couch to the front-page interview in the local newspaper, are just situations she and her vanity need to negotiate; sometimes successfully, sometimes as abject failures.  Sometimes her vanity shines forth as fully justified.  Sometimes it takes a big hit and has to be patched with transparent justifications. Sometimes it gets knocked completely down and spends months licking its wounds, but it will be back.  It’s not a flaw. It’s a character.

I’ve not been posting much lately, mainly because of The Grad Course. But my friends have been busy!

Sue Burke, translator of Amadis of Gaul, was interviewed at The Far Edge of Normal.

And Sofia Samatar has a wonderful story, The Nazir, up at Ideomancer.