This week: Long Form Fantasy Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
—Lorrie Moore
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
—Flannery O'Connor
There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.
—Octavia E. Butler |
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So, you've created a universe.
Maybe you've spent many years working on it, building settings, societies, factions, individuals. Maybe you just write your story and these things sprout from that. Either way, there it is, in its potentially infinite glory, just idling after the story's done.
There's often a temptation, then, to take it further. Tolkien did, following up a short novel with a longer trilogy. The many people working on Star Wars expanded on the original universe. Fantasy in particular is known for long, epic series, though it's certainly not the only genre to do those.
Sure, you can do it... but should you?
The short answer is: if you still have stories to tell, sure.
The long answer isn't much longer. As with anything, it's helpful to consider the pros and cons.
On the plus side, you already have characters, settings and other pieces, so you don't have to reimagine them from scratch. Readers, too, often appreciate revisiting a familiar place and seeing old friends.
Maybe not so positive, though, is that the more you work in a particular universe, the more stuff accumulates that you need to keep track of, or continuity errors and other discrepancies start to proliferate. You also risk eroding the sense of mystery and wonder that readers/viewers enjoyed so much the first time around, as more and more things are explained or detailed.
But a good story can make us overlook picky contradictions, and as long as you don't explain everything, there can always be a sense of mystery.
The real danger would be starting to milk a cash cow for all it's worth, but that would mean you made some money off it to begin with, which I think most of us would agree would be a nice problem to have. |
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Last time, in "On the Surface" , I touched on the history of writing.
Elfin Dragon-finally published  : Did you know the story of King Arthur most likely came from the Epic of Gilgamesh?
I wasn't aware of any connection, but it makes sense.
A comment on my editorial from April, "Artificial Intelligence" ...
Elfin Dragon-finally published : Before the iconic "The Day the Earth Stood Still – U.S., 1951" and "2001: A Space Odyssey – U.S., 1968", four other films were made. "Metropolis – Germany, 1927","Der Herr der Welt (The Master of the World) – Germany, 1934", "The Invisible Boy – U.S., 1951", and "Alphaville – France, 1965"
Well, I haven't seen all of those... yet.
And from back in February, "Time" ...
Elfin Dragon-finally published : I love the "problem" of time. Science Fiction's problem with traveling at light speed, tackling black holes, and string theory. Fantasy can often do whatever it wants, but tries to stay within some limits. But I go with the theory that time really is an illusion.
If time is an illusion, then so is space, and everything in it, because they're all part of the same continuum. This makes the definition of "illusion" somewhat problematic.
So that's it for me for November! See you next month. Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: November 15, 2023 Issue [#12274]
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