What is the cleanest model for unpacking a complex backstory in fantasy?

Hmm...I'm not sure there's anything like a formal model. My personal advice is to dole out backstory like you're giving M&Ms to a two-year-old in a crowded store.

I did write a Greek hero novel that had an important prologue--a conversation between Athena and Poseidon. It framed the narrative that followed. But even then, I kept it short (1k), and it still had lots of action.

Or if you want to consider a writer that people have actually heard of: JRRT. If ever there was a King/Queen of Backstory award, he would certainly qualify. It's no longer the Fifties, so it's wise to be more brief than the revered professor, if you can. But consider deconstructing his work. See if you can internalize his rhythm. I definitely wouldn't use more backstory than he did. And even he started with narrative.

CathleenT said:

My personal advice is to dole out backstory like you're giving M&Ms to a two-year-old in a crowded store.

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This is brilliant.

hereticdoll said:

I agree, The Silmarillion was a huge inspiration for me, and I would say that is part of the struggle I'm having.

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The Silmarillion might be one of the least appropriate models you could choose for a modern fantasy novel. It isn't really a novel, for one thing. It also was incomplete upon Tolkien's death, and published posthumously. From Wikipedia:

The Silmarillion is a collection of mythopoeic works by English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, edited and published posthumously by his son, Christopher Tolkien, in 1977, with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay. The Silmarillion, along with J. R. R. Tolkien's other works, forms an extensive, though incomplete, narrative that describes the universe . . . in which are found the lands . . . within which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place.

In shorter words, it's a big pile of relatively unconsolidated backstory. Not exactly the blueprint for the kind of novel most current fantasy readers will be interested in. It would never have been published at all, without the LOTR stuff having reached immense popularity first.

If you want to get more appropriate inspiration for the way to construct a more coherent, accessible epic fantasy story, read the Earthsea series by Ursula LeGuin.

caw

blacbird said:

The Silmarillion might be one of the least appropriate models you could choose for a modern fantasy novel. It isn't really a novel, for one thing. It also was incomplete upon Tolkien's death, and published posthumously. From Wikipedia:

The Silmarillion is a collection of mythopoeic works by English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, edited and published posthumously by his son, Christopher Tolkien, in 1977, with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay. The Silmarillion, along with J. R. R. Tolkien's other works, forms an extensive, though incomplete, narrative that describes the universe . . . in which are found the lands . . . within which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place.

In shorter words, it's a big pile of relatively unconsolidated backstory. Not exactly the blueprint for the kind of novel most current fantasy readers will be interested in. It would never have been published at all, without the LOTR stuff having reached immense popularity first.

If you want to get more appropriate inspiration for the way to construct a more coherent, accessible epic fantasy story, read the Earthsea series by Ursula LeGuin.

caw

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Brilliant advice this is.

hereticdoll said:

I agree, The Silmarillion was a huge inspiration for me, and I would say that is part of the struggle I'm having. I'll explain.

Through a friend of mine, I was fortunate enough to meet with an agent for a successful publishing house in NYC. I told the agent my writing style was more classic fantasy, and showed a sample. The agent straight up told me, "Listen, if Tolkien tried to publish his books today, no one would buy them. The audience just doesn't have the attention anymore. You really would have had to be established about 20 years ago to be writing like that now. The only way to make it in fantasy (currently) is if you take an approach to like Sarah J. Mass or Sherrilyn Kenyon. It's just the reality of publishing." And I know critique is a wonderful thing, but that talk seriously made me question everything I was doing.

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Remember, that was just one agent's opinion. It doesn't represent the entirety of the publishing world.

Re backstory and Tolkien--the vast majority of the backstory for The Lord of the Rings is actually not in The Lord of the Rings. There's some in the Appendices. Much of it is in The Silmarillion, which is pretty much nothing but backstory, and various other companion works.

Through a friend of mine, I was fortunate enough to meet with an agent for a successful publishing house in NYC. I told the agent my writing style was more classic fantasy, and showed a sample. The agent straight up told me, "Listen, if Tolkien tried to publish his books today, no one would buy them. The audience just doesn't have the attention anymore. You really would have had to be established about 20 years ago to be writing like that now. The only way to make it in fantasy (currently) is if you take an approach to like Sarah J. Mass or Sherrilyn Kenyon. It's just the reality of publishing." And I know critique is a wonderful thing, but that talk seriously made me question everything I was doing.

Remember, that was just one agent's opinion. It doesn't represent the entirety of the publishing world.

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I agree, this agent doesn't sound like she has a good sense of the field. Maas and Kenyon are the James Patterson and Dan Brown of fantasy right now, in that they have mass market paperback books with a lot of publishing push behind them. Neither one are likely to ever win a Nebula or Hugo, and I'd guess they're not much respected in the genre (though they might be in the airport bookstore.)

I don't think there's one blueprint for backstory/worldbuilding that will fit every novel. It also depends on POV. Do you have an omniscient narrator? Perhaps their style is to elaborate on world and culture? Do you have an immersive third person POV? What aspects of the world/environment/society are particularly important to that character?

I write immersive third person and like to give just enough backstory and worldbuilding to provide clarity, enhance understand of immediately-important story elements, and to deepen the reader's emotional understanding of the character and plot. This is going to vary from moment to moment, but it's better to sprinkle information throughout an active narrative. The reader will be following this trail, building their understanding as they become immersed in the story world. Trust that your reader doesn't need to know everything at once. Keep it interesting. Make the world feel lived-in by showing rather then explaining.

hereticdoll said:

Yes, I agree about The Silmarillion, and it's probably why I have this excessive backstory/world building but not the right "blueprint" as you said.

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You probably don't need to present to the reader anywhere near as much backstory/worldbuilding as you think you do. Tolkien didn't slather on the reader all that backstory that posthumously appeared in Silmarillion, and it didn't exactly damage his readership of LOTR. For a story to work, something needs to be happening, right from the get-go. Backstory/worldbuilding tends to be highly static, lacking energy and movement. You may have found all that backstory stuff valuable for you, to crystallize your ideas, but that doesn't mean it needs to go into the text.

So, what happens in your story?

caw

Re: Deities on the mountaintop.
Is this going to be a regular feature of your novel? Updates from a couple of gods, like sports commentators?
If not, if this is a one-shot conversation, two deities chosing sides, or laying out the conflict, the mountain doesn't need a name or a description, let alone a history.
Perhaps instead of 'The Silmarillion' you need older examples: The Bible: lots of mountains: the one the Devil tempted Jesus on, the one with the ark, the one where Moses spoke to God and got the Commandments. No descriptions. Just the name, perhaps, or 'a mountain'. Because we don't need to know anything else about them.
Or, plays: read Shakespeare's opening lines: Romeo and Juliet, for example: "Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."
With only that to go by, the audience would presume contemporary dress, an urban story, a feud.
Admittedly, a play is different from a novel, in that there's a stage, set dressing and costume, but, in general,
readers don't need that many clues.

heretic, is it your expressed goal to be published? I gather that it is, based on what you're saying. But is your heart telling you to write something in the style of The Silmarillion? It just pains me to see someone compromise an artistic idea just to conform to a fickle (and often unimaginative) set of rules. I know my head is in the clouds in this regard, but anyway, I've said my piece

hereticdoll said:

I think you have the right idea. One shouldn't compromise their natural style to be more marketable, unless it actually makes them a better writer. From the responses I've seen on this thread, it seems I should consider just sticking all the world-building in a side book for reference, that way I can still enjoy fleshing everything out without weighing down the story. So, in the end maybe it would be something like The Silmarillion.

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This sounds like a good idea, work it all out on paper, and take only the parts that you need for this story. And, if you're books take off, you could indeed, do a 'Silmarillion' with the info. Or, put it out in bits and pieces on your blog, or wherever, for fans?

hereticdoll said:

Thanks, that's really helpful.



I'll try to do a brief summary that's not a trainwreck.

The backstory involves the story of Lon. He is an immortal unbound by spatial constraints and his power essentially allows him to move objects between space/galaxies at will (including himself). Over the centuries he saw the fall of all these civilizations and he's tired of outliving everyone he loves. When he finally comes to the realm set in the book, he meets another immortal named Virtusiana. She has power, but unlike Lon she wields elements rather than spatial control. He pursues her, but she is already pledged to the king of the realm, Akrisos. Even though Lon is immortal he would have trouble defeating Akrisos in combat because Akrisos is this legendary warrior. So Lon uses his power to cast him into this storm void called The Daultros, which kills Akrisos. Lon tells Virtusiana that he would do the same with her children if she refused him. So she concedes and they have children of their own. A couple hundred years go by and Lon is bitter because Virtusiana favors the bloodline of Akrisos over his own. An event happens that pushes him over the limit and he marks the line of Akrisos to be butchered. Virtusiana couldn't bring herself to hurt her own children, even the ones she had with Lon, so she develops a language using the elements and teaches it to the line of Akrisos so they could defend themselves (later called spellcraft). Lon is enraged, and threatens to break his oath to Virtusiana (sending Akrisos' line to the Daultros). Seeing no other choice, she ends up sacrificing herself for the sake of imprisoning Lon. A thousand years pass and with Lon and Virtusiana out of the picture, the war dissipates, and the bloodlines separate into their own regions. However, the descendants of Lon (now living in the region of Brescha) never stopped obsessing over the language Virtusiana gave to the line of Akrisos. They ended up bastardizing it into their own version, making a religion out of it. So moving forward, the story centers on a boy named Fionn (MC) who grew up under the sect of Ishtivar Lon (one of many Breschan cults), where he learns standard Breschan doctrine such as "How Lon freed the people from Akrisos the oppressor." Anyways, Fionn comes to realize the corruption of the cult through a tragic event, and leaves Brescha. This is really where his journey begins, when he meets a warrior named Octavion-a descendant of Akrisos.

This point is about a quarter through the book, but I didn't want to stretch out the summary too far considering the post was mostly about the backstory. But I foresee a lot of gutting and restructuring going forward.

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Okay, I was going to ask whether your deities might be better served by keeping them disembodied, sort of letting their worshippers make up their own images of them, but it sounds like you're going for the sort of pantheon that looks/acts like humans, so they might well be speaking to each other in the high places.
But I'd keep it to a few brief exchanges, not describing the whole history of the schism.
It's like if you have a Catholic and a Baptist not getting along, you don't have to bring in Luther and the Reformation - just show it by their attitudes, and their ways of speaking to/about each other.

Consider an outline where you start with your protag--Fionn, whom you might consider renaming since this is secondary world stuff.

Start with his story, and see if you can dribble in all the other bits--dreams, prophecies, selections from ancient tomes--we're all familiar with the tricks of the trade. Consider making Fionn discover all this stuff for himself, so that the reader gets your world building in more measured doses.

Then write a first chapter. Put it and your other first chapter on SFF SYW. Get some feedback and give some critiques. SFF SYW taught me how to edit. It's not the sort of thing I could compress into a forum post. It's more of a learn-by-doing skill.

As far as marketability, it really depends on what you want to do. For instance, I wrote a biography of my husband's aunt, who really is a singular person. Born in 1921, she was a marine in WWII. Later, she taught art and traveled the world.

It sold its expected sixty copies or so and that's all, which was fine. I didn't write it to be a commercial success. I wrote as a gift to a woman I loved for her 90th birthday.

It's different with my fantasy books. Part of their worth comes from sharing it with an audience and seeing that audience grow. I want them to be commercially viable.

But there's a lot of wiggle room there. If sales were my only metric, I'd write pure romance--it's the biggest market. So that puts me somewhere in between writing only so that the work will exist and writing for an audience.

You'll need to decide where you fall on that spectrum and what you're willing to do to achieve these goals. And then you'll need to work on the skill sets you'll need to achieve them. Be patient with yourself. In my case this has taken years, and I still have some ground to travel.

Earthsea is an older book, but one that's held up well over the years. I personally admire Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis. Or if you'd like to try a single volume, To Say Nothing of the Dog. Both of these stories rely on an incredible amount of world building (her protags time travel back to WWII). But it's woven in seamlessly throughout the narrative. Ms. Willis has won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, so if it turns out that you like her work, it might be worth deconstructing to see if you can adapt her rhythms to your own writing.

Some of Pratchett's stuff has significant world building in it, but the tone is often humorous, and he doesn't really use chapters, so this might not be the best guide for you. Still, consider Mort, if you haven't already read it. One of the main characters is Death, so there's a fair amount of otherworldly world building.

I quite liked Diana Wynne Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm, and that had a fair bit of second world theology worked into the narrative.

Can anyone but Tim Powers write like Tim Powers? Hard to say, but he mixes incredible amounts of world building into his work. It's worth reading, even if it turns out that (like me) you can't quite wrap your mind around the way he does it. His first novel, The Drawing of the Dark, is still my favorite.

Hope something here helps.

hereticdoll said:

As with most of you who write in fantasy, you might have some epic diety-like characters, yes?

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Sure. I think all of my novels have had some sort of deity-level characters, though not necessarily described in those terms.

So when you establish your realm or plane of existence-how in the world do you unpack that information without completely dragging the reader into a second story?

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The same way I would any other character, as needed. If they are characters with PoVs, no need to infodump just because they have deity-like powers. Have you read Stephen Erickson's Gardens of the Moon? It opens with a scene told from the PoV of two deities. It might give you an idea of how this can work.

Do you establish the realm without any fine details?

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In my WiP, one such character lives in a marsh. I described the marsh the same way I would describe any other setting.

And if they are, how is it kept tight and to the extent of backstory without sounding like "shiny people on a shiny plane doing shiny things."

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I'm not sure I understand this question.

Let's say you have a scene with two deities on a mountain talking to another that sets up some important piece of the plot. Do I need to establish information about those mountains and the surrounding area?

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Describe where they are, sure. Mountain. Open vistas. Glaciers or snow banks or cliff edges or babbling brooks or whatever fits. There's no need for backstory infodump on the world's geography though. Show the characters in their setting in the same way you would show any character within their setting.

The history of the mountains and why this universe has mountains?

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I would recommend against this. Can you imagine reading a history of the US Civil War in Appalachia which suddenly diverted into a dissertation on plate tectonics?

My first inclincation is to go to world building, but it just ends up stretching the whole thing on and on.

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Worldbuilding is great, but only for the writer. The reader needs less than the writer tends to believe. What worldbuilding you need to share, share out in small doses. Avoid giant infodumps, pages of expository digression, and the like. Consider how GRRM worldbuilds in ASoIaF. This is a world with years-long seasons, but he's not once discussed the planets axial tilt, orbital mechanics, or location vis-a-vis interstellar dust clouds.

And isn't it a problem to wait a third of the book just to get to the main characters?

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If the first third of the books doesn't feature at least one of your MCs, consider omitting that third of the book. Try to incorporate necessary information (minimally) into the rest of the book from the PoV of major characters.

Do you just omit the details of the backstory and cut to the main plot?

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Precisely. Tolkien jumps to Frodo in LoTR. He doesn't start with a primer on the history of the lost kingdom of Arnor.

Consider how other epic fantasy writers handle worldbuilding. In addition to GRRM and Erickson, I would recommend Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series, Robin Hobb's Soldier Son Trilogy, and/or Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher novels. All of these introduce extensive worldbuilding in what I consider an interesting and effective manner. Outside of epic fantasy, Cornwell's Saxon Stories, Scalzi's Old Man's War, and Robin McKinley's Sunshine all provide examples of effective worldbuilding in a variety of genres. There are many other excellent examples I'm sure, these are just the first that come to mind atm.

hereticdoll said:

So, in the end maybe it would be something like The Silmarillion.

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Hopefully not, because The Silmarillion is not a novel. It's a collection of mythic tales that explain the world of Middle Earth and the realms beyond it.

I also highly recommend reading widely. Read stuff outside your favorite genre. There is a certain package of narrative skills that all good writers use, regardless of genre, and reading more widely may give you a better sense of what those are and why and how they work.

caw

Just one more thing. Don't publish for nothing--you're worth more than that. The exception would be if you self-publish, since it can make sense to have an ebook for free, but even then you're getting compensated by expanding your audience, some of whom will go on to purchase your titles for sale.

The reason I bring this up is because of the incredible shark-filled waters in which hopeful debut writers swim. Sometimes I wonder if there are more scammers than legitimate publishers. If you end up feeling desperate, it's more likely that you'll fall prey to one of them.

I'll be happy to beta read 2k or so of a first chapter privately, if that will help give you the courage to post on SYW. Just go to my website (in signature), and use the contact me button. Please remind me of this conversation, as I do get some requests out of the blue that I don't always answer. You can also PM me, but forums are an if-I-have-time thing, and your missive could wait in electronic purgatory for longer than you might like.

Uh, one cautionary note. I'm an extremely thorough critiquer. I'm never cruel, but I don't sugarcoat, either. People who come to me for a pat on the head are usually disappointed. If I go through your work, I'll be looking at how to make it better. This will usually involve some criticism. Be sure you're ready for that.

For an example of well-received recent fantasy that involves humans interacting with immortal gods and includes a lot of complicated backstory & mythologizing without delaying the real story or dropping info dumps on the reader's head -- take a look at N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy (first volume: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms). There are many ways to solve this problem. The Silmarilion was one approach. Jemisin's is very different, and more contemporary.