Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!
I hope you have had a great week. Mine was good, if littered with snowy commutes of which I am not fond.
Experiments in marketing go on. Self-education on many fronts continue to be delayed, which is a little depressing because I keep adding things to the pile to be learned in advance of writing my next book, because I want to write with more understanding of formal theories of novel structure and construction, mainly so I can either ignore or pick and choose from various strictures. But first, I need to intimately inform myself of those strictures and theories, and where to fit that work in? I have comics to read, you understand!
I’ve been thinking of the future, the forks in the road we take, branching ever on into an undiscovered country. I wish I could write two books simultaneously, or three, to satisfy the urge in me to take on different subjects and styles. But I can only write one and do it any justice. Being honest with you I am torn between my planned traditional fantasy with many Macdonald twists, and smacking out a pulpy version of The Red Palace that I have mentioned over the years. However, I know that TRP actually turns into something of a formal challenge, which is why I stepped back from it in the first place: I couldn’t decide which road to take in its construction, and so retreated from that fork in the road. I think perhaps I should write vignettes from it as the mood takes me, windows into that world, or see if I can write a short story version of it. (I have a few thousand words of the first few chapters gathering dust somewhere.)
But I am not changing course, I think. I have laid down the challenge to write a rich, lush, languorous fantasy, a world to drown in, to live in, to explore, for readers to wish characters took that other road just to see what lay over that distant rise. That only works of course if the characters are worth exploring the world with, and I believe wholeheartedly that they are.
So ahead lies a future of a great deal of work, of learning, of trying new things whilst wishing I could do more than one project at a time. And beyond that will come the day when I return to the World Belt, to continue the story I am temporarily laying aside after three stand alone (this week I learned they are more correctly called singleton) novels.
This week I watched a bunch of book criticism videos, which is a form of masochism for any writer, because you adore and are jealous (if you are honest) of the attention lavished on someone else’s book, wince at the critical takes, fear and desire that same level of attention to be lavished upon your own works.
All that is typical enough. But what jumped out at me was repeated discussions of religion, and how it isn’t really explored in modern fantasy, not deeply anyway. (This was my understanding of the online opinioners’ opinion, and could be in error.) That in writing for what the reviewers assumed was a mostly secular audience the religious experience is therefore somehow minimized or explained away. This interested me greatly, as I’ve just written a fantasy novel in which the religious experience is central, and my planned epic fantasy has built into it a living mythos and a clash/transition of religious eras.
I looked back, and did find that the books of my youth did not pay any deep attention to religious feeling or motivation. Corwin feels bad for playing Messiah to some poor sophomoric dupes who die for him in the approach to Kolvir. And then he moves on. Such is the fate of the eternal prince. Other Eternal Champions fought in wars between law and chaos that at first seemed important, then trivial, but the universe seemed more one of concepts, than feelings. At least it was to me at 16! I think I need to re-read those books and find out how much more is there. In the Belgariad every people had a god, but I don’t recall Garion or his crew, even good old Mandorallen, displaying much devotion, having it truly guide action of conscience. My memories are misty, so I could easily be omitting some very cogent details.
Is that a missing opportunity in modern fantasy? To have characters and peoples living their belief? Or is it so alien it must be part of science fiction and a description of futures unfound, as in Dune? And in those recent films did you, my friends, really feel the Fremen belief, or was it just performed on-screen for you with no depth? Of course in the film you know it is a planted and cultivated religion, so you stand at some distance from it, observing it as Paul and Rebecca do, until Paul accepts his role, and the futures spawned by it.
And here we are at the golden path through many futures. We do not have that luxury or curse, and so must find our way through each day, to the end of our days, and hope to be content with our muddlings through.
What think you? What have you found to be the best realization of the religious experience and religious motivation in fantasy? Tell me so I can read those books and be depressed by their excellent execution in advance of the release of my own book! I refer you back to writers and masochism.
Until next week.
Roderick T. Macdonald 
Roddy, sorry… did the typical wordy thing. Honestly suggest that you skip to the end for the summary… you can reread the rest later and yell at me.
FatOR: If you choose to read my diatribe…. happy to see you yell back at me… let’s see if we get some clicks going, lol.
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Okay… so first… I’m going to say… write all 3 and that this is the perfect time.
The suggestion is only pseudo-tongue-in-cheek. You can pick later… but let the ideas just flow. I truly believe that unruly regurtiation will produce the best ideas.
Because, let’s face it… you’re an editing addict. So… well, I feel, that it doesn’t matter. You’re trying to force yourself to concentrate on one thing that is “far in the future”… why? Writing for you is a process… why not branch out and then decide when TGatG is done? That might be called brain-storming. ;oP
Hell, all this talk of comics… write the text out for the three ideas and imagine the vignettes? Just a thought.
To get towards your first question… religion isn’t “too explored” in fantasy… simply because it’s a disaster zone.
I’d disagree… you’ve got the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Iliad and the Odyssey and it goes on and on. They are all fantasy.
See how it’s a disaster area? I just called it fantasy.
And yet… didn’t you already do this in The Killer and the Dead? Construct a religion… and… well, let it go.
You already know the trick… don’t attack the institutions who pretend they represent a religion. Make up your own, you’ll be fine.
Sects are attacked, fantasy isn’t…
What you’ve written about Dune… Note how Dune Prophecy (TV series) is coming out and will be all about the Bene Gesserit.
A complicated discussion about what is science fiction and what is fantasy.
So yeah… your last question… I guess my answer is the same I mentioned before: the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
I’ve only read the Bible, the Koran and the last two. I do fully recommend these. Torah… I can’t say yet.
Unless you’re really religious about something, I can’t possibly see why you focus on that aspect. Religion doesn’t rule the world, institutions do.
The Church makes me vomit, the sects coming out of the Koran make me have acid indigestion, although Iran’s pretence at being Muslim also makes me want to release bombs… anybody that thinks Netanyahu has anything to do with the Jews whatsoever and that his genocide is justified.. all frigging idiots.
Nobody has read the books. And trust me… if you read the Bible, you’ll have arguments to combat the sheep and even their pastors. If you read the Koran, you can battle terrorists… And dang, I haven’t read the Torah yet… but think I can cite Hitler to fight against that disgusting right-wing fascist who is the very face of Hitler and uses him as a shield to supposedly “protect Israel”.
With Trump having won there… btw, been to Israel… not a lot of people behind the N-Hitler. Most trying to get European passports… not unlike a good number of Americans trying to find another country. All pretty complicated.
I promise to be polite on all responses to my rantings. Feel free to yell at me Roddy.
SUMMARY:
Hi Jason!
It is good to rant. I do it a lot.
I think that what I meant to address is the sense of having people’s actions and goals be driven by their religion. Their principles. Their emotional responses and decisions both in repose and under pressure. I think fantasy writers (the ones I have read) talk about the religions they create a lot, but the characters themselves do not seem that driven by their religious experience or adherence (or lack thereof) to a particular dogma.
I think that through writing TGATG I have realized (again – the knowledge has always been there) how powerful a lens that is through which to interact with the world, but in the fantasy I have read it is rarely addressed, and if it is, it is a negative.
Similar to the way in which forever ago I talked about morality in fantasy and where characters get their moral codes from and how they express them, I think it will be more important for me in future to create rounded characters who do account for their religious or spiritual life. Or lack of it. It is more to me about their interior experience, and then how they live it and reflect it out into the world. Things they will and will not do, when and why. When so much of the message about writing today is to find points of conflict in order to generate drama, it seems that deeply held beliefs are going to lead to points of conflict and therefore drama, however the writer wants to handle them, or whatever slant they wish to take.
In my earlier unpublished writing, and even in the two published so far I think my tendency was to take religion and faith for granted, and not explore it, to consider the characters as more or less rational actors. Which is unrealistic (irony alert in a fantasy!). We believe ourselves to be rational, but instinct, emotion, and codes of behaviour derived from community, morality, religion, spiritual adherence, do have a profound effect on our choices. I think I want to be sure to take more time to address the religious/spiritual aspect of those drives (and the internal and external conflicts they almost inevitably create) in my writing going forward. I need to further explore community impact too, and intend to.
I will still be interested in institutional conflict and inertia, the social structures created by and imposing some beliefs, and how individuals react to them, but my focus at least at present is just to give more characters, and more people within each world a deeper connection to the religions mentioned in that world. If you have gods, you cannot ignore what comes with them.
Now I need to write today’s blog… what to say?