Writing Fantasy Heroes

by Jason M Waltz (ed)

  Watching from the Sidelines

  Cat Rambo

  Heroes, whether starring in heroic fantasy or some other genre, don't exist in a vacuum. They aren't a single stick figure standing in the middle of an otherwise blank page. In reality (if we can ever use that word when talking about fiction), they're the center of a web of relationships: familial, economic, desire-based, and otherwise shaped by physical circumstance.

  That's why, while your story requires an antagonist, it also requires an array of supporting characters: family members, servants, friends, confidantes, allies, and others. These aren't simply cardboard cut-outs stuck in to supply the story's need—each one is potential to be mined. The more realized these characters are in the author's head, the more they have to contribute to the story.

  Among the story assets these characters supply is a useful lens through which to present the protagonist, one that allows the writer to do three things:

  Accomplish extra world building.

  Make the main character more engaging.

  Supply additional story details.

  My story "Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight" (Paper Golem LLC, 2009) is a useful example when talking about this approach. The tale takes it to an extreme by focusing on one of these side characters, letting her narrate her small version of the story, and letting the reader glimpse only bits and pieces of the larger one.

  The story, told from the point of view of someone who is affected by, rather than affecting, the events around her, becomes the larger story in miniature, one that shows it in a refracted and sometimes skewed style dependent on the reader's surmises about the offstage action.

  "Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight" provides this take on world-changing events enacted by the ostensible heroine the narrator is observing: Alkyone.

  This choice of narrator allowed me to take huge events—a war, a rebellion, the devastation of a city—and show their effect on a side character who, like the reader, does not know exactly how events have played out at the highest level. The overall grand story arc comes in scattered rumors:

  My ineffectual efforts at magic died out after a while and our lives continued. When I was twelve, there came rumors of magic outside the city. Travelers reported the undead walked the North Road at night, and no one dared journey beneath the moons. Day by day, the stories grew wilder. They said an ancient demon, the Lord of Ash, and his servants plagued Tuluk and that the Templarate could do nothing to stop him. Others went further and said that the reason the Templarate did nothing was that they had given their power to Lord Isar.

  ...

  Months later, though, I was vindicated when travelers spoke of the night the lights had flashed in the sky to mark the last battle with the Lord of Ash. They said Alkyone helped defeat him, but that it was a joint effort, really—the J’Karr and the Tan Muark, and a handful of magickers joined together. That their dead friend Arianis had come back as a gwoshi to help them defeat the Lord of Ash, that there had been a fierce fight nonetheless, and Kul had offered no aid—he’d been off in the North on his own expedition, searching for ways to defeat Isar.

  They said down in the Salt Flats there was just a statue of the Lord of Ash, what he had been, turned into black stone—obsidian. My eldest once traveled down to see it, and said it was large and wicked, and that she dreamed of it for three nights running. The Muark still make the trip there once a year, to piss on its feet and curse it.

  Because, honestly, how often can we read the story of the Chosen One, who saves a world, without starting to wonder about the circumstances surrounding them? Isn't it more interesting to look at it through the perspective of why those crazy Muark travel down to pee on a statue's feet in a yearly ritual?

  So in "Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight," I've looked at the main story through the eyes of a character who is unnamed, who starts with the small details of a night when revolution foments:

  Smell the storm brewing this evening—that edge of lightning riding the wind? That’s how it smelled that first night they came. Everyone in the tavern was alive and electric that night. Word had spread there was to be a secret meeting of those who opposed Lord Isar.

  The commons were packed to the gills with Tan Muark and Tuluki followers of Kul. Everyone called him Kul, despite his rank, as high as that of Lord Isar. Everyone thought of him as a distinguished friend, an elder brother. The one who would defend us all.

  The choice of this narrator, an innkeeper's child, allows me to supply detail after detail, particularly sensory ones. I've filtered details of the experience through her child-keen senses. Alkyone is a wind-mage and the "edge of lightning riding the wind" presages her appearance. And the narrator speaks in child-like similes, "a distinguished friend, an elder brother."

  There's something about the narrator's position in relation to the overall story that lets me build up this sort of layering of detail in a way that would feel draggy or bulky and somewhat overanxious if attached to the actual protagonist. Details like a child's portrait of the economics of Allanak:

  Wonders came from the southern city of Allanak: obsidian bracelets, and puppets with joints carved from bone. And sticky dried insects laced with honey that came in big blocks so chunks could be pried off to be chopped and added to pastries. I said this.

  Or the incense and steak-nostalgia of:

  The night winds were howling, and my mother lit thick cones of lanturin incense to keep away ghosts. In the middle of the meal—duskhorn steak, the wild-fed kind you can never get nowadays—the main door blew open, or so we thought at first. The youngest children were all screaming and things were confused. My mother glimpsed Alkyone’s form huddled outside, a few feet away from the lintel. My brothers pulled her in, dragged her beside the hearth, pressed hot tea and soup on her. She kept her eyes turned down, her cloak’s hood drawn up.

  A few hours later, her friends arrived. They stood in the doorway. She did not look up. No one had wanted to go to bed after that, not with all the excitement, and my father had allowed us to heat watered wine and drink it, stretching out the sips to make our time awake as long as possible.

  Part of that is my tribute to one of the books that informed my childhood reading—Little House in the Big Woods. I know it seems like an odd thing to be informing heroic fantasy, but for me heroic fantasy was an important component of childhood and supplied many of the narratives that let me make my way through its tribulations. LHitBW is full of the sensory and the details that matter to a child, such as strategies for escaping bedtime.

  At the same time this choice allows me an additional relationship between my main character and someone else (the narrator) that (I hope) makes her more engaging and human. Alkyone is kind to the child narrator when they first meet, in ways that shows she still has empathy for the things that matter to children. Someone who understands children is often appealing to the reader. It's someone who, we think, would understand the child part of ourselves.

  Alkyone's first act is one of welcome, her second that of generosity, her third an act of bonding through speech.

  She smiled at me and shared her honey cakes, crumbling them with long, nervous fingers. Her accent was lilting as she told me she had never had honey cakes when she was growing up.

  Alkyone gives the narrator the earrings that will let her recognize her in their final encounter in a moment that foreshadows her conflicts with Phaedrin, his attempts to master and direct her. At the same time, this passage shows that she's already moving toward the story's final moments, preparing herself by "lightening her pack."

  One of the men filling the room muscled his way through the crowd. He was blonde bearded, a northerner like me. As he approached, he scowled down at me, but spoke to her.

  “What are you up to, Alkyone?” he said.

  “Lightening my pack,” she said. “It has been heavy lately.”

  “We can’t afford to be giving away things all over the place,” he said. “Come in the back room, they wish to know what ou
r magics are capable of, and whether yours could carry someone outside the gate despite themself.”

  I opened the box and he spoke as I saw what lay inside, “Those are your favorite earrings, Alk!”

  She put her head down, looking at the floor planks between her boot toes. “I had those before we ever met, Phaedrin. My friend Jhiran gave them to me, and I may give them where I will.”

  In the end, even though Alkyone has been exiled from her chosen home and knows that she is about to die, saying "I have but a day in this form before I am returned to the wind," she gives her moments to the narrator one last time:

  At the door, she stopped, seeing me. “I recognize those earrings. Is all well with you?” She waved the men on ahead.

  “The inn is still standing—we lost the stable and some livestock,” I said. “And my little sister’s barrakhan pen, which is why we have no eggs.”

  The words were inconsequential. I drank the sight of her in. Her eyes were no longer coal. They were the color of moonlight on the sands. They were sad, but they were so beautiful that they gave me hope, if that makes sense.

  The side character can supply additional details of the story, ones that the main character may never see, such as the details of Tuluk's devastation, reduced to the matters that concern the narrator the most: the cheese the family eats while waiting to find out if they and the inn will be destroyed, the block of buildings around the inn, and Liselle's death.

  That night, elementals walked through the city, beings from planes outside our own. The city shook with their passage all night long. We hid in the cellar with four crates of Reynolte wine and a keg of spiced brandy. The Tan Muark had brought up a great wheel of cheese on their unexpected visit two days earlier, and we ate half of it that night because there wasn’t anything else to do.

  I wondered where Alkyone was. Surely she was part of this? Had the Lord of Ash returned, was she out there helping defeat him once again? Who had brought the elementals to destroy the city? Were her friends with her still, was exiled Kul there to defend his home? Did she remember giving me her honey cakes, back when I was as old as the child huddled against me?

  And what color were her eyes now?

  It was a long night and none of us slept, only sat awake listening to the cries and feeling the earth shake whenever some monstrous thing passed in the street outside, nibbling at our cheese as though it would quiet the nervous snakes in our stomachs.

  In the morning, the city was gone.

  Our inn still stood, but other buildings near us had been burned and flattened.

  Survivors recounted stories of a great fire-winged hawk from the plane of Suk-Krath, and a stone tortoise from Ruk, and a girl made of water from Vivadu. Liselle was dead. They wouldn’t let me see the body, but I heard the whispers. The water elemental had drowned her with a kiss.

  Many of the details this narrator supplies are based around her experience as a member of the merchant class:

  Rumors said Kul was in exile. He’d tried to kill Isar after retrieving some artifact, and had been driven to live with the Tan Muark. Some people said he’d married a Muark woman who’d fallen in battle a few days later. We did not see the tribe much after that, and you couldn’t get blue silk ribbons for years. They were the only ones with the secret of the dye.

  Because they're so close to the action, your main character may not be the best point of view to operate from. A side character can observe a hero's frailty with affection, derision, or awe. They can supply dialogue and play Sancho Panza to their Don Quijote moments.

  Pick your side characters and consider at least slipping into their heads from time to time. They may supply unexpected details of or insights into the main character.

  Particularly at the end of a story, such a side character may provide a way to pull the camera back slowly from the main character in a move that helps establish to the reader that this is the end of the story.

  I’ll always remember her eyes. All through my life, through the betrayals and petty rivalries, the moments that were large and small and everything in between, the thought of her eyes has gotten me through the hard times. She walked by herself, and gave me the strength to do it as well, by remembering her eyes. Not as they were at first, a storybook blue, the color of the ancient days when it rained, and certainly not when they burned with that black, fierce light.

  But rather as they were that final night, when she walked out in the company of the gentle evening wind, a fearless woman who had given all she could in the fight and who would never be seen again. Her remarkable eyes, silver as the moonlight, and twice as kind, and a thousand times as brave and alone.

  Think as well about what the side character thinks about the main character, how their encounters with each other have shaped the side character's life. This is the lens which, at one level, we use to observe the narrator's life. Alkyone is important to her. Memories of her heroism, her actions and words, allow the narrator to carry on through her darkest moments:

  For years afterwards, I could take my breath away just thinking of her eyes. It took me through some hard times—later the occupation by the Allanaki, and when my two youngest were killed by the Borsail lord they’d sent up to oversee things. We didn’t know it then, that we’d be decades under their heel because of what the elementalists had done. But I never hated her, never thought that even when they were taking my children.

  The rebels kidnapped the Lord’s son and he swore that for every day the child was not in his nurse’s arms, twenty Northern babies would die. They took mine on the third day, and would have taken another, except I lied and said he was too old—had seen over three years now. I thought of her eyes, and they gave me strength to say the falsehood flatly, as though there was no way it could be anything but true. You do what you can and see what happens.

  Heroic fantasy tries to supply such figures, heroes who, through their courage, their actions, motivate us to do the heroic in turn. That's a central theme in "Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight," the effect of the hero on the observer. It requires heroes to start a revolution sometimes, and it will be a revolution not of individual heroes and figures of legends but of the masses, as represented by the narrator, that will lead to the overthrow of those oppressing the city of Tuluk. At the same time, those masses and their exemplar, our unnamed narrator, are inspired by the stories of heroes, such as the very one the narrator is being urged by some unguessed at interlocutor (A spy? One of the bards of the new Poets Circle? A grandchild? A fellow traveler?) to tell.

  Which is, at the highest level, what stories of heroic fantasy are about—the inspiration of the hero in us all and the impetus to help us live our lives, just as the narrator lives hers in "Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight."

  Man Up: Making your

  Hero an Adult

  Alex Bledsoe

  There's a quintessential image in fantasy: the idealistic youth looking up into the sky and off into the future, his gleaming sword raised as a challenge to the world. It's Arthur after drawing Excalibur from the stone or Luke Skywalker on the original Hildebrandt poster for Star Wars.

  If you're reading this, though, you're probably more interested in the older, battle-hardened and cynical hero standing in a wasteland surrounded by the bodies of his adversaries, his bloody sword held wearily at his side. This is Conan, Kull, or Elric, and it’s the opposite of the idealistic youth. And for me, it’s is a far more interesting character: I prefer to both read and write stories about grown men and not untested boys.

  But in the broader fantasy genre, there’s an abiding interest in the immature hero forced—by circumstances or that catch-all term ‘destiny’—to essentially ‘man up’ and save the day. Frodo in The Lord of the Rings is such a character. The most popular example is Luke Skywalker, simple farm boy who turns out to be the ‘new hope’ of the galaxy. Thanks to George Lucas and his very public embrace of Joseph Campbell’s work, as well as the growth of the Young Adult genre, it sometimes seems like fanta
sy consists of nothing but this story retold against different backgrounds. We’ve seen countless heroes, from Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter to Percy Jackson, become men. We’re hardly ever shown what happens next.

  So I’m writing about the hero as a grown man. And I’m using male examples, but the issues are genderless: they apply if you’re writing about Conan or Xena. I'll also be using examples mainly from movies, because film is a more common frame of reference, and it takes less time to watch a movie than read a book. And I’m not trying to tell you how to write, but to get you thinking about what you write in a new way.

  INTRODUCTION

  When establishing an older character, it’s best to be clear up front. There are ways to do this without blatantly saying, “John Doe, 45 years old, drew his sword.” Many things immediately mark an older man: wrinkles, gray hair, scars, even a certain world-weary bearing. An acceptable variation might be, “John Doe scratched his salt-and-pepper beard, then drew his sword.” Simply by describing one physical trait, you have implied the character’s age. Now you have to define him.

  When I introduced my hero Eddie LaCrosse in The Sword-Edged Blonde (Night Shade Books, 2007), I tried to establish his age (late thirties) in a couple of hopefully subtle ways. One was in his narrative voice: since Eddie is telling the story, his attitude comes through in both the narration and the dialogue. He mentions that back then he worked out of a tavern office, and later says: