Writing Fantasy Heroes

by Jason M Waltz (ed)

  (One could argue as to whether or not it matters if a story fits perfectly into a given genre. Odds are, it really doesn’t. But that’s a different question entirely.)

  TROPES AS SATIRE

  Deliberately evoking fantasy tropes beyond what’s strictly necessary for a story—sometimes to the point of cliché—can certainly be a sign of bad or amateurish writing, but it might also be a deliberate act on the part of the writer in order to create humor or to point out some absurdity in the genre. Peter David’s Sir Apropos of Nothing series is, essentially, a parody of fantasy with a genuine story running through it. In the aforementioned Simon Green novel, both the characters and the narrator are able to squeeze a fair amount of wry humor out of the very traditional circumstances. In The Goblin Corps (Pyr Books, 2011), I sometimes deliberately emphasize the classic fantasy tropes—multi-racial adventuring parties, empires of good and evil, etc.—in order to more dramatically frame the actions and natures of the goblin races who, though evil, are the protagonists of the book.

  Obviously, there are limits to how far you can go with this unless you’re writing what is meant to be a comic story. An element of parody or satire can go over just fine as a spice; too much of it, though, and a book becomes impossible to take seriously. It’s a fine line to walk.

  ALTERING, TWEAKING, AND DISGUISING

  Smoothly, two forms broke the surface of the water. The first was Urkran; his eye was stretched wide with shock, his breathing shallow, his formerly red skin a sickly shade of pale. Here and there, a few stubborn spots of blood clung to his limbs or his clothes. His weapons were gone, embedded in the mud, not that they’d have done him any good. He was too weak even to turn his head, much less raise a hand in defiance of the creature slowly murdering him.

  The other form emerging from the heavy murk was his killer. Less than half the ogre’s height, it appeared almost human. A face that didn’t quite qualify as round—puffy, perhaps, was a better word—was topped by a matted mane of black hair, plastered to his scalp by the surrounding waters. His eyes were cold, piercing, and tinted with the faintest hint of crimson. His lips, fish-pale and thin, gaped open to reveal perfectly white and straight teeth.

  The thing leaned over the ogre, those narrow lips a hairsbreadth from Urkran’s ear. Placing his mouth against the ogre’s cheek, it inhaled. Urkran moaned in revulsion as he felt the pores of his skin stretch wide, felt his own blood flow through the newly-opened gaps. He shuddered as the creature’s tongue danced over his face, determined not to miss a single drop of the ogre’s draining life. (from The Conqueror’s Shadow, chapter eight)

  Nor was Losalis finished. With a grunt he pivoted on a single foot. The snow slowed him, threatened to trip him up, yet he muscled his way through. The saber, yanked free, whistled around again as he completed his spin and cleaved cleanly through the monster’s neck. Her head, jaw sputtering silent imprecations, landed crookedly at his feet.

  Even before the rest of the body hit the ground, it was putrefying into black, hideous sludge. Despite himself, Losalis retreated a pace as the thing he’d just slain decayed into a thick morass that refused to mingle with the surrounding snows.

  A tendril of fog flowed from the rotting form, skimming low over the white-shrouded earth, and then shot arrow-swift to the nearest corpse, the bloodless husk of one of Losalis’s own men. He watched, pulse racing, as the mist slammed hard into the body, sending the corpse tumbling and rolling. Another instant, and it ceased thrashing, rolling smoothly to its feet, eyes open, mouth quirked in a malevolent grin. Haze hovered beneath its feet as it slowly, deliberately, advanced toward Losalis, a familiar spark of hell in its eyes. Losalis saw the skin tightening across its bones, growing pale as the remaining blood in the corpse was consumed by the thing that rode it.

  The Endless Legion. Finally, Losalis understood.

  With no shame in his heart, Losalis called for a full retreat. (from The Conqueror’s Shadow, chapter twenty-one)

  Seeing those two passages together, it’s pretty clear what kind of creature I’m describing, right? Drinks blood, turns to mist…Gotta be a vampire.

  On the other hand, it doesn’t have fangs; it’s a body-thief; and its nature is a little less overt (at least at first) as presented over the course of the novel. If it’s a vampire, it’s not typical of the critters as they normally appear in fantasy or horror.

  My point here—and it’s one that most of you probably already know, but it’s worth hitting anyway—is that including a standard genre trope doesn’t mean that you have to approach it in the standard way. In Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series, the main character is a human (Easterner) living among the Dragaerans. These are long-lived, tall, pointy-eared humanoids. Elves, right? But they’re almost never called that (except as a racial slur by Easterners), and they don’t act anything like the elves that Tolkien or D&D have made such a prevalent part of the genre. Moorcock’s Elric was created, in part, as a deliberate inversion of the “mighty barbarian” trope most personified by Howard’s Conan. The two characters are nothing alike, yet the archetype of one is directly responsible for the existence of the other.

  Heck, the entire original Star Wars trilogy is arguably a fantasy, with its main tropes painted (sometimes quite lightly) in a veneer of science-fiction.

  Depending on how thoroughly you disguise it, an altered trope can either be used to give the reader a sense of comfort or familiarity without quite knowing why, a nagging sense of something not being quite right, or just a moment of “Oh, cool! I see what you did there!” Of course, disguised too thoroughly, a trope might as well not be included at all. There’s nothing wrong with changing a trope beyond recognition, using the familiar as a jumping-off point for the creation of something new; just be aware that that’s what you’re doing.

  FALLING INTO CLICHÉ

  A lot of you have been shaking your heads at me this whole time—don’t think I can’t see you, there in the back! And spit out that gum!—at my talk of tropes. You grumble and mutter something about clichéd, hackneyed writing.

  And to an extent, you’re right. It’s easy, sometimes very easy, to slip from using tropes into clichés. Falling back on tropes, if done just because it’s easier, leads to lazy writing. But that’s not a good reason not to use them; just to be careful how and why you use them.

  A trope becomes a cliché when it’s used in place of other content, rather than as an enhancement of other content. Using the example of Corvis Rebaine as “fearsome armored warlord/black knight” from earlier, I used the classic imagery to introduce him, sure. But after that, the book delves into other aspects of the character: who he is, what he wants, why he does what he does. Had I relied exclusively (or even primarily) on the archetype—had “classic black knight” been the majority or the entirety of his character—then I would have slid down that slippery slope into the realm of cliché.

  This is an incredibly easy mistake to make, especially when writing about traditionally heroic characters. The courtly knight—stalwart, brave, and true—is, frankly, a clichéd and uninteresting character. If, however, there’s more to him, if there’s something beneath the surface beyond more “stalwartiness,” only then does he potentially become interesting. The mighty-thewed barbarian who makes his way by sword and axe is just a poor copy of Conan, if that’s all there is to him. Motivations, personal foibles, quirks; these are what separate the characters from the clichés.

  And again, this applies to the story as a whole, as well. If a tale involves a corrupt vizier who delivers the princess to the evil dragon, and the brave knight who must rescue her, without doing something unexpected or new with those tropes; if it involves the traditional human-elf-dwarf-halfling quartet of races without actually making some use of the racial differences or otherwise having a purpose for their inclusion; then yeah, tropes become clichés. But that’s not the fault of the tropes themselves; it’s the fault of poor writing, of using them as a crutch, or even as the entirety of a character or plot
point, rather than a building block.

  Some would say that certain tropes have been so overused that they are automatically clichés, and it can be tough to argue with them. I’m pretty lenient when it comes to such things, and even I roll my eyes when I come upon stories with the aforementioned orphaned farm boys growing up to be prophesied saviors. But I’d argue that even then, it’s not impossible for an author to build something worthwhile on the trope—to do something new with it, or to use it as the starting point for an interestingly developed character—that keeps it from toppling over into cliché.

  The character of Arlen in Peter V. Brett’s The Warded Man is a good example. He’s not a precise fit for this trope, but he’s close enough that I initially sighed when coming across him in the book. Yet Brett very quickly took him and the story in directions that were different enough from the archetype that it ceased feeling clichéd almost instantly, and developed into a truly interesting character.

  And “interesting,” ultimately, is at the core of the entire point I’m making. Tropes in and of themselves? Not interesting enough to be relied upon; they are, in the end, nothing more than oft-repeated ideas. But as a basis on which to build, as a means of communicating with—and, yes, manipulating—the reader? There they come into their own, there they make themselves useful. The best fantasy writers aren’t the ones who refuse to make use of the tropes and archetypes of the genre; they’re the ones who know when to use them.

  So You Want to Fight a War

  Paul Kearney

  It’s said that all effective drama revolves around conflict. Certainly this is true of personal relationships; who ever got excited reading about a happy couple that never argued? In fiction we want humanity to get a slap in the face, whether it’s through crime, war, or good old kitchen-sink quarrels. It evokes in us both a feeling of empathy and a touch of schadenfreude. Sure, we want the guy to get the girl, the villain to get his comeuppance. But they must do a little dance for us first. They must get into each other’s faces and mix it up a little for our entertainment. That’s what keeps us turning the page.

  Extrapolate that fact, and apply it to the fantasy genre. If an author has gone to the trouble of creating a whole invented world for his characters to bicker in and meander across, then the chances are that world will in some ways mirror our own, in diversity if nothing else. If a fantasy world does not have a serried assortment of races, creeds, philosophies and polities, then it’s little more than an over-large ant farm.

  Conflict, when it comes in such a milieu, may well blossom from interpersonal disagreement to the clash of arms. It may spiral up onto a grander stage. Whole nations and kingdoms may become involved. It’s at that point the author must graduate from organizing a tap-room brawl to the consideration of armies, their raising, their deployment, and the ultimate depiction of them on the battlefield itself. How much detail the author puts into a burgeoning military campaign is entirely up to him or her and their personal approach to the depiction of mass violence. But no matter how blood-spattered the narrative becomes, in order for it to retain some kind of real-world integrity—in order for it to seem, for want of a better word, realistic—then there are certain factors that must be borne in mind.

  A great rash spread over the desert, a river of men, dark under the sun save where the light caught the points of their spears. They raised a dustcloud behind and around them, a tawny, leaning giant, a toiling yellow storm bent on blotting out the western sky. It seemed a nation on the march, a whole people set on migrating to a better place. The sparse inhabitants of the Gadinai drew together, old feuds forgotten, and watched in wonder as the great column poured steadily onward, as unstoppable as the course of the sun. It was as grand as some harbinger of the world’s end, a spectacle even the gods must see from their places amid the stars. So this, then, was the passage of an army. (from The Ten Thousand, Solaris, 2008)

  Armies. These are the ultimate instrument of state policy, and in the low-technology societies of most fantasy worlds, they are utilized to fulfill the ambitions of the state. This ‘state’ may well be driven by little more than the desires of one powerful man in a feudal setup, or it may reflect the wishes of some kind of popular assembly. It may merely be an aggregate bunch of mercenaries and ne’er-do-wells, or it may reflect some form of malevolent, nihilistic extra-worldly force, (a fantasy staple.) In any case, it is made up by a bunch of men or creatures that are armed and capable of mass maneuver, and usually there will be some form of hierarchy within it. An army cannot exist without officers of some form; without them, it is merely a mob, which is an entirely different thing.

  Leaving aside the preternatural spawning of innumerable faceless hordes, an army of relatively ‘normal’ beings must be regarded in three different ways. Creation, subsistence, and deployment. Or to put it another way: how is it formed, how does it eat, and how does it fight?

  You can sow dragon’s teeth in the ground and have your battalions spring to instant life if you will, but most pre-modern armies had to be gathered together over a period of days, weeks, or even months. Men had to leave their homes and muster at prearranged locations, gathering incrementally, marching to ever larger concentrations, until finally the entire host was gathered together with its leadership and made ready to march as one giant entity. Think of the raising of the Rohirrim in The Return of the King. The bigger the army, the longer it will take to get it organized. And the larger the political entity that spawns it, the longer it will take men to come in from all the far flung corners of the land.

  Even a professional, standing army, which were incredibly rare in pre-gunpowder history, will usually have to call in garrisons and outlying posts before it is formed up. Men will have to be equipped in some manner; either they will bring their own arms, or the state will supply them. Those who are light-armed cannot fight in the line beside the heavily armored; they will fall first and weaken the integrity of the formation. So there will be different types of units within the army, based on training and equipment. In both Rome and Greece, the poorer, less well equipped citizens fought as skirmishers, and the more prosperous farmers and tradesmen who could equip themselves with mail and shield and helmet formed the backbone of the phalanx or the legion. The richest of all owned horses, and these men formed the cavalry. Thus armies, even in notional democracies, were subdivided along lines of class and wealth.

  Does your army have an elite? Of course it does—what self respecting fantasy author can resist the urge to emulate Leonidas and his Spartans, or Arthur and his knights?

  The Persian Kings had a household guard of 10,000 men named the Immortals because their numbers were never allowed to fall below that level. The Thebans had the Sacred Band of 150 pairs of male lovers who fought and died like heroes under the hooves of Philip’s cavalry at Chaeronea. Alexander had his Companions, Harold his Huscarles, the Byzantine emperors their Varangian Guard. In every ancient and medieval society the ruler has had a picked band of troops he relies upon for security, loyalty, and to stand fast when all around them are turning tail. Of such men are great stories made. Most armies have a cadre of hard cases like these, and an author would be missing an opportunity were he not to include them in his forces in some form. After all, some people have to be heroes.

  Often, it is around these ‘heroes’ that the army accretes. Think of Joan of Arc, or William Wallace. While talking about massed armies and great campaigns, it’s important, especially for our purposes, to remember that individuals made a real difference in pre-modern wars. Men cared about the leaders they served under, and would do extraordinary things for them. Alexander the Great is a glowing example of this. Yes, he was born Royal, but he made himself into a legend of his time through sheer brilliance. After him, men in emulation shaved their beards off for hundreds of years, and even tried to hold their head at the cocked angle which was typical of him. Mary Renault puts it beautifully, in the words of the aged Ptolemy:

  He had a mystery. He could make anything see
m possible in which he himself believed. And we did it too. His praise was precious, for his trust we would have died; we did impossible things. He was a man touched by a god; we were only men who had been touched by him; but we did not know it. We too had performed miracles you see. (from Funeral Games, Pantheon Books, 1981)

  In some ways, the hero counts for everything. He comes first, and can drag the rest of the fighting men behind him like the tail on a kite.

  Let us say the hero and his army has been gathered together. Depending on the scale of the society involved the force can number in the hundreds or thousands. Imagine the numbers at a rock festival or a cup final, spread out across the countryside, all looking for somewhere to lay their heads. Those kinds of numbers can be sometimes hard to visualize, and the thought of trying to keep a grip of them all makes the head ache.

  The camp of a good-sized army will not be small enough to look round at a glance; it will have the complexity of a city. Men will bed down beside those they know—neighbors or old comrades. Within the army there will be rivalries, even conflicts. Perhaps the host has gathered together contingents of men who were at one time at war with one another.

  Now the nitty-gritty of the affair becomes ever more apparent. There’s an old saying that amateurs discuss tactics, while professionals talk of logistics. The troubles of the army hierarchy have only just begun.