The symposium went off as planned. I have about four and a half hours of recorded conversation that I’ve been reviewing and thinking about and trying to put into some order in my head. I’m not going to make the recordings public. In order to get folks to talk about what I wanted to know, we had to talk about some of our colleagues - -both their strengths and their weaknesses. Broadcasting that kind of thing is unprofessional and counter-productive.

The participants were George RR Martin, S.M. Stirling, Melinda Snodgrass, Walter Jon Williams, Ian Tregillis, Ty Franck and myself. I expect the report on the symposium to take a while to get out completely. The topics we chewed over tend not to have particularly well-defined boundaries, and putting them into a taxonomy here is trickier than I expected it to be.

I’m beginning with this outline both to give an overview of what topics we discussed and provide myself with a sort of working plan for how I talk about it in public.

TOPICS:

1) Definition of Epic Fantasy:

This is in part an exercise in setting boundaries. What exactly is epic fantasy for the purpose of this particular conversation, and what isn’t. (I didn’t want the group to have to take on the burden of outlining all the differences between Laurel K. Hamilton and Jim Butcher in order to define urban fantasy, for example, when that wasn’t the subgenre I was interested in.)

I’ll summarize the definition we came up with here and then spend a full post on it later. Epic fantasy is fiction with an ahistorical setting and magic. That sounds really simple. We took a long time getting there, and we still don’t all agree.

2) The Role of Setting

One theme that arose in the conversation that I think deserves more attention (ie a separate blog post) is the role of the landscape as a character. Epic fantasy seems to have a great deal to do with place (not something I’d considered much when I first went into this). Tolkein’s Middle Earth, for instance, is filled with memorable places — Rivendell, the Mines of Moria, Mirkwood, etc. — that invite the reader’s imagination as much or more than the characters or plot.

One consequence of this that I at least hadn’t noticed was a massive tendency for readers to defect when the world itself is changed, but to stay on when the new book/trilogy/series is set within the same world.

3) The Hero’s Journey/Clute’s “Greening”/the plot

There are several ideas about the necessary and/or appropriate plot structure for a fantasy novel. I am comfortable with none of them, but when I write that post, I will do my best to outline them (as I understand them) and give an idea of their strengths and weaknesses.

The moral structure of the epic is closely related to this, since the plot is an explication and example of a moral system. Yeah, I hadn’t noticed that either, but it does help explain with The Lord of the Rings became a classic and The Worm Ourboros didn’t.

4) Fan Service

Oh, this one’s an interesting problem. We borrowed the term from anime where it’s used (I’m told) to refer to the scenes that may or not make sense, but that have to be there to meet the expectations and appetites of the fans. This issue is, I think, the rabbit hole that leads to a very strange and I suspect illuminating analysis of what genre writers (and probably all writers) do. The single term stretches from whether it’s okay to treat the readers with contempt to the tension between accessibility and sophistication to what exactly it means to “sell out”.

5) The Large Canvas: A Metaphor for Something

Throughout the conversation, certain phrases kept popping up: broad scope, painting on a large canvas, big stories. I’m not sure we managed to say explicitly what this was all a metaphor for (we don’t actually have canvases, and the big in stories isn’t actually word count, no matter what it seems). I’ll try to give an idea of what a “large canvas” actually means and what techniques we thought of that might serve it.

6) A Plan of Attack

Of course all of this was ultimately self-serving. I’ve just turned in the last of my Long Price Quartet books, and I’m looking down the barrel of planning the next project. The underlying agenda of this symposium was to help guide me in that. That, the final post on the subject, will outline what I think I need to do and how I intend to go about it. (This has a certain Babe Ruth hubris about it, I know, but I’ll do what I can.)

Next up: The Definition of Epic Fantasy