Stuck at the beginning
Apr. 22nd, 2005 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI've been trying to make sense of what I want to do with Moon, Sun, Dragons for weeks now and I feel no closer to an answer today than I did when I started. It's really frustrating. And I think part of the reason it's frustrating is because I've been reading Dorothy Dunnet and Jaqueline Carey.
There are two things I took away from reading Dunnet: First, most fantasy is crap. It's set on hermetically sealed stages completely isolated from reality. The reality is that people have to eat, and that just getting food onto the table of a castle involves an incredible web of economic interactivity that everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, was aware of, and it was all human-powered. Her characters don't meet in bars, they lay on the grass outside of a church amongst the butchers, dyers, sewers, merchants, and louche nobles to discuss what's happening. When they do meet in taverns, taverns are busy places where real trade, not random background noise, is the order of the day.
The other thing I took away from reading it (she was a history professor and this was her era) was that trade was truly international. The precipitating crisis is a fight between a Dutch dyer's apprentice and a minor French nobleman on a trading vessel in Bruges, Netherlands, that had just come from Florence, Italy, around the bulk of France, and was on its way to Dover. The ship had aggregated spices from Egypt, jewels from Africa, and silks from as far away as China, all brought to Florence via other ships. There was an international mercantile network and a stock market as dynamic as today's.
Reading Carey, on the other hand, made me realize just how important having secondary characters is to the story. There really isn't a character in Kushiel's Dart that, once given a name, doesn't play a serious role somehow, something that raises you the reader up and then slams you down again. My problem seems to be that I've always been primarily a short-story writer: at most, three or four characters get center stage, and the rest are extras. I try not to make them spear-carriers likely to get killed, but still it's hard to see the many dozens of people I'll need to surround my trio with, or how I'll get them all underway.
Bleah.
There are two things I took away from reading Dunnet: First, most fantasy is crap. It's set on hermetically sealed stages completely isolated from reality. The reality is that people have to eat, and that just getting food onto the table of a castle involves an incredible web of economic interactivity that everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, was aware of, and it was all human-powered. Her characters don't meet in bars, they lay on the grass outside of a church amongst the butchers, dyers, sewers, merchants, and louche nobles to discuss what's happening. When they do meet in taverns, taverns are busy places where real trade, not random background noise, is the order of the day.
The other thing I took away from reading it (she was a history professor and this was her era) was that trade was truly international. The precipitating crisis is a fight between a Dutch dyer's apprentice and a minor French nobleman on a trading vessel in Bruges, Netherlands, that had just come from Florence, Italy, around the bulk of France, and was on its way to Dover. The ship had aggregated spices from Egypt, jewels from Africa, and silks from as far away as China, all brought to Florence via other ships. There was an international mercantile network and a stock market as dynamic as today's.
Reading Carey, on the other hand, made me realize just how important having secondary characters is to the story. There really isn't a character in Kushiel's Dart that, once given a name, doesn't play a serious role somehow, something that raises you the reader up and then slams you down again. My problem seems to be that I've always been primarily a short-story writer: at most, three or four characters get center stage, and the rest are extras. I try not to make them spear-carriers likely to get killed, but still it's hard to see the many dozens of people I'll need to surround my trio with, or how I'll get them all underway.
Bleah.
