podcast friday

[sabotabby]

 Have you ever had a story that you're dying to tell but when you sit down to write it, you look at a blank page and then clean your grout? Or, conversely, you've written a novel but agents find it "not as gripping as they'd hoped"? In Wizards & Spaceships's "In the Beginning", Rachel and David talk to Shiraz Janjua of How The Novel Starts about story beginnings—who did it well, who didn't, and how the way SFFH beginnings have changed over the history of the genre.

P.S. Prologues and maps 4ever.

Comments

[smhwpf]

Sounds awesome!

Every fantasy novel (except those set in real places, for which the map already exists) needs a map. There are some otherwise excellent fantasy novels and series that lack a map, and it annoys me. I want to know where places are in relation to each other. Like, Charles de Lint really ought to have produced a map of Newford by now. It is really quite negligent.

[sabotabby]

Right? His books are screaming for it.

I would like to increase the fucking maps.

[greylock]

Is that 'Hark, A Vagrant'?

[sabotabby]

Yup.

[greylock]

Still one of my favourite web comics.
Not sure why I stopped checking it regularly.

[greylock]

That joke is *chef's kiss*.
I'll listen to the rest later because I have OPINIONS about maps.
Maps are magical.

(Also dramatis personae, especially as I get older and series get longer and longer).

[greylock]

Prologues I can easily live without.
The Star Wars crawl I reckon is the best ever.

Maps I can live without. They can add a lot. When I were a lad, I remember being captured by the maps in the Belgariad and Lord of the Rings as a kid. But the first time I saw them... they gave a huge sense of scope.
Later books.... less so. But even in something like the Feist books, there's a sense of the world(s) which I am pretty sure have never been visited.

One of my favourite maps is the Hyborean Age map that is overlaid with Europe and MENA.

Bulwer-Lytton ... a Nazi influence?
It's wild a single line obscured everything else he did.

[sabotabby]

A thing people don't recognize about Star Wars is the degree to which it breaks all received writing wisdom that followed, trying to emulate its formula. Like the crawl is a prologue. The opening scene is a prologue. Chapter 1 is Luke on Tattoine.

[greylock]

Yes, but what if we made the crawl loooong, and tedious?

(I've been watching some YT video essays on Conansploitation and the like, and hooboy, did people not get why Star Wars worked).

[radiantfracture]

hmmm that could be very useful to something I'm thinking about

[sabotabby]

It's useful to something I'm doing right now, and yet.