How did you decide on the writing style for the series?
The Riyria Revelations was born out of my trying something new. My last novel before this, even though it was written years previously, was a true literary fiction piece. Short on plot, long on character development, with sentences that were composed with great care and required a tremendous amount of contemplation and polishing. As I already mentioned, I loved the fun of Harry Potter. This wasn’t Steinbeck; it was simple, and light, and just a good enjoyable read. Riyria just flowed from my head to the keyboard. I wrote the first book in a month, the second a month later. Its style was designed to be light. I had a huge story to tell, one of complex themes, numerous characters, and dozens of twists where things are not always what they seem. This idea would be unmanageable in a heavy-handed style. I’m already asking a great deal of the reader—to keep track of everything that happens over the course of six separate novels as if they were one long book. To make the trip as comfortable as possible for my readers I attempted a style I had never tried before—invisibility. The idea is to make the story pop off the page and make the writing disappear. Neither awkward prose nor eloquent phrases should distract the reader from immersion in the action and the world unfolding before them. I have needed on many occasions to rewrite passages that were too pretty, too sophisticated, for fear the reader would notice them and pause to reflect. I have other works that do this. For the Riyria Revelations I wanted to keep it simple. The result, I have discovered—much to my delight—is a book that reads like a movie in the reader’s mind. As you can tell, a lot of my references have been from television and movies, and I think that also sets the tone and pace in these books. I’m not so much trying to create another Lord of the Rings so much as a good old-fashioned Errol Flynn movie or sixties Western.
This, then, is the “light-hand” approach that some have read about on my website. While I know that I am not the first to employ it, it remains something of a rarity in the fantasy realm. For me, this is a great disappointment, for while I enjoy a beautifully written novel—I love a great story.
Why did you choose to use such established fantasy tropes in your series?
For years now I have heard fans of the traditional “Tolkienesque” fantasy novels lament the repetitive themes and exhausted archetypes of the genre. They are tired of the same old hero-vanquishing-evil and want something new, something more real, more believable. Which to me sounds like someone saying they love chocolate, they just wished it wasn’t so chocolaty and that it tasted more like vanilla. Many writers struggle to appease, whether that means turning an old theme on its head or going for the gritty and morbid. During the past few decades this trend has resulted in fantasy going dark: Evil often wins. Heroes don’t exist.
This happened before.
The motion-picture industry turned out happy endings for decades, then in the sixties things began to change. Gritty, realistic films began to pop up, and antiheroes like The Man with No Name arrived in the Italian Western. The trend solidified in the seventies, with moviemakers like Scorsese, De Laurentiis, Coppola, and Kubrick, who often focused on complex and unpleasant themes. It was theorized that the public was tired of the old good-triumphs-over-evil stories because it was so out of sync with the realities of the American experience during the age of Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and the Sexual Revolution.
Then Star Wars debuted in 1977 and everything began to change again.