I’ve pretty much finished a rough draft of the final book in the Legends of the Red Sun series. I’ve got most of it done on Scrivener, and this is the point where I move everything to a Word document and start polishing, smoothing over cracks and so on. To say I’m relieved to be at this stage is an understatement, because writing this book has made me realise quite a few things about writing a long epic fantasy series.

1. It’s a marathon. You think finishing one novel is tough, tying up lots of novels, plot-threads, and personal character stories, and retaining continuity for years of your life is energy-draining work to say the least. The more complex you try to make your novels (i.e. sophisticated or subtle sub-plots, themes, references and so on) the more this bites you on the arse for the finale.

2. Creatively, writing the last book in the series sucks. I’ve tried for each of the first three novels to create self-contained stories, with new plots and characters. That approach gives me a huge amount of creative freedom, which is severely lacking in a novel that has to bring everything together. It’s a challenge to do so because you’re picking up old plots and are heading towards a resolution that was planned (in theory) ages ago, so much of what you create is pre-destined. That kills a lot of the creative spark.

3. I’ve discovered I have a new respect for those who write mammoth series, even Robert Jordan who seemed to relinquish control of his books. Sure there’s no excuse for many pages discussing the stitching dresses, but that goes to show what a toll it can take on the writer’s perception of time and detail.

4. This loss of control is why novels are often late. There are laws of motion working on plots. Things that were set into action ages ago suddenly crop up again, or need resolving. Much like life, things become more complex and tangled, and representing this when you have multiple points of view means that you have to write about things you didn’t intend to cover. You have to remember names, places and character traits you created years ago – a quick fact-check on Google won’t cut the mustard. You have to manage airtime in a totally different way. For the first novels, you didn’t have to do this as much.

5. The last books in a series are nearly always read by fewer people than the first book in a series, which really doesn’t help with motivation. You’re writing to a different, more hardcore crowd.

All of these combined factors can mean that it isn’t quite as much fun to write. All books are tough to create, sure, but when writing stops being as much fun, it becomes work. Essentially, as a writer, you’re bound by your own series. You’ve one hand tied behind your back. You’re hamstrung. You’re whatever simile or metaphor you can think of. What starts off as a neat expansion of a few ideas soon grows into an uncontrollable beast at times, and your job becomes not so much about telling that story as it is about controlling the beast and putting it back in its cage.

None of this is to say I haven’t put my heart into the project – quite the opposite. You start to feel extra love for it. But if you’re new writer trying to unleash a fantasy series upon the world, be careful what you wish for…

One of the questions I’ve been thinking about recently is how fantasy literature – or, strictly speaking secondary world fantasy novels – can be relevant to people. Much of this came about from seeing some of the fine coverage from the British Library Science Fiction exhibition, where there has been much discussion of the history of the genre and what that strand of literature aims or does not aim to do. Fascinating stuff, in and of itself. And there was a lot of talk of relevance. I know there’s a lot of talk of relevance to what or to whom, but to keep things simple, I’m speaking in terms of a cultural value outside of escapism – that there is additional commentary, there are more things to be deciphered, pored over, above and beyond the base layer of a good yarn.

Being a fantasy writer, I questioned the value and relevance of fantasy literature today. It’s something, as a writer, I want to always keep in mind. Sure, write a good story – absolutely nothing wrong with that whatsoever; I value the non-cerebral literature just as much as the heavy stuff – but from a creative perspective I get bored of writing for long periods if I’m not playing with certain concepts or themes, even though they might go unnoticed by the reader.

I see a couple of ways fantasy literature can be directly relevant. One is, like many great works of SF, to take a load of current concepts and write about them with exotics – H.G. Wells, Jonathan Swift and Imperialism etc. That’s the approach I sometimes prefer to take – most explicitly in The Book of Transformations, for example, when I was getting frustrated at the media’s portrayal of anarchism and what it meant. This examination of current concepts is actually a useful tool for a writer to deal with the stuff in their heads, and to get a subtle message across without being over-the-top about things.

Then there is symbolism, the Gene Wolfe approach, to layer stories with so much meaning and so many symbols, that you can spend most of your life trying blissfully to discover them. It’s the sort of thing that is, for example, linked to religious or mythological imagery, speaking of other great works and offering a reinvention or different interpretation. (I don’t find I have as much time to explore this as much as I’d like to.) Then there is a work that is intensely character-focussed, an effort to write a deeply moving and conflicted character that can stir something in people (though is this more in the hands of the reader than the author?).

So, what else? How can secondary world fantasies become more significant, culturally speaking? (And don’t say when it sells a bucket-load or gets its own TV series!) Or do you think these things are outside of our control?

An interesting debate in the Guardian on questioning whether or not fantasy can tell the truth, but it’s the notions of escapism that repeatedly crop up in such debates:

There is nothing wrong with escaping reality now and again. Like a well brewed ale, or a good malt whisky, a finely crafted escapist fantasy can be a thing of joy and beauty. But while the occasional tipple can be a good thing, most of us recognise that a bottle of Jameson’s a night is unhealthy for body, mind and soul.

An unfiltered diet of escapist fantasy blockbusters can be similarly unhealthy. As master anti-fantasist M John Harrison expresses it in his essay The Profession of Science Fiction while discussing the appeal of fantasy to young children terrified by adult life, “Many fantasy and SF readers are living out a prolonged childhood in which they retain that terror and erect – in collusion with professional writers who themselves often began as teenage daydreamers – powerful defences against it.”

And in the comments, the rather dated line (in internet years): “I think it’s undignified to read for the purposes of escape.”

There’s a whiff of the teenage rebel about these sentiments and, I’ll confess, when I was a much younger wannabe (unpublished) writer, for a few months I was all Hell Yeah and Fuck You to the Establishment (the Establishment being escapist fiction/commercial publishing). Then I came to realise that I’ve never quite understood the argument that reading for escape is undignified. And, as one of the comments states:

My natural reaction is to say, “I think it’s undignified to have sex in a bouncy castle, but it’s fun and I’m not going to stop just because you disapprove, sir.”

In the same way I’ll watch “Singin’ in the Rain” when I feel like it, and to hell with anyone who thinks that’s unhealthy and I should be spending my time watching Citizen Kane.

Indeed.

Here are a couple of issues I have with the dismissal of escapism. Firstly I would question: well, what exactly are readers escaping from, an Objectively existing external world? (The Objectivist undertones concern me.) Secondly I’d want to know, why would one do anything at all if it isn’t to escape/deviate from a given path in order to discover something else? So I would say that to read ‘to better oneself’ (the often opposing argument to escapism) is still actually reading for escapist pleasure, albeit a different pleasure and a different form of escapism (from oneself?).

Perhaps people might simply mean that reading for escapism means that it’s bad to switch off. It’s unhealthy for the mind, it’s lazy, or something like that. Without wanting to create a straw man of an argument, I remember reading someone on a blog or a message board years ago saying that they were serving on the front line in a war-zone, and reading for pleasure was all that helped them get to sleep at night. Perhaps, from the comfort of our own bedrooms, we can preach about the negatives of escapism – while we’ve currently nothing in our lives from which to escape. Escapism as a form of liberation seems highly dignified in some circumstances.

As far as fantasy is concerned, these aren’t the truths we’re looking for.