Ayan Agarwal: "Dear Max Gladstone: Make sure your novels are, well, novel"

Dear Max Gladstone: Make sure your novels are, well, novel

By Ayan Agarwal

I’m not a difficult man to please. All I ask is that you dare to be different! I swear, I’ll be leaps happier that you took a swing at a wild concept than if you stick with the classic tropes and give me another Hobbit. Every fantasy fanatic has read tons of those. We still remember our favorites - because they were different.

I’ll acknowledge that I’m not your average fantasy consumer. You won’t find many Ayan’s out there who appreciate the value of an interesting twist on fantasy or the blending of seemingly strange themes. Economically speaking, it makes sense to stick with what works. I get it. Publishing derivative texts seems to be more successful than taking a risk on something fresh. There’s also a distinct familiarity in the standard tropes of fantasy that are guaranteed to leave the reader content. But I don’t think fantasy is designed to leave a reader feeling content. I read fantasy to dive into an incredible concept. I want my rear to go numb on the toilet seat because I’m so captured by the pages flipping through my hands.  

My ‘narrative kink’ is simple: make it novel. When I was in 3^rd grade, I essentially stopped reading fiction because I felt I had read it all. I had read all the classics and seen all the sights. Every new book I picked up seemed like something I’d read earlier – just under different circumstances with slight modifications. The Hero’s Journey made fantasy almost formulaic: An unexpected / unprepared hero finds a mentor, kills a beast, saves/defends humanity, and falls in love somewhere on the way. Woo hoo.

 I can point out dozens of incredibly memorable story moments that could be defined as ‘narrative kinks’. But I’ve realized my true kink doesn’t come from a plot element. Rather, reading a concept that completely turns my head around makes a book memorable for me. It’s the scenes where you stop and appreciate the author’s creativity and the story’s incredible framework that are memorable. I think many of the familiarities we see throughout science fiction can be chalked up to common human hopes. For example, space travel is seen from Star Wars to Star Trek to Ender’s Game. Yet, each story takes this theme and processes it in a unique way. In Star Wars, one man/woman faces powers of galactically proportion. Star Trek prompts the reader to determine the balance between exploring the universe and finding peace. Ender’s Game moves into an analysis of xenophobia and human psychology, looking at the loneliness that exists in the universe. Though all based loosely on the same framework of space, each of these stories is memorable for me. Thus, I don’t ask that the fundamentals of the story be wild for the sake of being unique. I mean, we all know where that leads (Mrs. Townsend mentioned this man’s wonderful work in class one day. Though, to be fair, she told us not to google him. Curiosity killed the cat.)

Take Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, for example. The story’s framework is incredibly trope-y. It’s similar to every stereotypical fantasy book ever written, but still one of the best I’ve read. This book stood out to me for it’s consciousness of it’s own tropeyness. In the very first pages, the story presents two hunters in a lilac wood debating the existence of unicorns. These characters have a conversation and eventually agree that fairy tales are not real (while simultaneously existing in one). Moments like this throughout the book made it incredibly humorous and unique. Beyond the comedy, The Last Unicorn also changed the classic themes of fantasy novels. Beagle presented the theme of belief as the blurring of two different worlds: the familiar and the fantastic. In all other fantasy novels I’ve read, belief is based entirely around a world created by the author. For the first time, I felt as if the world built within the book could only exist with pieces of my world. It was inspiring, memorable, and narratively-kinky.     

So there you have it. I don’t expect for fantasy authors to start completely redefining the genre. Classical tropes are classical for a reason. It works. It’s good. It’s just not great. Break the mold, try something incredible, and - most importantly - be novel.