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It’s been too long since I was working on the next Merry book, SWALLOWING DARKNESS. So I printed off the first fifty pages, which is what I’ve got. I reread them, made some small notes. Mistypes, mis-spellings, word order; small stuff. I also started the notes about the research I know I’ll need to make some of the scenes work. Or, to make certain I’ve got the real life details as real as possible, so that all that fantasy can seem more solid. Reality is the backbone of your world, the rest comes from that. Or maybe the backbone of the world is the character, or the world building. I guess it depends on how you want to orient it as a writer.
But either way you cut it, you have to be real enough on the real world for the reader to belief all the fantastic stuff. If you can’t make the reader believe your main character is ling in a hospital bed with real nurses and real doctors, then they’ll never buy the eternally young, eternally handsome, harem of supernatural warriors. It takes a very serious dose of reality to get readers to follow you to faerie land, and believe that they actually made the visit.
I’ll leave you with two quotes.
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.
Tom Wolfe
Again, always nice to know that other writers have found the same truths. I find it comforting when I’m stuck in my office, by myself, trying to conjure worlds from thin air, that others have gone before me. If they can do it, I can do it.