I’ve always been a Glen Cook fan. Long before “gritty” became a marketing hook for so many fantasy novels, he was a darker counterpoint to writers like Raymond E. Feist. Don’t get me wrong—I loved me some Feist when I was growing up—but I was always drawn to Cook’s stories about seedy mercenaries.

So I’m more than happy to claim him as an influence. That said, I do hope I’ve done enough to distinguish my chronicler-among-a-company tale to avoid the dreaded derivative tag. Otherwise my post here is going to look awfully silly.

The premise of Scourge of the Betrayer is fairly simple: a young chronicler named Arkamondos is bored archiving the mundane histories of middling merchants, and agrees to join a foreign military band to record their exploits.

This has some parallels to, among other things, Glen Cook’s Black Company series, where the chronicling of their exploits is an important motif. Did they influence you?

Thanks for the well-wishes. I agree that it’s difficult to write something wholly original (lots of critics and professors subscribe to the theory that there are only a handful of types of tales out there). Writers that go to great lengths to separate themselves from anything that might have come before sometimes up drowning in the deep end of the experimental pool. Almost any story, SF or otherwise, is going to call to mind something that preceded it.

In my mind, though, there’s a wide difference between a trope and a derivative cliché.

Writers don’t necessarily have to try to emulate Miéville or Vandermeer or their ilk (who I would argue *are* exploring territory that, if not wholly new, is far outside what most readers experience), but I think they should be aware of what clichés crop up in that genre, and to avoid them if possible. Or failing that, if they consciously use them, to torque them or put them in a new light.

Can you write about the farmer boy who turns out to be the long lost heir, gets mentored by a curmudgeony old coot, rescues the kingdom from the dread lord, and gets the girl? I suppose. Especially if you’re willing to play with the reader expectations that naturally come front-loaded with a storyline like that. But if you simply recycle that bit without attempting to at least try to change things up, I suppose I don’t see the point.

If I feel like I’m anticipating every bend in the road as I read, and nothing surprises or delights me, I’m going to move on. But that cold just be me–I have three young kids and little free time, so I’m an unforgiving bastard of a reader.

Best,
Jeff

It’s almost impossible anymore to write something that hasn’t been told. Even traditional fables have tons of variants on the same theme, across different cultures. Yet they persevere throughout the ages, and are retold to each generation, in one form or the other.

I’m comfortable with the tropes, personally, and employ several. Theoretically, I make them my own, but there’s no reinventing the wheel, so why bother – it’s almost an insult to the reader. What I try to focus on is to take that wheel and put it somewhere unexpected, or go further back, and discover why the wheel is the way that it is. (Well, not literally wheels, of course.)

There’s only so many ways that “departing from the classic tropes” can go, before they go too far and THAT becomes the new trope. For instance, ‘gritty’ is the new big thing – but that’s going to wear itself thin. Fantasy wasn’t built upon rape scenes, and readers will get tired of that, just like they grew tired of the peasant boy who becomes a king. After awhile, a good old-fashioned ‘boy becomes King’ yarn will be more popular (again) than Blackie McBlackNight the dirty rotten scoundrel’s tale.

What’s an author to do? Write a good story: cream always rises to the top.

Good luck with your debut!