It doesn't happen often. After I finish a great book, or story, I get a longing for the grandeur, the scale, the majesty, and the power of the thing, and - how can I convey it
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Thinking in mundanities gives you an in right there - people's lives keep going when the big epic stuff happens around them, and they fight for their mundanities when they get sucked in and their lives go to pot - someone has to round up the cows and stick 'em back in their pen, after all; someone has to make sure the bread gets baked and the streets stay passable and the that the laws get enforced (or not).
Not saying you have to write the mundane around the epic, but that the mundane that goes on inside the epic, the mundane that keeps going despite the epic, because it's necessary to human life, is what makes the epic *real*.
Some epics, you'd think your Heroic Band never used a latrine, for all the attention that gets paid to details like that.
(laughs) that's true, and I think, as you do, that it's an advantage. Certainly if I ever wrote something so big it would be from the inside, with the little details and daily things given importance (if only because that's what El Hero/ine is missing out on? lolno, I have more sense than to make details only special cause of that.)
But yeah. It's not Heroic Band I'm thinking so much as - well, lots of people taking part in a great change, something that changes the entire world. There would be Various Viewpoints. Yes.
There are times when I feel like ATS is epic in, at the very least, length and breadth of the timespan that I'm tackling. It never ceases to terrify me. There's a great sense of "How can I write a story over ≈30 years when I don't even know what ≈30 years feels like?" hanging over my head - and then I look at the actual *scope* and it's not the whole world*, it's just TBI. All of my older characters and some of my younger ones will be dead by the end of the books. (And I'm not even sure whether it's a Decline And Fall story anymore; with each decision I make the ultimate ending branches off into more and more potential directions, but that's another blither for another time.)
I don't think I could write a genuine epic without tongue firmly in cheek - whenever I think, "SRS BZNS" I start cracking up.
*except where it is - technological revolution spreads like fire
(nodnod) it works for epic-ish, I think, in that it goes through some real lows and real highs, and that its story spans a huge change in the world. Ditto, I think, for Olinscarr, with the same qualifiers.
I think they could fit at a mid-level of epic - a realistic level of epicness - I don't know what would be considered "genuine epic".
And now my mind is asking, "What is epic?" Because there's a certain kind of story that inspires these awe-filled feelings in me, and there's a certain type that doesn't.
Perhaps ... epic could be subdivided: majestic epic versus realistic epic versus herioc epic versus mythic epic. Because certainly there's things I read that I sit back and feel wow because of that, if I define epic as something that, as above,
1) has a great importance to the world it's set in 2) has far-reaching consequences 3) encompasses a great thing in the story/in the reader.
So - now I'm thinking it through there'd seem to be different kinds of epic, and they don't need to be high fantasy or straight-up mythos to be
( ... )
Not saying you have to write the mundane around the epic, but that the mundane that goes on inside the epic, the mundane that keeps going despite the epic, because it's necessary to human life, is what makes the epic *real*.
Some epics, you'd think your Heroic Band never used a latrine, for all the attention that gets paid to details like that.
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But yeah. It's not Heroic Band I'm thinking so much as - well, lots of people taking part in a great change, something that changes the entire world. There would be Various Viewpoints. Yes.
Reply
I don't think I could write a genuine epic without tongue firmly in cheek - whenever I think, "SRS BZNS" I start cracking up.
*except where it is - technological revolution spreads like fire
Reply
I think they could fit at a mid-level of epic - a realistic level of epicness - I don't know what would be considered "genuine epic".
And now my mind is asking, "What is epic?" Because there's a certain kind of story that inspires these awe-filled feelings in me, and there's a certain type that doesn't.
Perhaps ... epic could be subdivided: majestic epic versus realistic epic versus herioc epic versus mythic epic. Because certainly there's things I read that I sit back and feel wow because of that, if I define epic as something that, as above,
1) has a great importance to the world it's set in
2) has far-reaching consequences
3) encompasses a great thing in the story/in the reader.
So - now I'm thinking it through there'd seem to be different kinds of epic, and they don't need to be high fantasy or straight-up mythos to be ( ... )
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