07-20-2021, 01:09 AM
(07-18-2021, 01:24 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: Thank you for the feedback!
That's very interesting, I hadn't thought about that at all. In these stories where there's a lot of people from different parts of the world, I sometimes (well... often, apparently) use their nationality as a substitute for s/he or their name when referring to them. I'll see what I can do about making it a bit more subtle. All these strange words aren't strange to me for obvious reasons, so it's kind of hard picturing what someone encountering them for the first time might think.
On the other hand, I don't intend to make every single short story I write a self-contained introduction to the world and the lore, just in case it happens to be the first story a reader comes across. That doesn't really make sense to me
And no, I'm not familiar with the books you mention. My main inspiration for the military fantasy thing is probably David Gemmel.
No problem! I totally get it. I guess the thing to remember is that whatever you choose to use at any given time should serve to give the reader some bit of information they need and not distract them too much from whatever is happening on the page at that time. In a fantasy, you probably can't avoid using these terms fairly regularly without losing something of the world itself, though. You might consider if there are times when adjectives might work better, maybe to remind the reader that one character is bigger than another (when some tension that might/did lead to violence exists between them). There are some good bits where you explain what a person looks like or what makes them whatever nationality they are, but that kind of thing can also be doled out tactfully in other ways. Maybe you remind the reader that a dwarf-type is short and it has some positive effect on whatever task they have to do.
Honestly, I was never good at writing fiction, so I'm responding purely as a reader of fantasy here.
I have only heard of Gemmel. I need to add that to the list! I do recommend the Malazan Book of the Fallen (it's ten huge books long, though). It's pretty incredible, and it tells of a ton of different groups of soldiers campaigning around the world, and plenty of other stuff besides. I only recently became aware of just how much Erikson (cough) "borrowed" from Cook's Black Company books in terms of themes and general style. Both are great, but I do know that at least the first few Black Company books are significantly shorter than any of the Malazan books, if you ever wanted to dip into one for a test drive.