Some Great Questions from Tour

Hello beautiful people,

In my last newsletter, I promised that I would share a few answers to some of the amazing questions I was asked while on tour for Fate’s Bane and The Sovereign. There were so many good ones and lots I took notes on, so others may make an appearance. As always, you can drop other questions you have down below and I’ll put them in a question box to pull out when I can.

In the meantime, enjoy!

From the Writing Fighting panel I was on at world fantasy con:
How you balance accuracy and literary effect when writing fighting?

Answer: This question came. It’s been sitting in my head for a while in part because I answered with a bit of a silly answer at first, then went deeper, and yet still feel I didn’t get to the heart of it. But that’s the way of panels. There’s always more to say, and when you’re having a good conversation with your peers, there’s a synergy that keeps pushing the depths of the material at hand.

My silly answer was something like, “I strive for accuracy in all things,” which is silly because it’s a bit impossible and a bit untrue. It is impossible because I will probably never have [the chance] to do what my characters do. I will not actually have to lead an army of thousands of melee soldiers, and probably will not need to stab someone. So I will not have the experience to depict that precisely. There’s also the fact that I’m writing fantasy! There will be dragons and magic and that’s not something I can cling to accuracy with.

I do, however, like the work to be accurate insofar as I can make it. If I’m going to choreograph a fight scene, I want the actions to make sense. I want the wounds and their consequences to be real, and to require real solutions (or umm real magic ones). If I’m having armies march against each other, I want them to face real strategic problems and solve them in a way that is a credit to their commanders—or fail appropriately.

That said, what I am actually striving for is what a teacher of mine used to call truthiness. It’s not real truth, but the feeling of truth through the character. I don’t write each blow in the fight because that’s not the sort of truth I need. I need the reader to believe that the character is undergoing this trial, and that the stakes are what I have said them to be. I’m aiming for verisimilitude. I think there is value in not half-assing that.

That said, I also think there’s value in really cool shit. And sometimes that’s not got anything to do with truth.

From my event with Hannah Kaner in Edinburgh:
Love is an essential theme in your work, familial, sororal/fraternal, romantic and platonic. Why do you think love is such a driving force of great narrative?

Answer: This was a great question. I’m sure I’ll keep mulling it over in a lot of different forms, from essays to fiction. Love is one of those topic—massive and un-understandable in a few simple words. Hence, novel after novel.

The first thing I said is that love is a great story motor from a craft perspective. It makes people turn pages. It sells. See romance/romantasy. There are more think pieces about those genres than there need to be, so this won’t be one of them. (I’ve already written some of my own thoughts about relationships, particularly sex, in fiction.) I don’t know why it works so well, but it does! It does.

On stage that night, I wondered if it was a matter of wish fulfillment. If we are attracted to the magic of a love story in which love does change everything, including people, for the better. In the real world, I don’t know that this is true. There are plenty of people who will love someone and then hurt them with selfishness or a betrayal of some sort. Some might counter, then that is not love! but lo! I counter-counter and say that while self-sacrificial love may be an excellent love and possibly the highest form and expression of love (possibly; it may also be a form of self-effacement, a lack of self-love), we are complicated little monkeys capable of holding multiple and conflicting feelings within us at once. I can love my partner very much and still not want to give her my french fries (sorry, babe).

So anyway, finding that kind of love in fiction can be wish fulfillment. Personally, I prefer the love in my stories have a blend of the honesty humanity along with a little idealism, which is why my stories are rarely so cleanly happy. I am, personally, very interested in the ways we humans fuck each other over, even when we know we want something better. I think we are weak and selfish and capable of the most amazing generosity and care for one another. Sometimes within the same hour!

And so the other reason I write about love is because it is often the bright spot in a dark time. It makes the trials and the striving worth it. It is the only thing worth fighting for. In some way or another, I think it always comes down to that. We fight to save our lover, our children, our parents, our friends. We fight for our marginalized brethren. We fight so that others do not have to go alone. We fight so that we can laugh and love in freedom after. We make sacrifices to evil gods to bring our loved ones back from death.

You know. The usual.

From a book club event:
Who hurt you?! aka, Why do you write tragedies?

Answer: This is a hard question that I don’t know how to answer, really, even though I did my best in the book club at the time. Similar to the question about love, it is the kind of thing best answered by writing story after story until the tragic seems to no longer have a hold on me. Then, maybe I will understand.

In a talk I gave at the University of Kansas, an expansion on my Fantasy of War essay, I said that one reason many of us might play so much with the themes of war is because we haven’t experienced them, even though such much of our lives are shaped by conflict. (Obviously, many fantasy writers have also been soldiers, as well.) I wonder if there isn’t something similar in the seeking of sorrow.

Do I write tragedies, because, like war, I am fascinated also by this aspect of the human condition?

I don’t really know. But I do know that I have always been moved by the pathos of tragedy in a film. Joan of Arc is always one that sticks with me—the Leelee Sobeiski version is the first one I saw and even now when I watch it back, her plaintive cries—well, I can hear them even now. There is also a certain cry that ripped my guts out in the end of the third season of the Wheel of Time tv series. The end of the Traitor Baru Cormorant. The Fifth Season.

What is it about watching the good guy lose everything?

If love is a motor, I think loss is its dogged companion, the thing we are trying to outrun in the story, and sometimes, as it life, you can’t. Inevitably, you will lose something dear to you, and the only way to avoid that is to avoid love at all. To avoid desiring, striving, holding. To avoid these great expressions of human existence.

And so, more than just the gut punch of loss, I’m also interested in seeing what we do after. How do we recover from grief, from setbacks, from failure? “There’s always next time” we say, but sometimes there is no next time.

This is particularly salient to me as AI ghouls try to replace our dead loved ones with AI caricatures. We must learn to live without that which we cherished. We must learn to cherish that which we have, while we have it.

Also, I really like minor key music.

Another question from the Edinburgh event:

A very insightful one about how physicality and agency are intertwined in my work, how much is deliberate philosophy vs a projection of how I live my life getting onto the page. That’s a meaty meaty question that I would like to tackle in a proper essay, but I think, like the question of love and tragedy will be evergreen. Which will answer the second part of the question:

It is both deliberate and a function of how I live my life leaking onto the page. The question-asker also asked if I felt the things were separate and I don’t, not in this case. I’m certain there are some things making it into the books that are accidentally revealing me, maybe even about physicality, but I do try to be a self-aware person, and I read my drafts carefully in revision, looking at themes that arise. Sometimes they surprise me, but then I can be more deliberate with the crafting of them, with the exploration, the testing, the countering.

In a series about colonisation, though, where bodies are owned and traded just like the land, I was very deliberately exploring what choices we get to make about our own bodies, especially when someone else thinks they have a claim upon it.

On Mary Robinette Kowal’s My Favorite Bit column, I wrote about precisely this topic, featuring three scenes from The Unbroken.

One last question, also from the Edinburgh event:
How am I like my D&D/TTRPG character?

I will try to be more concise than I was at the talk, wherein Hannah yelled at me because I was going on a long ramble about my character’s name, Minzrrt Don’turden, which is a combination of my favorite dark elves, Minthara and Drizzt Do’urden. IYKYK.

I play a game called 13th Age with some homies, the GM is from my first sword school. When Jim asked me what my character looked like, I just sent a screen grab of my Baldur’s Gate tav because a) I didn’t know where else to find a character and b) she’s hot. Min is a Paladin of the Golden Order, once a bodyguard (cough escort cough) in the elven courts. Unfortunately, she fell in love, was rejected, and went into a steep, steeeeep downward spiral that landed her half a step from the hangman’s noose.

Which is NOT how we are alike. We are alike because…

• Well, in all honesty, there is much to be troubled about this trope, but dark elves who live above ground (I call them “daywalkers”) are often coded with the same sort of racism black people encounter in our world.
• She has a sword and thinks with her body
• She looks good in leather
• She likes the ladies and the ladies like her
• She slept with an elf who was actually a demon—

Like my fictional characters, pieces of me sneak into their interests and sensibilities, but part of the joy of the game (at the table and on the page) is being someone I’m not.

Also, she canonically struggles to read, which was an accident involving several fateful rolls and her -1 intelligence score. (Look, all the points went to her muscles and her charisma stats, sorry.)

Thanks again to everyone who came to one of the events and double thanks for those who asked these excellent questions! Audience questions are always my favorite part of the night, so keep them coming.

Until next time,

Stay sharp, my friends.

C. L.