Michael Wettengel

3-27-2015

In the Reach of Tension

Landfall, the fiction that I have submitted for your review (and hopefully your

amusement as well), seeks to challenge the dry status-quo of genre fantasy fiction. By that I

mean, the fantasy that liberally uses heroic warriors fighting the forces of darkness while flinging

magic, swinging swords, and riding anything from horses to dragons. Of course, there are

outliers in the world of fantasy that break free from those repetitive trends but unfortunately, they

are in the minority. My hope is to have Landfall join that happy minority where it can jolt a bit of

life into the genre which largely seems set on repeating itself well into the ground and out of

sight of real academic attention and respect.

That main driving force, that piston which seems set and ready to drive genre fantasy into

a deeper hole is something I’d like to call Positive Tension. Positive Tension is the insidious

force the feeds off of the damaging clichés of genre fantasy, such as its over-attention to violence

and lack of attention to its physiological effects and its apparent lack of care for the malleability

of character and chances for their actions to be read in more subjective, human ways.

Subjectivity is of particular importance for Landfall since, like real humans, the

characters in that novel are (ideally) somewhat morally flexible, often holding controversial

opinions- controversial to either the society or people around them or even to the rest of their

person. Everybody in Landfall sees the characters in different ways and through different lights.

So why shouldn’t the reader do the same? It should never be easy to figure out who is the “hero”

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or the “villain” in a truly human story. However, genre fantasy tends to disagree with that; my

own response to Positive Tension, Negative Tension, throws that disagreement right back at it.

But to see just how those Tensions form, I must be surgical in examining and displaying just

what grinds my gears sometimes about the genre I love so much.

As mentioned before, genre fantasy has developed some bad habits over the years and

unfortunately, those bad habits have become stereotypes of the genre as a whole. As such,

fantasy (and indeed most other genre fiction) seems to be kept at arm’s length from the prestige

and attention of literary fiction with a few exceptional authors being able to break free of that

mold. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter spring to

mind. However, the grip of those habits is still undeniable, even to the point where plenty of

them are acknowledged and even encouraged in guides to writing fantasy, such as R.A. Salvatore

and Philip Athan’s, The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction (2010).

To immediately reference The Guide, R.A. Salvatore remarks in the foreword that,

“Perhaps more than any other genre, fantasy is about the hero’s journey… the idea of one man or

woman grabbing a sword and defeating the dragon and saving the village is quite appealing.”

(Salvatore, 5) As appealing as it is, though, the idea of one person trying to do so much and

actually accomplishing it is, perhaps fittingly, a flight of fantasy. However, while the genre has

no shortage of imagination, what it lacks is humanity. Even the act of taking up arms against an

enemy as intimidating and coming away unscathed is a breach in human believability.

Violence has been the tool of fantasy genre heroes since their first renditions in the epics

of Beowulf or Song of Roland. It is a hero’s task to slay his or her enemies, whether they be

dragons, the forces of an evil empire, or the hordes of the undead. The hero in fantasy must use

their skills with swordplay and (usually) magic to carve swathes through whatever forces oppose

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him or her. Incidentally, if the idea of genre fantasy being a way for authors and readers to

experience power fantasies is starting to sound more viable, there is a reason for that. Most genre

fantasy has always been concerned with it’s the actions of the hero rather than the hero as a

person. Violence is used to propel the plot along and is also a way to remind the readers just how

“awesome” a hero is. Because, let’s be honest with ourselves, just because some genre fantasy is

a playground for power fantasies doesn’t mean we all wouldn’t like to ride a dragon or throw a

fireball once in our lives. And yet, it does no favours for the stigma against the fantasy genre.

The emphasis on violence and its sheer weightlessness (something I’ll get to in a moment) has a

tendency to make the plots of traditional fantasy works feel very blasé or unimportant. The hero

is faced with an enemy, he or she uses his or her Author-given powers to defeat it and then the

narrative marches on to its next impressive set-piece or battle sequence. Genre fantasy has a bad

habit of forgetting that in order to have a story, characters are far more important than pure plot.

For instance, character-driven narratives are a recognized and respected subgenre in the literary

world. However, narratives driven entirely by plot and a retelling of action are called history

textbooks.

As alluded to before, fantasy tends to treat its violence very weightlessly. Heroes, in their

most clichéd, tend to transform from the young and the naïve to the mighty and heroic in a

relatively short amount of time (a handful of years seems to be the usual average). Going from a

usually idyllic and peaceful existence to one practically gorging itself on violence seems to be a

rather shocking shift of tone. However, that is usually not acknowledged in genre fantasy. The

horror of real violence, no matter the scale, never seems to affect the hero’s psyche in any

permanently negative way. Most times, the hero only becomes wiser or more skilled from battle

rather than burdened with psychological damage. Indeed, the aforementioned weightlessness of

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the plot rears its head here, turning one of the most traumatizing acts a human can commit into

showy spectacle. In most cases, there is not even a realization by the hero that they have become

jaded or uncaring about the deaths of so many other living creatures that fall to them or fall for

them in battle. The idea of psychological damage is just rarely ever referenced at all. In fact, the

only time that violence seems to affect the traditional genre fantasy hero is when a close ally,

friend, or loved on dies (more on this over-poetic-ness of fantasy plots will come later). And the

reason for that may very well be that the death of a close companion will just be another tool to

move the story’s plot along. Introspection and reflection on the terrors of murdering, even for a

potentially good cause, do not move the plot along to its next fantastical battle. So those are often

avoided. In other words, we readers are given heroes to watch and read about, not people.

Naturally, this is hardly realistic. Hero’s solve problems. People have to live with them.

For a final point on the subject of violence and the hero’s skill at arms, I turn to the hero’s

weapon, i.e. the sword. The sword is the typical fantasy hero’s extension of his or her personal

physical power and skills with violence. Through the sword the hero imposes his or her will on

the story, taking life away from enemies with skill and righteousness. Roland’s Durandal,

Arthur’s Excalibur, and Aragorn’s Andúril, are just a few in the preposterously long list of

examples of blade-toting heroes (or, do the blades tote the heroes from battle to battle?) from

genre fantasy and old legends. The reason for the inclusion of the old legends was to show that

this fascination with the sword as the hero’s primary weapon of evil-slaying has a very long

history. And that would only make sense given the historical connotations of the sword. The

sword was, after all, the de facto weapon for the knightly sort. A mixture of wealth and skill was

needed to wield or even own a sword, keeping it out of the reach of many in medieval society.

And as such, a knightly man was required to wield a sword. Medieval chivalry has made its mark

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on the morals of fantasy heroes who, despite their gender, backstories, or otherworldly powers,

tend to exhibit the chivalric codes of honour, loyalty, and compassion towards friends.

Unfortunately, chivalry is only an ideal; it is a code of wishful thinking and hopes rather than an

ideology that was consistently followed through historically.

I picked a bone with the unrealistic nature of typical fantasy genre heroes a few

paragraphs back. Well, I’m here to pick yet another bone until the whole skeleton falls apart like

a Jenga tower. Perhaps in fantasy worlds men and women can be heroes. Despite their flaws, the

author’s intentions will make them out to be truly heroic. Meanwhile, whatever good points the

villain may have in his or her actions, he or she will always end up as being just the villain

anyway. That, of course, is hardly realistic. The concept of subjectivity is missing from the

current fantasy genre. “Hero” and “villain” are only words, after all. One character’s hero is

another’s villain and so on. That is simply part of the trappings of real life. However, Athans

seems to disagree, saying, “Often the hero and the villain are after the same or similar goals, but

for different reasons and with different intended results,” (Athans, 26). So, even though the hero

and villain in a fantasy narrative may have some similarities with the villain at first, ultimately

the two are locked into their archetypes. Despite what genre fantasy may have us believe, there is

no necessary connection between a character being a hero and a character being a protagonist.

The latter can, and often does, exist without the former. The same goes for being a villain and an

antagonist. It is too often that villains in genre fantasy are portrayed as being simply “evil,” or

“wholly beyond redemption,” which reeks of taking an easy way out of a mesmerizingly

complex issue. To attempt to distill characters down to the denominator of “good” or “evil” does

a great disservice to the complexity of the human mental and emotional landscape because it

does not allow any subjectivity to piece the characters. A potentially uncomfortable truth is that,

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as humans, we are never truly “good” or “evil” and can’t be neatly categorized as such. Every

serial killer has some troubled or damning past which damaged them beyond repair and every

champion for a downtrodden cause has some kind of controversial thoughts in their heads or are

at least a little unpleasant to be around sometimes.

Most people in real life are difficult to immediately take a liking to. We know so little of

people when we first meet them that it’s hard to instantly tell if their personalities are compatible

with ours. So when a reader first meets a character, why shouldn’t they behave the same way?

Why must the heroes immediately come off as noble or adventurous or brave as soon as the

readers meet them? Debate is usually not allowed for the primary characters of genre fantasy.

Perhaps the hero’s sidekicks of allies are more slippery on the moral slope and perhaps the

villain has some underlings that are honourable or compassionate but the heroes and villains will

still be untouchable and thus, un-relatable. They even feel weightless in their inhumanity.

Athans writes in the Guide about planning out one’s fantasy characters, “Don’t even

name your characters yet… for now in your notes, use placeholders like HERO, VILLAIN,

LOVE INTEREST, FOIL, WISE MAN, and so on.” (Athans, 43) On the surface, that piece of

advice may seem to be helpful, after all there are more important things to focus on in the story

than the names of the characters. However, Athans’ advice shows some of what is wrong with

the characters in genre fantasy; the characters are assigned roles that they must adhere to.

Characters in fantasy are too-often given archetypes to fit into such as the wise old mentor

(bonus points if they look anything like Gandalf) and they lose some of their humanity as a

result. The fantasy characters that fall into archetypes just go through the motions of their molds,

their actions often dictated to them beforehand so that they can play their role and let the hero

continue to shine above them all. If the fantasy genre wants to be as respected as literary fiction,

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its writers must understand that archetypes only make stories feel repetitive and dry. It is the

flexibility of humanity that keeps characters feel like interesting and diverse people who could

realistically exist outside of the bonds of the story. I remember a piece of advice I once heard

about world-building (apologies on not being able to remember the exact source) that said

something to the effect of, “Your world must be able to exist and run without the characters there

to see it.” In other words, once the reader closes the book, the world should be believable enough

to keep running without a plot to push it along. The same should and could be said for characters.

They must be human enough, effected by human problems and have human dreams beyond what

the plot prescribes to them to make them feel truly believable and realistic. Otherwise, it will feel

like the hero is just on puppet strings and being pulled around the world by the author.

On a slightly more metaphysical note, consider the author as God in his or her created

world. It may seem like a concept that came right out of a fantasy novel and that is only fitting. It

has become apparent to me that most genre fantasy relies on the author being a kind of

omnipotent force, ready to move his or her creations on strings to make them fight battles or fit

into archetypes on their whims. Given the earlier point about the author shuffling their creations

off to fight in spectacle battle after spectacle battle, perhaps this is hardly surprising. In genre

fantasy, it truly does seem that the author must micromanage every action and event so that the

story meets a certain quota of impressive action. Likewise, the author must play God to ensure

that the designated hero will stay the hero despite flaws or hardships and the villain will stay the

villain. This feeling of artificial manipulation of human complexity and subjectivity does the

fantasy genre no favours when characters are meant to be viewed just one way by the audience.

Even if characters within the story debate over whether or not the hero is truly heroic, author

intention pokes through the fabric of the story like divine intervention. Reader debate is not

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allowed about the characters or about their actions. Subjectivity is not encouraged in the

traditional fantasy genre characters; they are what the author has created them to be and they

should be interpreted in one way, whether that be heroic, villainous, funny, sad, endearing, etc.

Additionally, and perhaps a bit paradoxically, the author playing God can sometimes

make both the action feel light and weightless while making the characters arcs and stories feel

unrealistically heavy. Poetics are all-too-often tossed about as ways to fill in the blanks about

why the hero must fight the villain and why the grand heroic journey must begin in the first

place. Consider one of the most over-used plot initiators in all of fiction— the death of a loved

one at the hands of the antagonist or the antagonist’s henchmen. Unfortunately, that seems to be

a very easy way out of crafting a character that can take issue with the world or people around

him due to engrained moral views and thus interacts with the world in engaging ways. After all,

who wouldn’t want to pursue the man/woman/dragon/beast/demon/angel/god that slew a loved

one? Actually, a good many people. And that is because, life is often unforgiving in how quickly

it doles out death. Nobody but the hero of a story could have the strength and Author-given

power to fight against the malevolent force that destroyed their life. Meanwhile, in the real

world, loved ones can die from a prolonged with fight disease, a street mugging, a car accident,

drug overdosing, or sometimes something as cosmically cruel as bad genes or a hereditary

illness. Too few fantasy novels paint poverty, social unrest, disease, or any myriad of other

realistic destructive forces as the true antagonist. While it is true that individuals can often wield

tremendous power over others (it helps if they have swords or know people who have swords), it

is truly all-too-convenient for a high-rank leader of the designated faction of evil to be the one

personally or at least closely responsible for the death of the designated hero’s loved one(s) or

friend(s). It is overly-contrived and has the author’s fingerprints all over it. Naturally, an author

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must craft his or her narrative and plot but keeping it in the realms of reality not only helps to

disguise those fingerprints but it allows the story to touch so many more lives through

experiences that all of us have felt but would rather not have. Most real people would much

prefer to have their loved ones die at the hands of an identifiable individual that they might have

a chance of fighting back against rather than having to watch those they care about slowly die for

years from an incurable illness or crippling debt.

All of what I have spoken of up until now as I dissect genre fantasy has been leading up

to the concept which I made to be an umbrella term to encapsulate the bones I picked earlier.

This term goes by the name of Positive Tension (though it also has a counterpart in something

I’m calling Negative Tension which I’ll get to later). Tension is a central feeling used throughout

many different narrative’s plots and, in a way, is the driving force behind its events. Tension is

what keeps readers reading and wanting to see what happens next. That tension gives the plot’s

events some kind of meaning, it is the quickening of the narrative’s heart as it nears some critical

point in its life. As a result, the readers should feel their pulses quickening too as they dive

further into the plot.

Positive tension comes from an expected positive outcome. Consider the magician. We

expect his tricks to amaze and amuse us, so there is a tension of waiting and counting the

moments until he pulls the dove out of his hat or makes money explode out of a fireball.

We are enraptured by the tension or impatience of something fantastic about to unfold.

Negative tension comes from an unexpected negative outcome. Consider everyday life.

When we climb into our cars, will we be blindsided by a drunk driver? Will the water in

our showers come out with unsafe levels of minerals and iron? Will the stores or banks

we visit be terrorized by gun-toting robbers while we’re still there? We tend not to

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consider all of these questions on a daily basis, elsewise we would go mad and become a

shut-in (which are not requirements for becoming a novelist, as it turns out) but we do

realize that we have very little power in those kinds of situations. We have no special

magical powers to defend ourselves or alter our fates when darkness comes knocking.

I intentionally used the comparison of positive tension to a magician’s trick rather than,

say, Christmas morning, because it emphasizes what positive tension truly is. It is enjoyable,

cathartic, and euphoric but it is also highly theatrical. There must be an assurance of success that

baits our anticipation. Through good showmanship and bombast, the threat of failure is rendered

all but gone. So, we wait to see just how high in the limit is for the inevitable crescendo. Even

for us optimistic people, how often can we say that we were assured of success? How often do

we find ourselves in life filled with an invigorating kind of tension, waiting for the next great

thing to happen? Not very often, I would wager. Life is full of uncertainties; with so many

people in such a large world all wanting the same thing through different methods, we can never

quite be sure when we will be caught up in the machinations of somebody else’s plans. We have

no magical powers and no mythical beasts to call on as allies to help us solve these problems of

ours. We have no certainly of success because we, being all human beings, are not truly too

different from one another. Thus, none of us are truly better than each other. So, we can’t just

light somebody on fire with our minds if they try to rob us or threaten our families.

But when a sword-wielding, magic-flinging, dragon-riding hero soars over an entire

offending nation, scaring them all out of their wits, he is almost certainly above (no pun

intended) all of the rest of the people who flee below him. That superior nature, that certainty of

success, is what gives genre fantasy its unfortunately strong positive tension. For characters that

can weave spells and swordfight and not feel the burden of all of the bloodshed they have

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unleashed, we as readers are found not in rapt attention to see if they will survive to the next day

but how will they survive. Will they perform some fascinating maneuver on their dragon and

make an attacking army head for the hills? Or perhaps the hero will find a new power deep

within himself that steals his victory out of the jaws of defeat? I mentioned before that the people

of genre fantasy sometimes feel weightless. Well, when the story’s narrative grows out of those

weightless characters, their narrative also becomes weightless. There is a disconnect between us

as regular folks in this regular world of ours and the man with his dragon. We do not live his

experiences and connect with his life. Instead, we live a kind of fantasy of the author. I’m sure

most of us without a fear of flying would love to steer a dragon and tear through the clouds at

high speeds. And that is what positive tension gives us a feeling of. It is us waiting for the next

hit, the next high we experience as we live a dream of power and guaranteed success.

Positive Tension is the crescendo to all that genre fantasy is failing to do. It is failing to

build realistic characters and characters that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. In other

words, fantasy authors are not making enough human beings. They are making characters to fit

into archetypes but not real people. And as a result, entire plots can become just as weightless as

the “HERO” and the “VILLAIN” and the “LOVE INTEREST” that play their roles in it. So, the

whole genre can become almost totally un-relatable to us readers if handled in such a way and,

unfortunately, it seems that the genre nowadays is known for being all and more of all of what I

had mentioned and has a second-class citizen kind of status compared to literary fiction.

Landfall, however, has something to say about that status.

After attempting to exorcise the demons I found in the fantasy genre, let us see what

Landfall is doing differently. Firstly, I don’t think that my work with Landfall is the panacea that

will solve everything that currently gnaws at the ankles of the fantasy genre but I think William’s

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story can at least offer a little reprieve from the usual storm of heroes and villains and dragons

that thrives in the genre currently. After all, I am not the first author to attempt to inject things

like subjectivity and realism into the genre. George R.R. Martin is certainly an author who

knows that humanity is more important than fantasy, even when writing genre fiction. His

treatment of his characters as people rather than heroes or villains means they are always

somewhat controversial in thought and action and always very much in real danger. Perhaps it is

already obvious that he is a big inspiration for me and my writing. But we are not here to talk

about Song of Ice and Fire, we are here to examine Landfall’s brawl against fantasy clichés.

However, before individual points are addressed, Landfall’s intentions must be addressed

first. After all, without those being made clear, Landfall may appear to be completely reactionary

and contrary to typical fantasy with no deeper love or passion behind it. Landfall is supposed to

be simple good literature, first and foremost. Not a scrict genre piece and not a romp of pure

imagination but literature that can be enjoyed by a wide array of people, particularly those

outside of the usual fantasy reader’s circles. I did this without the aforementioned conceit of

simply making a counterculture statement. I am merely a writer of (primarily) fantasy with a love

for humanity and a desire to see it represented in all its flawed glory. And yet, if Landfall

manages to change the mind of even one staunch critic of fantasy that the genre can indeed stand

alongside the greats of literary fiction, I will have to consider it a roaring success.

In direct opposition to the way that most genre fantasy seems to be written, I do not feel

like I need to play God in my novel. My grand scheme for Landfall and other stories does not

have the same overbearing sense of poeticism found in plenty of genre fantasy works. I am

content with considering the natural causes of entropy and misfortunate I mentioned before as

being a compelling antagonizing force. I want to keep things from becoming contrived so that

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the plot unfolds unrealistically or that everything fits together a bit too nicely. Real life is messy,

so if I’m to write a book using characters as realistically close to actual people as I can make

them, their lives and adventures must be messy, too (especially when real people start to get

thrown into situations filled with death and violence).

As mentioned before, I think it is a great disservice to the human experience for the

fantasy genre to brush off the psychological trauma incurred by those subjected to violence and

death. Fantasy tends to go on the presupposition that the hero will have the psychological

fortitude to resist whatever madness may arise from bloodshed. William, however, is not one of

those heroes. To him, violence is the oppressively heavy opposite of the weightlessness from the

violence mentioned before. William has only a few brushes with death in the work I submitted

but I think it speaks to William’s vulnerability to carnage when in Chapter 9, he finds himself

tormented by the execution of the men from the previous chapter. As William rightly asks

himself, “Why did his imagination feel like it needed to so zealously overcompensate? Why did

his mind insist on creating such lucid images, ones that William was thankfully spared from

seeing with his own eyes?” (178-179) Even though William’s wife was almost killed by some of

those men Alistair executed and even though William never even saw the men clearly, he is still

bearing scars from the event. The same goes for Orla who, despite having been in brawls before,

is horrified to see what is dealt to the men and is also horrified to see how the violence seems to

stir others into a blood frenzy. The weightiness of doling out death is often forgotten in genre

fantasy unless something poetically violent is happening such as, again, the villain killing the

hero’s loved one. But the suddenness and gruesomeness of the men’s death affects them all the

same. This, of course, also goes for William and Orla’s brush with violence on a more personal

level as they are directly attacked in Chapters 9 and 6, respectively. In both of those sections, I

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really wanted to show that not only do people simply not make it out of lethal violence

completely unharmed physically but the moments just after the violence has subsided are also

usually very emotionally trying. William and Orla both have moments in the aforementioned

chapters where they can only close their eyes and try to readjust their sense of reality. The

characters are seeking respite to try to cast off the weightiness of battle. So, if they feel they must

shake off a weight from their shoulders after witnessing or taking part in battle, then they are

avoiding the dreaded weightlessness of the action most commonly found in the genre. Even

William’s attempts to defend himself feel weightier than most heroes’, probably because he is so

awful at it.

William’s attempt at fighting is about as effective and heroic as flailing one’s arms and

shouting, “Go away!” And that’s fine. He shouts, flails, and dents a perfectly-good lantern during

Chapter 9’s battle in the cellar. William does not have the skill, wealth, or strength to use

anything like a real weapon. So, he uses the lowest-common-denominator for achieving change-

the denominator of force. William has almost nothing to fall back on when violence finds him or

when diplomacy breaks down. There is to be no guarantee that William will make it out in one

piece from any fight. That lack of guarantee feeds into the so-called Negative Tension, which

keeps suspense and the human element of the randomness and cruelness of fate intact. Granted,

because this is a prequel to Garamoush and William is mentioned in passing once or twice, a

reader of both books will probably figure out that William will survive his own adventures.

However, as I’ve already tried to show in these first nine chapters, William can evade death but

sometimes his life isn’t that much better.

William’s lack of skill in battle alone probably shatters what most would consider being a

traditionally heroic façade. However, his breaking of that mold goes much deeper than that.

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If the hero’s weapon is the sword, then the flawed and human protagonists’ weapon of

choice should be something quite a bit less elegant. William’s lantern seems to fit that bill rather

neatly. Looking ahead to the rest of the book and indeed the rest of the series, William’s primary

“weapon” will always be a lantern. Rather than the most basic and self-fulfilling action of

violence, William’s lantern is to represent something deeper and more implicit about violence in

that violence is really only a means of expressing power over others. Indeed, there is hardly any

greater power to have over others than the one of being able to end life. And if William is going

to be a protagonist rather than a hero, meaning he has no inherent or magical power over others,

then the lantern will fit him perfectly. And in his own way, William’s “weapon” still allows him

to have some agency and control amongst the violence around him, albeit in a different way than

expected. Throughout the nine chapters provided, I have made various references to shadows

falling on individuals with William being the most common victim. Fredrick, Sir Douglas, and

even Orla throw their shadows over William, showing that their will can be imposed onto his.

The ones who cast the shadows have the power. And William’s lantern, his “heroic weapon,”

allows him to not only dispel shadows on him but also lets him cast his own shadow over others.

There is no deeper fantasy connection in that. Shadows do not have some kind of mystical power

in the world of Landfall and light has no great magical connotations or abilities. Instead, I merely

wanted to play with symbolism and a literal lite motif to give the sense of power that a regular

person may have control over. Not many can wield swords with any skill but every regular

person can light a candle or lantern to cast away darkness. After all, William is not out to save or

conquer the world in Landfall, so perhaps there is no more fitting “weapon” for him as a

protagonist then one that simply helps him avoid danger in the first place.

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However, the hero’s weapon only exists to slay archetypal villainous forces so, for a

regular man perhaps some more regular or human villainy is called for. So, to attack poetics

more openly now, the primary source of tension in these first nine chapters is William and Orla’s

lack of funds. With nothing more than simple economic difficulty, William and Orla’s lives and

homes are being threatened. There is no great villain or even antagonizing force in this part of

the novel and, as a minor spoiler, this feeling of non-antagonism will continue on for the rest of

the book. Even though Alistair could be considered the central antagonist in Landfall, his first

contact with William, through the contract, is actually one that gives William a chance to escape

the confines of his silver and food-deprived life. Alistair is hardly the villain that William makes

him out to be. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch at all to say that Alistair hardly even knows that

William exists. Alistair has no specific grudge or any kind of feelings towards William outside of

seeing him as an asset to his goals. And while that within itself may rile William, Alistair’s

money is ultimately the way William and Orla are able to survive and live as they do. Naturally,

this relationship which hinges on believability and realism will need characters to enact the

events that move the plot along.

In writing Landfall, I have tried to create characters that break out of the fantasy

archetypes of “hero,” “villain,” “love interest,” and “wise man.” I have tried to make characters

that are real enough that they can break out of their role as characters in a novel and become

people independent of the story they’re in. After all, if we genre writers can learn anything from

literary fiction writers, it’s that characters that are a little bit controversial or debatable make

them out to be all the more compelling. William, Fredrick, and Alistair seem to fit the roles of

controversial characters the most clearly in this part of Landfall. Fredrick, despite being

William’s best friend and one of his only, is rather racist towards anybody outside of the East,

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immediately blaming the Northerners for the attack on the Salt Shore and insinuating that they

are all cannibals as part of a warrior code. Additionally, he has a love of knighthood and the

nobility which William can hardly sympathize with. And yet, he and William remain close

friends through the years despite their differences. Chapter 7 shows how much that bond can be

stretched and yet how little that stretching really matters to either William or Fredrick. Despite

their argument midway through the chapter, William knows that, Fredrick will, “always open

[his] door,” (152) to William. So, while on paper Fredrick and William may seem to be totally

incompatible, they are still the best of friends. This phenomenon happens quite a lot in real life

so it certainly has a place in Landfall.

Indeed, William’s sense of extremism when it comes to lumping people into groups of

“like” and “dislike” for no other reason than their association or adherence with ideologies or

individuals that William doesn’t care for what ends up landing him in trouble with Fredrick and

Myra in Chapter 7. Perhaps inadvertently, William is showing what it would be like to impose

the archetypes of genre fantasy onto real people in the real world. And, as he shows, the results

are not pleasant ones, even if he thinks he is defending his morals by opposing others.

Normally, a hero’s moral code is part of what makes him or her a true hero. William’s

moral code, however, is almost his downfall. When Alistair’s first letter finds him at the end of

Chapter 3, he immediately destroys it. Even though he and his wife are in dire financial straits,

William’s hatred and fear of the nobility causes him to act rashly. It takes some concentrated

manipulation by his wife to get William to act with a more utilitarian mindset and accept

Alistair’s offer. Even though Orla acknowledges that her husband’s moral code is well-

intentioned, she realizes that a lack of food may be a more pressing matter than having a slightly

damaged sense of self. This kind of strength of character can indeed become a weakness in real

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life if the person in question, like William, decides that it is more important to side with morality

over practicality. And while doing so is commendable in its own way, the action is certainly a

little controversial. So, making William think in such a way was intentional, of course. I wanted

William to appear as character worth mulling over. I wanted to make him a character that is

deserving of respect (because without respect, even the most adored character can become vapid

and feel purposeless) but does not necessarily have to be liked.

Of course, like a real person in stressful points in their life, William can be seen

changing. However, it is not always in an upwardly direction which is contrary to those genre

fantasy heroes who only grow as the story continues. They grow wiser, stronger, quicker, and

more intelligent as they go along whereas William, by Chapter 7, has reached a breaking point

with his patience for Alistair. He is shown to be lashing out at Fredrick just because he happened

to be nearby, not because of any real dislike of Fredrick. Not knowing to count his blessings,

William lets his frustration get the best of him. Of course, William’s actions are up for debate

both for the characters in the story and the readers who are along for the ride.

To quickly make an aside, critic James Wood pioneers the idea of free-indirect style, a

kind of, close third-person perspective where the author positions him or herself inside the minds

of the characters while keeping the perspective out of first person. Free-indirect style has almost

unlimited potential to evolve both literary and genre fiction by eliminating several of the

constraints inherent in the traditional third person perspectives. However, I barely see the style

being picked up in fantasy at all. The genre is mostly being written in the same way using the

same kind of third-person perspective (usually third-person serial) that is most common in the

genre. Writing William using free-indirect style, I think, has helped him appear more human and

relatable since we’re hearing the story through his own words and perspective. Given William’s

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weak eyes, his perspective is oftentimes a source of that Negative Tension. We as readers are just

as aware as William if dangers come for him, neither us nor he will likely be able to see it

coming. That feeling of vulnerability should help to make William a more engaging character to

read about, too. His vulnerability can make being in a dark room unnerving or an unexpected

luncheon become nerve-wracking, as we saw in chapters nine and seven, respectively.

All of the realism, subjectivity of character, and vulnerability to violence will be standing

in direct contrast to the jabs made at the genre up above. Thus, if the qualms with the genre

culminated in Positive Tension, the points made for Landfall with demonstrate Negative

Tension. Negative tension was intentionally represented with comparisons to real life earlier

because, in a way, we all live in a state of negative tension. While it is true we fear the random

and the unexpected instead of more slow and calculated malignant forces (unless we were to live

in war-torn or destabilized places in the world where entire nations enact plans that, frankly,

didn’t consider us or what we might be doing in the slightest), we can still sympathize with

characters who experience very real moments of duress. Those moments might be crafted in a

more theatrical way, with consistent characters and plot elements appearing throughout, but the

net result of feeling personally tense because of the similarity of a regular person’s conflict to our

own lives is undeniably magnetic. We will not be pushed away from characters whose lives are

filled with relatable Negative Tension as we were with those filled with overly-poetic and

weightless Positive Tension. And so, we can connect on a more human level to the characters.

The goodness of that outcome cannot be overstated. Once on that human level, readers will

hopefully have some compassion for Landfall’s characters. Fittingly, the Latin of “compassion”

ends up meaning “co-suffering.” How fitting for readers to “co-suffer” with characters whose

lives are filled with Negative Tension.

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And so, we come to the end. Even though what you read for this Honours Research

project was only about a third of Landfall, I am confident that I will be continuing to pick bones

with fantasy as it stands now until the genre can trim itself down and shake lose its weighty, wet

clothing of cliché and come under a new and more respected light in the literary world. But, for

what Landfall says for itself, I hope it truly will be a step forward for the genre and for my own

career in writing. It would also help if it was just a darn good read as well, so here’s hoping for

all of that and more.

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Works Cited

1. Athans, Philip, Salvatore R.A.. The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction. Avon, Massachusetts:

Adams Media, 2010. Kindle edition E-book.

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