Ah, and so the hard part commences.

This is where epic fantasy starts to take a deep planning-out in your mind. Now that you’ve got your world built and minor details out of the way, it’s time to start building a language, if you want one. I personally don’t have a language I’ve built; if someone in my book is speaking in a foreign language, I’ll just italicize what they’re saying and add a tag at the end of the sentence that says that they’re speaking in their tongue. 

You may have – no, you’ve definitely seen a language if you’ve ever read anything that has to do with fantasy, whether it’s epic or YA or MG. In Eragon, Christopher Paolini constructed several different languages: one being the Ancient Language of the elves, the Dwarf Language, and the Urgal language, and even in Brisingr, he added the Nomadic language. From what I’ve heard, most of what he used for the basis of his languages is that he just altered Norse words. Even some of the names in his books are comprised of several smaller Norse words. 

In the Lord of the Rings, we have the powerful wizardy language that we can’t understand. Gandalf will say a bunch of words that don’t make sense, yet they sound cool and are hard to read through. 

In The Wheel of Time, we have the Manetheren language that Mat will often shout out absentmindedly because the Two Rivers stands were Manetheren once stood before the Breaking of the World and he is of Manetheren blood. 

The list goes on and on, but do we really care? Well, you should. 

Most of the languages you see hold some sort of magic within the words. In Eragon and The Lord of the Rings, they use some kind of ancient language to produce magic, whether it be to lift a rock off the ground or to open a secret passage. 

There’s two types of magic within the words: poetic magic, and scientific magic. 

Scientific magic is what you would see in Eragon – in Eragon, brisingr is a word that comes from old Norse than means “fire”, and so Eragon uses this world to create fire. There’s a basis for his magic, and that’s called scientific magic. 

However, in The Lord of the Rings, you see a lot of runes and stuff that doesn’t make sense. Gandalf will shoot fire from his hands using some kind of weird chant, and you’ll think to yourself, “Oh, that’s cool! But… I didn’t know he could do that.” This is called poetic magic. 

Poetic magic doesn’t really have a purpose  – it’s mostly there to sound cool and look cool when you read it. Most of the time, though, it accounts for headaches when you try to read the words. 

Scientific magic is magic within the words of the language that mean something, that have a basis. 

Basically all this was, was to express how you should construct a language before you write some random junk down in your book that no one understands. Hopefully this was helpful.

By the way, I’ve planned out the rest of my book, so at least I have a visual of where it’s going to go. And when I mean I “planned out the rest of my book”, I mean I listed all the chapters that are going to be in the book. But, for some odd reason, that helps me. 

-Matt

This is a follow-up post to my last two posts, “Swordplay in Epic Fantasy” and “Worldbuilding in Epic Fantasy”. 

Keep in mind that a thousand or so years ago we didn’t have Kohls or Macy’s or JC-Penny’s, so we didn’t have jeans or khaki’s or any of the usual stuff people wear today. Shirts were made of canvas or stitched cloth – peasants wore rags that were sewn together. Pants were mainly leather, if you had the money. 

How do I know this? No, I haven’t done my research, I’ve merely just been paying attention, and not necessarily to the details books hold. I mostly pick things up like this from movies. 

The two movies that I obtained these details from were The Princess Bride and the film adaption of Eragon. And I’ll bet my bottom dollar that if you watch the TV series of A Game of Thrones you’ll find that it has the same clothing elements as those two movies. 

And remember, they didn’t have stores like Kohl’s and stuff that you could just waltz into and buy clothes and get out. They had tailor’s shops in the market. Of course, you could still custom order… if you were a noble, of course. 

Anyway, hope this will serve as useful.

I’m so proud of myself. I cut 33,000 words of fluff out of the book last week. It took me down to 12,000, but I’m already back up to 14k. 

-Matt

Hello, followers. 

I’m REALLY sorry I couldn’t get this to you yesterday, but I had a lot of stuff going on. It won’t happen again any time soon, I promise. But I will tell you that, about six or seven weeks from now, there won’t be a post because I’ll be doing a leadership thing for the Scouts for about a week at the beginning of June.

Now, onto today’s topic.

Today isn’t going to be my usual post. For the next several posts, I’ll be rambling on about epic fantasy and what people are doing wrong with it. I’ve only been into the epic fantasy genre for about three years now, but I’ve read enough of it to tell what people are doing wrong, and it’s why I’m here now telling you how to do it right. 

Yeah, I know, it sounds kind of weird coming from a kid who can’t even drive yet, here to tell you how to do something right. But, trust me, I’ve been classified as “genius” and “prodigy” a couple times.

I’ve studied the way writers incorporate action scenes and fighting into their books. At the beginning of most epic fantasies, you’ve got these peasant kids who don’t know how to wield a sword, and this is the only way that kind of swordplay will work in a book. 

Most of the time, though, authors don’t know what they’re doing when they’re describing action scenes. They’ve got people hacking and slashing and doing a bunch of random stuff that would look cool in an action movie. But it isn’t practiced, and it isn’t artistic. Swordplay is supposed to be precise and artistic. In fact, swordmasters are kind of like ballerinas…with weapons that can, you know… lop people’s heads off? 

Authors will describe their people not really doing anything but swinging their sword around dangerously. I’ve only seen it done right in a few places. One is The Wheel of Time. 

Now, I really do hate to go on and on about this book series, but it’s one of the few series of books I’ve read that does something right. At the beginning of The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan describes Lan and Rand training together with their swords. In The Eye of the World, Rand didn’t really know what he was doing with sword…no, he did not at all. He was new to swords and didn’t know how to wield one. Luckily, the ever-present Lan was there to help in The Great Hunt. 

He taught Rand several intricate “dance” moves with his sword, ones that took a whole bunch of practice for Rand to master. I remember one of them from The Dragon Reborn, which was something like the River Runs Downstream. 

The sword moves in the Wheel of Time are much like Karate – they are a bunch of articulate moves of the wrist and body all comprised into a big sort of stage dance with a sword in hand. 

Sorry, this is sort of hard to explain. Let me know if you’re having trouble understanding, and I’ll try to do a follow-up post to this one. 

I know it doesn’t seem relevant, but there are a LOT of nerdy people out there like me who pay attention to these kinds of things. And they will find you… and they will spit at you…

Hope this was moderately helpful, 

-Matt

A lot of you may envy my undying motivation and love for reading and writing because I’m so young. But, truly, I wouldn’t be blogging today if it weren’t for some of the authors I read when I was younger, and the ones I’ve started reading now that I’m becoming more of an adult.

The authors I read were the ones who inspired me to write. They were my inspiration, to keep going. They gave me wings to fly through my imagination. They are the Ones Who Came Before.

First, there was C.S. Lewis with his Narnia books. They weren’t my favorite, but they were the first books I read as a kid, and they were enjoyable pastimes. They taught me to have an imagination, which I guess I’ve sort of always had. But it taught me that my imagination should have no limits. You can do whatever you want inside your head – whatever you want! And no one can take you imagination away from you.

Then about a year later I started reading Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson” books. The Lightning Thief was one of my favorite books for about 2 or 3 years. It taught me so much about the forces of good and evil, about friendship and trust and loyalty. It also taught me a bit of a history lesson, too.

Eragon was another big one. It taught me to go beyond the limit and to start young. Paolini started writing his book when he was fifteen – why couldn’t I start younger? So I did. Paolini has been a huge inspiration, and still is today.

Eragon sparked my initial interest for fantasy. So, after that, I started to delve deeper into the epic fantasy genre, and I stumbled upon the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I read the first book, WIZARD’S FIRST RULE, and I had a hard time trying to get through it because it was so new to me, and I had never read anything so long before. It was about 270,000 words with characters I had never seen the likes of before. Although it did take me awhile to get through, I remember loving it and reading the next three without stop the next year, then the next four a year later.

The Sword of Truth series got me into the whole “epic fantasy” thing, and so, after doing some searching around, I came across the Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks. I read the entire three books in a week and a half and fell in love with books all over again. It was just simply awesome. It wasn’t quite as rich as the Sword of Truth books, but it had all the usual magic-like elements that had been carried over from generations of fantasy past.

Drumroll, please!

The best thing I have perhaps read in the last five or six years is the Wheel of Time series. If you only read it once and said “It’s good”, you have no idea what you are talking about. The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving legend to become myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the age that gave it birth comes again. When you really look for it and break this phrase down sentence by sentence, it somewhat makes sense. I read THE EYE OF THE WORLD three times in a year and studied Robert Jordan’s writing style, hoping that I could be like him. I read the next book in the series, THE GREAT HUNT, twice after that, and then THE DRAGON REBORN once after that. After reading the first three books in the series, I now know what epic fantasy really is.

And it’s not your typical dwarves, elves, magic, and whatnot. I read A GAME OF THRONES, barely finding a hint of the typical fantasy tropes. It was completely original, as was THE WHEEL OF TIME.

So, there you have it, guys. You should go out and read these authors, thank them for being such huge role models in my life. Because of Terry Goodkind, Brent Weeks, and Robert Jordan (mostly), I have delved deeper into the epic fantasy realm and have had it become my favorite genre, reading Brandon Sanderson, Peter Orullian, and Patrick Rothfuss.

Later, guys. Please, tell me in the comments: who were your role models as a kid?

Happy writing! 

-Matt

So, to those I have just awarded, be sure to check your comments to accept the award. 


Also, we have FIVE new members on the blog. Please give them a warm welcome:

Now, a lot of you may be wondering if I even have a family or a house, because I never mention either of them. I have a mom, a dad, a stepmom, a sister, three cats, and a dog. And two houses. 

My mom is just about the coolest person in the world. She just bought me a new desk for my room at her house, and I am currently sitting at it right now. Now I have a bit of storage room in some drawers for reams of paper and whatnot. There’s even a place for some excess books that I was stacking up on the floor because I ran out of room on my bookshelf. She was also the one who took the time and money to take me to LTUE earlier this month. And she buys me most of my books. 

My dad is the most level-headed person you will ever meet. He mostly builds Web sites and the like, and he got me into Boy Scouts. He’s the one who helps me calm down when I’m in my “moods” and when I am simply freaking out. He is normally my first reader for everything I write, and he has good insight. He claims he has no imagination, but I changed the main character’s name of my book from “Jason” to “Jazen” because of him. 

My stepmom is a professional organizer, and she’s probably the reason why my room at my dad’s house is so (moderately) clean. She’s always curious as to what I’m writing, and she wants to know why I chose writing, which I can’t actually answer. 

Fun story: yes, my mom and dad are divorced – FACT. But they are also really good friends, as are my mom and stepmom, and my dad and stepmom live up the street from my mom. I divide time between each house, and since we’re so close, it’s kind of like we’re one big happy family. 

My sister is four, and, as nature as a little sister, is a terror, but I still love her to death. She’s got quite the imagination, like myself, so maybe one day, we can do some sort of collaborative something-or-other on something-or-other. 

My three cats: Sassy, Meddy, and Socks. 

Sassy is far too heavy for a cat. She’s Siamese and has the softest fur you will ever feel on a cat. She usually runs for the food bowl whenever you fill it, and she loves Fancy Feast canned food. 

Meddy is a jet-black cat. Her name is the short version of a word in Spanish that translates to “midnight” in English. She’s my ninja cat and she kills garden snakes and moths. 

Socks is a black-and-white psycho cat, and I’m not really sure what’s up with her. But she attacks doorknobs and mirrors, so at least she’s trying to protect us. 

And, finally, my dog. She’s a chocolate Labrador Retriever with gold spots on her, and she’s pretty much the cutest, sweetest dog ever. RJ is her name, and don’t you forget that.

And here’s a very dramatic song from my favorite video game of all time.

-Matt

If you’ll notice, there’s a bit of a new description under the title of the blog on the home page. Yep! New blog posts every Monday. I know your Mondays are usually dull and dreary, as are mine. I usually only give about 13% effort at school on Mondays. So, to brighten your day, I’ll be putting out a blog post. Maybe once the blog expands a bit and gets a bit more known, I’ll probably put out a blog post every Monday and Friday or something like that. But, for now, we’re down to a sum total of 25 members.

Speaking of members, we have a new addition to the Lair. I would like to welcome Hektor Karl to the blog. Go check out his blog…. and his other one. I’ve actually seen his blog, and what he does is pretty interesting. He’s trying to start the theme of making a blog mascot. His mascot is his dog. This is a brilliant idea, Hektor, one that I may have to steal from you.

Okay, onto the main idea of today’s post.

I’ve been tagged by David Powers King in the Lucky 7 Meme. Here are the rules:

Hello, Dumbledore’s Army. Welcome to Matt’s Writing Lair. I’m your host: Matt. 

Today’s topic is “writing out of order”. This may not seem like a relevant subject, but it’s always been in the back of my head, and may some of yours’. 

What I mean by “writing out of order” is not just writing small scenes, viewpoints, or chapters out of order, but books as well. 

When you’re writing something as big as THE LORD OF THE RINGS saga, which is about 500,000 words altogether (not including THE HOBBIT), it’s tough to stay with one character for an entire 500,000 words. So, to cheat your way out of being sucked into 500,000 words of Character A (“Jake”), you can make up new characters: Character B (“Sam”) and Character C (“Summer”). 

Let’s say Jake is the main protagonist of this story, and about halfway through the story, he’s feeling some sort of deep depression that lasts maybe three or four chapters. You’re not going to want to stick with a half-dead character four three or four chapters, are you? Of course not. Because, as everyone knows, when you give your character an emotion to feel, you have to get inside the character’s head and express that emotion. 

So, you may want to write a few chapters from Sam or Summer’s perspective to give yourself some relief from Jake’s dread. That way, you can write chapters of Jake’s POV one at a time, rather than having to write this huge chunk of dark, dreary text. 

Remember my post from a few weeks ago, when I told you guys that I figured out how to keep the beginning of my story going by using multiple viewpoints? This is what I mean. I wrote three chapters from Jazen’s perspective, and now I’m writing three from Michael’s. After that, I’ll write three from Tyler’s, and finally, one from the Shadow Lord, the main antagonist in my epic fantasy novel, THE SHADOW LORD. 

The way I’ll place them is Jazen’s chapters will be chapters 1, 4, and 7 of Part One; Michael’s will be chapters 2, 5, and 8; Tyler’s will be 3, 6, and 9; and the Shadow Lord’s chapter will be chapter 10 of Part One. 

This way, the reader won’t get bored reading three straight chapters of Jazen, or three of Michael or Tyler. They have a mix of all three, and then a sort of surprise chapter at the end. 

Of course, this is merely writing chapters out of order. What about writing books out of order? 

What C.S. Lewis did with Narnia, is he wrote book 2 first, then 4,5, and 6 in sequence, then book 3, then 1, and finally, 7. They were published this way as well. However, several years later, they put the books in chronology. 

I’m not saying this works for everyone, but it definitely works for me. 

Ciao, Dumbledorians, 

-Matt