It’s been a good week in Writingland. I have to admit the last two music reviews I’ve written read a bit weirdly, but development for my fiction has been going grandly. I’m not actually writing any narrative, or even developing any characters, but mainly just drawing maps (see above), and working out what I need to know to draw them. So although I had the geography worked out, before I could put the countries on the largest map, I needed to make some decisions about religion, and its political implications, for example. The more I draw maps, the more visual detail I develop, the more I know about my world, and the more I write down about it. I’ve realised that by the time I’ve developed the setting and the characters, the stories will write themselves. Hopefully you can see that one of the maps (the least ‘finished’ one) depicts a city: this will be the setting for a lot of stories, I hope. I’ve already written one short story set in it, and submitted it to a competition, but I will soon be writing some narrative specifically to make freely available on my website.
I recently read a WG Sebald book which has got me thinking about nationalism and so forth; Tolkien’s ambition to develop an English ‘legendarium’ has some obvious connections to the sort of post-Romatic nationalism that was rampant in Europe from the 19th century, and there is a sort of racial essentialism that runs through much fantasy fiction. I have developed my own world on such lines, from a desire to take on the assumptions of classic epic fantasy on its own turf, and I realise now that this gives me the opportunity to develop some very powerful themes. Don’t worry, it won’t be too obvious or preachy, but I will be engaging as deeply as I can with ideas of race, nationality, culture and so forth…
