If you follow my books at all you know that I write all over the place. My first two books were post apocalyptic survival tales, my third a Gothic historical thriller, and my fourth a gritty contemporary. With my fifth book, GIVEN TO THE SEA, I wandered into the realm of fantasy.
When it was time to begin GIVEN TO THE SEA I was ecstatic. I had just finished A MADNESS SO DISCREET, my historical, for which I had researched for 18 months before penning a single fictitious word. At one point I couldn't finish a line of dialogue without doing a solid 15 minutes of research to learn what a cop would have been called in Boston in the 1890s.
No more of that - it was time for pure fiction, a world of my own in which I could make up any word I would like to fill in the pesky blanks. This was the first time I'd ever written fantasy, and I went into it thinking this would be my easiest drafting process yet.
Wrong. So, so wrong.
The unique challenge in fantasy is that your reader can assume nothing. If I'm writing a contemporary and I tell you that my main character goes to a private school, drives a Mercedes, and only wears Prada, you can draw about 20 assumptions about her, her environment, and probably her past pretty easily. I don't have to fill in the blanks.
In fantasy, if I tell you that one of my characters is the last surviving female of the Indiri... you know pretty much nothing. You can't infer from that that she's the only person in this world with magic, as only the females of the tribe carry that gift. You don't know what her life is like - are in the Indiri a reigning class living in a castle with servants, or are they a wild, feral people? Are these royals? Are they cannibals? What is expected of this character in her class and situation?
You don't know. And so I have to tell you. And I have to do it in a way that is not a bullet point list, boring to read and onerous to write. I have to give you seventeen years of backstory while also illustrating the present, seamlessly giving you the entire picture of her life while making it, you know, interesting.
Not easy. And that's just one character. GIVEN TO THE SEA has four POV's and as many highly unique and different cultures. Delivering all four - along with the land, the layout, the animals, the legend and history of this fictitious place - er... yeah.