Tales from the Circle

Reading the afterword of this book cemented a realization that I had already made a while ago: I love to read Ursula K. LeGuin, but I mostly love reading her non-fiction essays/thoughts about writing more than her actual fiction. ( Check out my review of The Disposessed here. ) That afterword, where she explains what she was thinking when she wrote the book and discusses the ideas behind it, was much more interesting to me than the actual book. I respect what she was trying to do with this book and I found myself enjoying small sections of her writing, but overall the distant tone in which this book was written kind of hindered from engaging with all these great ideas in a meaningful way.  In a coming of age story like this that was supposed to be about the main character understanding himself it really would have helped to get to know his thoughts first-hand, but LeGuin never really tells us what he's thinking. Instead, she tells us the names of all kinds of Islands and towns and ...

Fantasy writers have a major obstacle to overcome when telling their stories and that obstacle exists because of the thing we all love so much as fantasy fans: World Building. As a fantasy writer you’re not just telling the story and giving a few clues about the setting to orient your readers. You have to immerse your readers in a completely different world. At the same time, you can’t bore them or overwhelm them with the details. It’s a fine line. And there’s not really a recipe for this. What might work for one writer and one world will not necessarily work for another, especially once a hundred different writers and books have used the same method. It can start to feel derivative after a while. I used to be ok with and enjoy portal fantasy where someone from the normal world is flung into a new one and the reader can discover the world through this outsider character’s eyes. As I read more and more in the genre this started to feel annoying, especially in Epic or High Fantasy ...