Regular readers of Fantasy-Faction will remember the review of Edward Cox’s The Relic Guild we posted a few weeks back. We labelled it ‘a formidable debut from an author with huge potential’ and spoke extensively about the author’s dual narrative structure and decision to write a single story split across three books. Well, Fantasy-Faction decided to get in touch with Edward and ask him to tell us a bit more about these two decisions, the challenges they caused writing and his thoughts on the finished result. Rather than just a few words, Ed offered to write a guest blog. Here’s the finished piece:
A writing hero of mine is Tad Williams. For years I’ve lapped up his sprawling fantasies that cover three or four books, and appreciated how the story moved from one book to another as smoothly as turning to the next chapter. This episodic style of storytelling appeals to me greatly, and always at the back of my mind there has been a desire to tell a tale like Tad. A lot of years went by before the right idea came along.
It was obvious from a very early stage that the story of The Relic Guild would take more than one book to tell. I wanted to expand upon something I’d been experimenting with; interweaving past and present timelines into a unified tale, so much so that one timeline wouldn’t make sense without the other. And unless I wanted to hand in a single tome at least half a million words long, two sharp chops were required to turn the whole into three books. That was the plan for The Relic Guild right from the start.
The timelines are separated by forty years, and fitting them together incurred many problems. I often found it difficult to plot, and this occasionally made my writing process much slower than usual. Some of the characters appear in both timelines – spritely twenty-somethings in the past, but well into their sixties in the present – so I needed to find variances between young and old voices. Continuity required endless diligence, and it was fun but sometimes confusing when deciding which aspects of the story could be shown in one timeline without making any sense until connecting to the other.
This process was, of course, continued in the second book, which is now written and with my editor. It was rewarding to discover that my plan was working, and the arc of the story continued from the first book as I wanted it to. Dangling questions were answered, and many of those answers are now progressions that will push the story into book three. But as pleasing and rewarding as I’ve found my endeavours so far, the process has, on occasion, threatened to implode my brain and leave behind a vacuous wreck.
Writers are always looking to challenge themselves, to try something they haven’t done before, to improve, to learn. I chose a complicated method of telling a story, but it felt fresh and new to me, and, most importantly, it felt right for The Relic Guild. Whatever frustrations I experienced during the writing, the biggest challenge was making it read in a simple and uncomplicated way. So far, on this strange journey as a debut novelist, my biggest source of joy has come from the readers of The Relic Guild who understand exactly what it is I’ve tried to give them: a piece of entertainment full of magic, monsters and mayhem.
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The Relic Guild by Edward Cox is published on the 18th of September by Gollancz in Trade Paperback, eBook and Audio Book.
You can follow Ed on Twitter using @EdwardCox10 or visit his website EdwardCox.net.
Richard Marpole
Jennie Ivins