Second part of our chat with Scott from the Patreon!

Part one here.

Many epic fantasy writers try for a vast scope with multiple characters as POVs for the story but struggle to launch the story effectively: Failure modes include too much exposition before we know why it matters, too many characters introduced too fast to understand what's going on, and dropping the reader into combat scenes before we care about what's happening. How do you get the reader invested in a big story without overwhelming them?

SCOTT: I hesitate to say that there's one true way to go about this, but there's absolutely a hundred ways to misfire from the get-go, and one technique that keeps recurring in relatively successful properties, so I'll elucidate that a bit here. The simple version is to pick a point of entry that is local, limited, and emotionally immediate.

How many times have we contemplated Luke and Leia, those poor mixed-up kids who lived a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? Well, we're gonna do it again. Consider how we meet them at the very beginning of Star Wars—Leia is being chased by fascist goons who want to capture and interrogate her. Luke is stuck in what he perceives as the middle of nowhere, wrestling with the thought that life is passing him by. Both of these are instantly relatable situations—a hero on the run, a young person eager to choose their own direction. Everything accretes around those simple stories, like a tree adding rings to itself.

Think about all the stuff we're not told at the beginning of that movie—there's nothing in the opening text crawl about taxation of trade routes, Jedi, Sith, the Force, Trade Federations, the fall of the old Republic, etc. In fact, I would suggest to any anxious and uncertain writer that you'll be surprised by just how much setup you can successfully leave out of the beginning of a story. Enchant your reader with promises and mysteries, don't cudgel them into submission by pre-explaining every nuance of the world.

Another way to look at the question is to ponder the various tools in your kit, the various styles of narrative you can use. It can be a crucial structural mistake to cling too tenaciously to the idea that "epic fantasy" is the only possible descriptor of what you're writing, when the entry-point stories for so many fantasy epics are actually miniatures of other genres entirely—little action scenes, or little mysteries, or little family dramas. That's what A Game of Thrones is, books and TV adaptation alike, in the first volume and the first season. So many of the machinations and the people and the concepts and the places that will become critically important later aren't even mentioned. GoT, in simplest terms, commences as a story of family strife. The Starks have problems, the Lannisters have problems, the Baratheons have problems... and they all have problems with one another. The focus is relatively narrow, the problems relatively immediate. The first book in the sequence has about eight major POVs; the fourth has roughly eighteen. I know where I'd rather start, as both a reader and a writer.

DJANGO: It's definitely a fine balance. I like the metaphor of a tree—to switch it up a little, picture a tiny little sprout of a seedling, here representing the audience's ability to give a shit about your story. You start with a little bit of a grace period (they did, after all, pick up the book for a reason) but only a little bit, and if at the end of it you haven't encouraged the seedling along, it's going to die and the reader throws the book away and goes home.

You've got a variety of elements you can use to nurture the tree, but they each have their drawbacks. Exposition clues us in to the world of the story, but it tends to be uninteresting in and of itself. (One common failure mode explained right there—the author doesn't find the exposition boring, because they already care about the story.) Action is exciting, but only if we know who we're rooting for and why, and it can be confusing without enough knowledge of the world. (Especially in fantasy; everyone can parse a car chase or a gunfight, but probably not a spell duel.) And character work makes us care about things, but without knowledge we may not understand the stakes, and without action it feels like nothing is happening.

The trick, then, is not to smother your seedling under a giant pile of one of these elements, like dumping a great big load of fertilizer on top of it. We need a little exposition, a little action, a little character. Then a little more, and a little more, feeding us each when we find ourselves needing it. Because they feed off one another—exposition isn't boring once we care about the information, once the reader is asking the questions that will be answered. Action works great when we understand the rules and the stakes. And character makes the most sense when we understand the world and what they're trying to accomplish.

To revisit Star Wars—we get a tiny bit of exposition right up front in the opening crawl. Civil war, empire bad, rebels good. Then action! To crib from Mr. Plinkett, the opening shot tells us everything we need: the tiny blockade runner dwarfed by the massive Star Destroyer. The rebel soldiers, obviously scared, with visible faces, against the masked, automaton-like Stormtroopers. After the fight, we see Leia, young, beautiful, dressed in white, begging for help. We care, just a little bit at first, but it's enough to start the next round!

Now—very important—text can't use the same visual language as cinema. (There's a whole topic in there! Someday.) But the thing to highlight here is the deployment of the elements, a little bit at a time. Try to imagine if instead, the Star Wars opening crawl summarized the blockade runner battle, and the actual movie started with R2 and 3PO walking across the desert. Or just with Luke, hanging around his uncle's place and complaining about not being allowed to go to the Academy. You could have the same plot, but the launch of the story would be crippled.

As far as Game of Thrones, it's a great example of how to start a bunch of POVs and do it right. Another common failure mode of too-epic fantasy I think of as, "Meanwhile, on another continent." This is when we start with one character, and everything seems to be going along fine—we get some world, some character, some action, and we're starting to care about the story. Then, at the end of Chapter One, everything comes to a screeching halt and we're suddenly halfway across the world, in a completely different context and with different characters, and we have to start the story all over again. That's a lot to ask of a reader on the slender promise that these two things will eventually come together and become relevant.

It's not impossible to do a good story this way, but it sure is hard. The solution is to have some common element between the two, the stronger the better, so we feel like these two threads are part of the same story. It keeps the reader from feeling totally lost if you provide at least a signpost back to the thing they just spent time figuring out.

GRRM does such a masterful job of this in Game of Thrones it's always been my go-to example. The POVs spiral outward from a single point. First, in the prologue, we see the Night Watch fighting the Others. Then we see Ned Stark, executing the last of those Night Watch deserters, and wife his children. We get a sense of who they are and their place in the world before we cut into their heads. Tyrion's POV is introduced only after he arrives with the King and company for the big feast, so we know where he fits into the scheme of things too. And Dany is literally on another continent, but before we introduce her POV, we hear about her, about the Targaryens and their relationship to Ned and the rest. If you rearranged the book so it started with Dany, or added an early chapter where we see Tyrion riding north with the king and being bored, the whole story would be vastly weaker.

Because once you've raised your tiny sapling into a nice strong tree—once the reader actually cares about what's going on in the story—then you have a lot more leeway. A big expository scene, or a pause to work out some character introspection, or a giant non-stop action scene—they're all possible after you've got the reader's interest!

CASEY: Scott, thank you for providing a little Star Wars / Game of Thrones discourse catnip for Django, as a treat.

I'm going to answer this one mainly with a case study on my favorite recent example of absolutely stellar information management: the Cradle series by Will Wight.

(OTHER, NORMAL PEOPLE: Wow, this series has such awesome magic and fight scenes! Great characters! Epic worldbuilding!

ME: goddamn check out that sexy sexy information management)

(it does have all those other things too, to be clear 😂)

You start with just a teeny—not even prologue, more like a blurb from an unknown POV that sounds like a machine-analyzed report, giving just the hint that there's more to this otherwise clearly wuxia world. Then you start properly in the perspective of a curious person who has no special powers yet—and therefore can and will ask questions as needed, and whose literal actions we can understand—who's in a dangerous situation—facing bullies who do have powers—while trying to accomplish a concrete task toward his immediate goal: gaining powers—and the bullies also give us context for why he needs those powers.

It's only about a third of the way into the book, once we're comfortable with what's going on, that that tiny hint from the beginning, teased again briefly between chapters so we don't forget it, explodes onto the page and explodes the scope to give us a hint of how far this story is going to take us, now that we understand where we're starting from. And this immediately comes with a new short-term goal that will concretely lead toward the ultimate goal—which is still about gaining powers, so it's not a bait and switch. We don't get a full breakdown of all the different power levels and what they can do and all the different ways to go about them and their implications until we reach the points where those details matter, let alone how the world works or its politics. And one of my favorite moments of information management is in Book 2, when our hero has to go through a training ordeal—and we just skip it. We see him go in, we see him at the end and the results, but the details of the awful week he spends in this grueling environment? Not important and probably a slog, so we don't waste any time on them. We only see the training montages when they're both useful and not boring. Wight also does an absolutely stellar job of introducing new POVs only as they can give us useful perspectives on the events and people we already care about.

So there's a bunch of things happening there, related to what both of you brought up: introducing more POVs only once we already have context for how they relate to the story; an immediate, easy way to care for a main character (we all love underdogs, and empathize with people who are oppressed or want more from this provincial life; in a very basic sense, we don't like bullies, like we automatically like a character who saves a cat—or John Wick-style goes on a murder spree over a dog, extremely relatable); we start with just enough information to get us going, and only start expanding once we have more context and have firmly established why the readers should give a shit about the less local stakes. What we are not doing is dropping in a bunch of Made-Up Proper Names with Capital Letters, a summary of the history of our fantasy world so the writer can "get it out of the way and get to the part that matters" (spoilers: this never works), our protagonist internally musing about their life story for half a chapter, or a confusing action scene (that can work in visual media; in prose, not so much). It's perhaps pertinent to note that the advice to "start with the action" doesn't literally mean a combat scene; it's action that moves the plot forward. It's great if your character starts by actively doing something relevant, but a fast-paced exchange of magical laser beams is not likely to help the reader.

SCOTT: God yes. The idea that we just have to get some homework out of the way before we can enjoy the emotionally involving parts of the story as a treat... if you ever find yourself tempted to frame a story like that, take a break to go teach yourself how to fly by jumping off your roof and flapping your arms, it'll be a more useful exercise. There is ironically nothing more boring than the recitation of vast, deep, ancient cosmologies before we get to anything emotionally arresting. Be pithy. Be mysterious. Drop hints.

Also... sigh. (Groaning as I reach over to write CRADLE SERIES—WILL WIGHT on my already overwhelming TBR list)

SCOTT: One final aside it's taken me a minute to properly formulate. No book ever written has been for everyone and no book can hit everyone in the same fashion. We're not building humidifiers or microwaves here, it's not a case of "works/doesn't work." The thing about genres is that they're not just sets of marketing expectations or industrial specializations—they also relate to reader experience and expectation. To put it really crudely, readers who become invested in a given genre are trained to process it and its common assumptions. Some works of SFF are powerfully introductory in nature and some are relatively impenetrable to a casual audience. So, for all my talk of starting simple, sometimes there's value in simply going for the gusto, splattering your canvas with an explosion of ideas, damning the torpedoes, full speed ahead—insert your metaphor of choice.

If the gentle approach is to put your reader in the shallow end of your literary pool, and the advanced approach is to throw them in the deep end and make them learn how to swim, the most gonzo approach would be to throw them in the deep end and hold them underwater until they grow gills and turn into some kind of aquatic mutant. I think of stuff like C.S. Friedman's In Conquest Born, a mid-80s SF epic that I adore... it's all deep end, right from the start. It has more ideas in its first eighty pages than many big epics fit into five hundred. I think of some of the work of people like Frank Herbert or C.J. Cherryh or Samuel R. Delany. Sometimes, no real introduction is a powerful introduction. You invigorate the reader with the intensity of the experience rather than easing them into it.