
3 Key Takeaways – Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare
This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7346926358397766944
I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my key takeaways from Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare.
My first key takeaway is this: maps always make fantasy books feel that much more special. At this point, you can’t really do fantasy properly without a map, it’s just not the same.
So, if you’re writing a fantasy book, especially if you’re planning to self-publish, you need to put into your budget that you need to hire a professional map maker. This is something that your publisher will handle if you’re doing traditional publishing, so don’t worry about that too much, but yep, if you’re doing it yourself you are going to need to put that into your budget.
My second key takeaway is this: world-building shouldn’t slow you down.
Now, I’ve read a lot of reviews of this book that say they got bored in the first half, they felt like it dragged on too long, there was too much world-building and not enough action. I didn’t necessarily agree myself, I felt that it carried along nicely for me, but then again I was getting lost in the details and actually really enjoying the world-building aspect. So, I think especially if you’re trying to appeal to a broader audience – now, bear in mind that fans of the Shadowhunters series, the previous Cassandra Clare books, might not be the kind of people who grow up reading David Eddings like I did, so for that reason you need to be aware of who exactly your audience is and if they are going to be more general fantasy fans rather than high fantasy, people that read Lord of the Rings growing up, people who’ve read you know those longer kind of epic fantasy stories where the world building is such a strong and integral part of the storyline that it can take up a lot more room, you might want to think about speeding things up. And even if you’re doing traditional types of fantasy, honestly you can still make your world-building a part of the action by having things revealed by things that happen. It doesn’t always have to be paragraphs of description, you can unveil the lore of your world by having your characters immersed in it and dealing with it.
The third thing I want to say is be careful when drawing from life. This is a huge trend that is happening in fantasy at the minute and honestly it’s been a trend in fantasy for a long time, but recently it’s been making me cringe a little bit. So, let me explain.
When you’re reading a fantasy book, quite often there will be descriptions of characters that make it really obvious that what you are looking at is kind of a parallel race or a parallel group of people to something that exists on earth. So one that we would probably all be really familiar with would be the dwarves in Lord of the Rings. We know that they’re a Jewish allegory.
And in this book too there is definitely a Jewish allegory. Recently I read Fragile Enchantment which very obviously has England versus Ireland. So I’m seeing this a lot in fantasy at the minute.
It just makes me really nervous. We have all read the criticisms of J.K. Rowling and the way that she treated certain racial characters that ended up being horrible, horrible stereotypes that are actually very harmful and racist. So, just if you’re going to base something on true life in your fantasy book, just be really, really careful about what your stereotypical depiction – because the only way we’re going to know if it’s an allegory is if you use stereotypes – what your stereotypical depiction actually says about how you think about that group or type of people that you’re talking about.
So, it can really backfire very easily and I just want you to be very mindful. And if you can’t do it in a nice way, if you’re going to do it in a harmful way, why don’t you just take that out of the book? Just take it out. Just make up a fantasy race.
It doesn’t have to be based on reality. It doesn’t have to be based on what we know. Make it up. Completely make it up.
Those are my three key takeaways.
Related
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Leave a Reply