Less is NOT More but LESS - How Publishers & the Mainstream Scare Writers into not wishing to be Tolkien

Trust me here

It is always strange to me, how some writers of Mythic Fiction are always reluctant to write. I know this sounds stupid or judgemental but trust me here, they really are. And it seems like Publishers/Editors are afraid of writing also, and so they discourage their writers from doing more of it, especially in the greatest genre around, Mythic-Fiction.

The lesson is drilled into people at an early age, when they first get into writing; ‘don’t go writing exposition, and don’t write too many descriptions,’ creative-writing profs, school-teachers, publishers and all others will tell you as though they are afraid you might take the Lord’s name in vain (a sin they delight in it seems at times).

In reality this is the worst possible advice you can give to a writer of Myths. You wanna know the reason why? You’ve limited time and space to try to teach your readers all about your Secondary World. If you limit the exposure time to the local architecture, history, geography, nations, commerce, and other details it removes from the escapism. It actively removes from the quality of the story.

And trust me those details ARE important to the story. Because without them, how can people understand why the characters act the way they do, and how can they properly appreciate your world?

The thing is that you’re supposed to teach us readers about your world, as we’re complete novices about it.

Do you think Tolkien should have shirked on the slightest detail just because the Mainstream hates reading? Honestly, the market you’re chasing are those who love reading and are likely to obsess about every detail, every festival, every little nook and cranny and granny in your world. We want to know about what Bilbo Baggins does in his spare time, what Elrond’s halls look like and what Theoden looks like, or what the difference between the Noldorin and Sindarin Elves are.

We also need to know what the difference between a Cimmerian and a Pict is, or who Crom is, and need to know also about how Aquilonia came to be. Why? It helps us to better understand the characters, their world and their motivation.

For ex; Why does Xaltotun wish to undo the Hyborian People’s dominance of Hyboria? Because it was Hyborian Barbarians that destroyed his Empire of Acheron. And this leads to the next question; what in blue blazes is Acheron? Well Acheron is the Demonic Empire that followed the Thurian Age, it was instituted and brought together by those who followed Set and his Dark Arts, and other demons, following in the example of the Snake-Men. Who are the Snake-Men? etc….

Readers will go down these rabbit holes, so answer the damn questions. If you don’t know, come up with an answer. If you don’t care to establish the details, get out of writing the genre and write something else instead, like Young Adult, or Danielle Steel novels, I hear they’re not big on descriptions or exposition of the sort dreaded by publishers (funny thing, how they want the sordid details in those genres described in every way imaginable and descriptions of where which character put their lips or where they touched, but not about Conan’s sword swings, or how Gimli tore apart an Orc with his battle-axe, or about the finer points of Theoden’s golden-halls).

“Less is more, let the readers’ use their imagination,” has ever been the battle cry of the mainstream all while they seek to stamp out all forms of imagination.

Look at this passage taken from Lord of the Rings: “Thereupon Elrond paused a while and sighed. ‘I remember well the splendour of their banners,’ he said. ‘It recalled to me the glory of the Elder Days and the hosts of Beleriand, so many great princes and captains were assembled. And yet not so many, nor so fair, as when Thangorodrim was broken, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so.’
‘You remember?’ said Frodo, speaking his thought aloud in his astonishment. ‘But I thought,’ he stammered as Elrond turned towards him, ‘I thought that the fall of Gil-galad was a long age ago.’
‘So it was indeed,’ answered Elrond gravely. ‘But my memory reaches back even to the Elder Days. Eärendil was my sire, who was born in Gondolin before its fall; and my mother was Elwing, daughter of Dior, son of Lúthien of Doriath. I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories.
‘I was the herald of Gil-galad and marched with his host. I was at the Battle of Dagorlad before the Black Gate of Mordor, where we had the mastery: for the Spear of Gil-galad and the Sword of Elendil, Aeglos and Narsil, none could withstand. I beheld the last combat on the slopes of Orodruin, where Gil-galad died, and Elendil fell, and Narsil broke beneath him; but Sauron himself was overthrown, and Isildur cut the Ring from his hand with the hilt-shard of his father’s sword, and took it for his own.’”

Notice what it does there? Okay, I’ll still break it down for you.

We have here several key details established with this exclamation by Elrond.

1. We know that Elrond was around when Thangorodrim fell

2. Elrond was around for the 1st Age, saw the 2nd and now the 3rd

3. He was around when Gil-Galad died and was his Herald

4. Elrond saw the defeat of Sauron

5. Isildur cut the Ring from Sauron’s finger

6. Elrond is one of the oldest people alive in ME

7. We have the history of Elrond told here in a few paragraphs

8. Elrond is having an outburst, so that we see proof positive of the great spiritual exhaustion that will later drive him from ME and to the West. So that we have here a hint of what’s to come for him.

9. We find out when it was that Narsil was broken, in the battle of Sauron

10. We get a good idea of how Sauron fell.

So you see? We got almost a dozen details filled out right there. All from one collection of info-dumps (to be honest, this whole chapter is a treasure trove of info-dumps).

Here’s another info dump, this one from the other great pillar of Mythic-Fiction, this one from Hour of the Dragon: “Conan looked about him curiously. He had never before visited the temple of Asura, had not certainly known that there was such a temple in Tarantia. The priests of the religion had a habit of hiding their temples in a remarkable fashion. The worship of Mitra was overwhelmingly predominant in the Hyborian nations, but the cult of Asura persisted, in spite of official ban and popular antagonism. Conan had been told dark tales of hidden temples where intense smoke drifted up incessantly from black altars where kidnaped humans were sacrificed before a great coiled serpent, whose fearsome head swayed for ever in the haunted shadows.”

We learn here a couple of facts also;

1. Conan’s never been in a temple of Asura, it is showing that the priests of Asura are secretive

2. Mitra’s worship is main one of Hyboria

3. The people fear a great serpent, which is an ancient memory of the tyranny of Set (something hinted at here, but constantly mentioned in other stories that precede this one)

4. Human sacrifice is feared

5. We’re operating in a polytheistic setting or a possibly polytheistic setting

6. Folk-memories of a distant era are hinted at, and this helps set up a certain amount of dread in the reader as it inspires in them an even greater understanding that they should fear Xaltotun

7. Asura is NOT the dread-serpent, this is hinted at here

Now I know a guy, in fact he’s kind of in a writer’s group of mine, and he despises expositions and lore-dumps. Just despises them. In his defence he’s sold pretty well, however I could not make it past the opening paragraphs of his book, as it bored me to tears and the prose was crap. It was just too modern.

And that’s the problem, is that the genre which should stand in the greatest opposition to modernity and modern trends, is the only one in which we’re told not to info-dump or describe things.

The thing about Myths is that they are meant to be grandiose, meant to be legendary and meant to over-awe. If you cannot over-awe then what is the point of it all? And how do you over-awe people? By describing things.

What is more is that books are 100% showing and 0% telling in a way, as pointed out by

G. K. Sá Earp

, and so books should not be trying to compete with Marvel movies or something. You’ll never beat them at their own game, just like you won’t win if you don’t fill up your pages.

The Mainstream don’t want you reading. Reading develops ideas, which develops critical thinking skills, which leads to you breaking free of the narrative. And we wouldn’t want that now would we? (Sarcasm Mode Active for those who can’t tell)

But more than that, descriptions and lore and exposition helps to improve the understanding of the Secondary world, and helps to expand one’s memory and if one’s memory for a fictional world’s details increases, imagine how else you might utilize that there memory of yours.

Memory is a funny thing, if left to rust you lose it if used it refines ever more and remains pretty good.

Thing is though that readers don’t want less, they want ever more. Why else do you think Tolkien & Howard would sell hundreds of millions of copies of their works.

I really shouldn’t be typing this essay to be quite honest. It does me more harm than good, as it means I’m encouraging my competition to do what I’m doing that is to say increasingly describing things, world-building as much as possible, inserting as much historic info into every corner of my world.

But the thing is, I was born to write Mythic. I know that now. I can’t not do it. To see for that reason fellow writers led astray and work to tear apart the genre, to me is akin to how St-Luke and Timothy must have felt at the death of St-Paul. Why is this? Because the genre is sacred in my eyes. The genre is the Spirit of Truth, and you know who is said to be the Spirit of Truth? Jesus. So to me this is a genre directly connected to my Faith, my love of history and myths, and also my love of scholarly learning.

I see writers all the time, describing the ‘Deep Lore of Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion’ as boring over on twitter. A part of me wants to shake them and scream at them (instead I just unfollow). The reason is because the Lord of the Rings in my view is the Adventure-novel sequel of the Silmarillion. You wouldn’t have LOTR without Silmarillion. Those complaining about the lore never read LOTR and only ever saw the movie (for proof of this, I’ve seen these writers most of them indies boast this on twitter).

The trouble is that LOTR/Silmarillion is meant to be descriptive because it was written with a certain Celtic-Scandinavian spirit in mind. You see, the Celts & Norse have a tendency when telling a story to embelish and go into finicky detail on the minutest of things.

Why is this? They just do. The world without all the wacky details of knowledge of flora, fauna, history, geography, geology, architecture and so on isn’t as much fun.

Now it’s been an age that writers have been saying repeatedly to the younger upcoming generation of writers, ‘less is more’. And yet if you check out their books in the 80s you’ll see if they wrote Mythic that they described things a lot and had extended exposition dialogue.

Why is this? Because it seels, and because these deets matter.

So why would they tell the new generation not to do it? Because as my business/literary agent/advisor pointed out to me recently; ‘writers can be back-biting, back-stabbing little b***es, only trust a few and suspect the rest.’

In his view this is direct sabotage, this is an active attempt to ruin their competition, so that they won’t be accepted, they won’t make it far and won’t sell well. Why would they do this? To sell more of their own stuff.

As far as inter-generational warfare goes, in the literary world I can’t and won’t write too much about it as

Isaac Young

,

JD Cowan

and

David V. Stewart

have already written extensively about it to my knowledge and could likely do so better.

People don’t want ‘less’, why do you think in terms of recordings Joe Rogan gets so many views? Attention spans in my view aren’t shrinking, people’s interest in bull-crap is. Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion, and long form Conan stories still sell like hot-cakes.

Hell books like Pillars of the Earth still sells, and that book is 1,000 pages (almost) long. What this tells us is that people want long-form content and stories, what they don’t want is to be lectured at or poor quality fiction.

Less is not More. That’s a sleak slogan but it doesn’t really do anything more than tell people to ‘trim the fat’ so to speak and slim down their books, removing valuable dialogue that helps with characterization, world-build and also set the tone/themes of the story.

Can you imagine if either Tolkien or Howard had listened to the naysayers? How much poorer would their stories have been had they listened to them?

More is More as I always say.

Why is this? Because details and history, both on the macro and micro level in Mythic-fiction makes all the difference. A world without history makes no sense, just as a character without any personal history in relation to the plot or the lead(s) means nothing to the readers.

To the writer, the lore and descriptions and such, should be the means by which we stretch ourselves, testing our knowledge of the real world and demonstrate how ably we might put that forward.

Dialogue that is simply one-liners like in Marvel does nothing to appeal to readers like myself. One-liners are boring, and contribute nothing most of the time, whereas explanations, speeches in the style of Cicero for example are exciting stuff. There is a reason one of my best performing videos on yt is an analysis of Feanor’s speech from the Silmarillion.

The thing about the ‘culture war’ is that it is not only real but that it involves older Mythic-writers discouraging younger ones from following in their footsteps, just as it does the Establishment. What this does is kill the next generation of books and myths. It means we’ll have less stories, less myths and less to talk about between each other, and all we’ll have is the trash that the mainstream feeds us.

And you wanna know the worst thing about it? Some writers in the indie sphere I’ve interacted with irl and a few in the ‘Iron Age’ agree with the mainstream that ‘less is more’ and that ‘exposition bad’.

Strangely many of them have even complained to me about Elrond’s Council, or Tolkien in general or stated that the Silmarillion is boring. At first this bothered me. I then realized that they aren’t here for the genre, they’re here to grift on it and sell a product. Where I’m like Don Bluth chasing the shadow of Walt Disney, they’re grifting and using Razorfist’s idea of an Iron-Age of Art & Culture to advance their bottom-line which is fine.

But what they can’t see is that if they were to up their ball-game, and put out a better story, extricate the modernity from it they might reach a larger audience. But they’ve a right to do things the way they want to, can’t dispute that. I’ve been at this longer, and so have a different perspective, and they’ve honestly done much good online and offline can’t dispute that.

What does concern me is; will they change anything? I mean, will anything really change in the culture if we continue down this path of writing slimmer and slimmer MCU styled ‘Fantasy’ books?

Because the thing is; we need to consume culture responsably. We need stories that are good for society, as they are the meats and potatoes of a civilization. If we just produce what I’m terming ‘alt-woke’ or grift-books, or something that aren’t fundamentally of a higher quality than that of the competition, than are those of us creating indie projects really any better?

And in that regard I don’t really see myself as an ‘Iron-Ager’ as it is too small a target audience (not to mention it seems to be mostly an Anglosphere movement, no offence intended I’ve theories why but those are essays for another time) and too often some of its members seem to be too busy standing against something to properly stand for something. Not to mention there’s the strange obsession with politics which cannot possibly be healthy for the cultural to revolve solely around. I’m not saying disliking the woke is bad, I’m only saying some have let that consume them, to the point they’re busier with videos and with ‘scoring points’ on xitter than creating something new.

I’m not saying this to scare people away, I say it in the spirit of honesty. I’m more concerned as it is with prose, poetry and the genre, all of which are intermingled and must be properly interwoven together. Because of this we have to abandon modern sloganeering when it comes to Fiction.

I’m a writer. Nothing more and nothing less. Politics mean little to me, I find them wearisome. Time not spent writing and creating is time wasted for me. As said before, myths and legends are not just my passion but my very life-blood. So what hurts them wounds me deeply. Not to describe, not to have extended dialogue is impossible for me as a writer.

And it’s impossible in the genre. From Dunsany, to Howard, to Tolkien, to Lloyd Alexander, to Dragonlance to all the others, dialogue and exposition is impossible not to have.

Frankly, if there’s not at least one info-dump chapter, not one A Coin from Acheron or Council of Elrond, I’m out. If there’s not some of the song-chapters like from Dragonbone Chair, I’m not interested. Why? Because that stuff is interesting and fascinates and reverbrates with my child brain and my desire to escape.

This world is a Fallen one. So are those we escape to, however those ones can be saved, they can be rescued. It isn’t only the princess we wish to save when Link dashed to the rescue of Zelda, but Hyrule itself. If we can rescue the Secondary World, we can rescue some part of ourselves.

And that’s important. We need to feel we can change a world, as a mere mortal because it gives us a sense of accomplishment and fulfilment. If you don’t feel this way at the end of a story there’s a problem. No one wants to feel hollow or bored by a story, and that’s how most readers’ I’ve met of any well-written book feels; they love that which fulfils and hate that which does not.

Mythic Fiction must therefore purge itself of the ‘less is more’ crowd who hate Tolkien, Romance of the smut-lovers, and so on. That’s what this means. Embrace the Epic, embrace the poetic, and the historic.

Because it isn’t enough to make your world lived-in, it must be beautiful, it must be a place filled with longing and with a life of its own. Without these qualities, and newer works being produced with this sort of mindset, and without the understanding that the genre and one’s world must come before fears of being like Tolkien (imagine not wanting to emulate him, seriously some people are truly incomprehensible).

I guess what I’m saying is; you can either aim to be literary fine-dining, or a cheap macdonald meal. One is okay to be enjoyed from time to time, but no one really cares about it while the other is good for you and feels great.