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The Magic of Theater

Thornlost by Melanie Rawn

Written by Melanie Rawn

Given that the subject of my novels (the Glass Thorns series) is a theater troup who use their magical abilities to enhance their performances, I am often asked the question: “How would your own favorite play work with the magic system you created for your Glass Thorns series?”

Answer: Well, here’s the thing. My favorites are pretty much anything by Shakespeare and Euripedes, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, Lion in Winter, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and so on, none of which would benefit at all by the inclusion of the kind of magic that shows up in Glass Thorns. Those playwrights didn’t have any of the flash-dazzle I’ve given my theater troupe; they worked with what they had. Words.

Modern films of Shakespeare’s plays take great delight in showing massive battles (Agincourt, Bosworth Field) that the limitations of Elizabethan theater made impossible, but is it really necessary to see all the blood and gore and guts and horses and swords and armor and banners? One imagines that Shakespeare would have had huge fun with all that, but that fact that he didn’t have the option doesn’t seem to have bothered him much. To me, it’s rather like colorizing B&W movies: sure, it’d be interesting to see Bogie and Bergman in color, but would it really make Casablanca a better film?

Cole Porter, in his last musical for the stage, Silk Stockings, pokes fun at the technological advances of the ’50s, assuring us that nobody would come to see Ava Gardner as Lady Godiva bare-naked on a horse unless she was filmed in:

  • Glorious Technicolor,
  • Breathtaking Cinemascope or
  • Cinerama, Vista Vision, Superscope, or Todd-A-O
  • And Stereophonic sound!

If you’ve got toys, you play with them. You write with your toys in mind. This has, in our era of CGI, led to some really spectacular special effects in movies that are, shall we say, a trifle challenged when it comes to plot. Special effects can be delightful, but if you don’t have them to play with, you have to write words that engage the audience as completely as glorious explosions and breath-taking monsters and, heaven help us, sharknados.

(And stereophonic sound.)

Which is not to say such movies aren’t great fun. I’m a total pushover for space operas and let’s-blow-up-Los-Angeles movies, volcanoes and dinosaurs on the rampage. Toys are fun.

The plays my guys perform are actually quite short by our standards—less like a five-hour Hamlet, more like an hour-long Tommy. Their magical toys are sounds, sights, tastes, sensations, scents, and emotions, the intensity of which would become a serious strain on performers and audiences alike after an hour or so.

But what if you don’t have any toys? That’s something that I have my theater group think about, and it bothers them. What if they did a play without the sound effects or the physical sensations or the scenery or the emotions that are conjured by them with magic? They find the idea both intriguing and nerve-shredding. What they’ll eventually work around to is that it’s the words that matter in the end—which is scarcely a startling conclusion to find in a book by somebody who uses words.

When you get right down to the nitty-gritty, as they used to say in my long-ago childhood, as writers we can’t offer you Glorious Technicolor, Breath-taking Cinemascope, and so on and so forth. What we offer you in our books is writing. We use words to tell stories and delineate characters and posit ideas, and the words are all we have. The only thing we can do is write them, and hope that you enjoy them.

Even without Stereophonic sound.

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From the Tor/Forge April 21st newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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What’s Coming Up for Tor

Between BEA (Book Expo America), Phoenix Comic Con, and the upcoming San Diego Comic Con and New York Comic Con, we’ve been thinking quite a bit about some of the books we’re excited for this Summer and Fall. So we put together a list of just some of the highlights we have coming up. We hope you’re as excited as we are!

Words of Radiance

Fiddlehead

Thornlost

Watcher of the Dark

Judgement at Proteus

The World of the End

Sea Change

Wisp of a Thing

California Bones

The Eterna Files

Antigoddess

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“Why did you choose to return to high fantasy?”

Touchstone by Melanie RawnBy Melanie Rawn

Who says I had a choice?

Touchstone knocked me upside the head. This is the second time this has happened to me. The first was Dragon Prince, and I remember it quite clearly.

Memorial Day weekend, 1985. I’d been reading The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa’ud, and my fancy was caught by a description of a group of princes going out hawking, with the flowing robes and the hawks on their arms…riding in Jeeps. I liked everything about this image (except for the Jeeps!) so I began playing with it, just to see if it would take me anywhere. Three days later I had the first four chapters of Dragon Prince.

This happened again with Touchstone. May 9, 2009, nine o’clock in the morning (this time I made a note of it). I’d gotten to sleep at about 3 or so, and woke up with this thing in my head. Didn’t even change out of my nightgown. Went into my office, fired up the computer, and I could scarcely type fast enough. The next time I was even marginally aware of my surroundings, it was well past noon.

Neither instance, of course, was entirely the gobsmacking it sounds. Things accumulate in your head; you’re squirreling away ideas and information whether you know it consciously or not. Eventually it reaches critical mass and demands your absolute undivided attention.

The Exiles series and the Spellbinder books were different; they developed over many months, and I was aware of the process. Golden Key was unique in my experience in that Jennifer Roberson, Kate Elliott, and I created a whole world and a lengthy plotline during a weekend at Jennifer’s house. We wanted to have everything we needed (or at least most of it) before we started writing our individual sections of the book.

But with Touchstone, as with Dragon Prince, the thing was just simply there. Plenty of details to be worked out, of course: the look of the characters and the places, a map, the names (always a problem, but getting worse these days—why is it that every new pharmaceutical on the market sounds like a planet or a city or a character in a fantasy or SF novel? I mean, wouldn’t “Ambien” make a great name for a province?), and all that sort of thing. Still, the characters and overarching concepts were there, and, in my agent’s term, I went into “berserker mode.”

The thing that startled me most was that none of these people are in positions of power within their society. They’re working-class gits, teenaged boys with a chip on each shoulder and more stashed in their pockets. Cade, the certified tormented artist; Jeska, the instinctive actor and enthusiastic ladies’ man; Rafe, the solid and reliable strength behind them all; and Mieka, the key to their success and gleeful purveyor of lunacy. I’ve never written people like them before, and I’m having an indecent amount of fun.

So it’s not that I chose to do something new in the high fantasy genre. It was just suddenly there in my head. And now that it’s in your hands, I hope you have as good a time reading it as I’m having writing it.

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From the Tor/Forge March newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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About our newsletter: every issue of Tor’s monthly email newsletter features original writing by, and interviews with, Tor authors and editors about upcoming new titles from all Tor and Forge imprints. In addition, we occasionally send out “special edition” newsletters to highlight particularly exciting new projects, programs, or events.

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