InsaneJournal

Is it? Can it be? Yes it is - another discussion!
After writing half a NaNo's worth of posts thoroughly thrashing Eddings (26929 words! Fo' serious), Aki and I decided to move on to something else.

"Something else" turned out to be a genre-staple - quest-fantasy. We begin with Aki's post:


Well, the idea of quests itself is extremely old, if I remember right--King Arthur and the Holy Grail is the oldest I can think of, but there might be even earlier examples. So there's been a lot of time for bad quest-fantasy to get written, and one generally remembers spectacularly bad stuff more than somewhat good stuff, so we end up associating quests with--to give the obvious example at the moment--Eddings, instead of... see, I can't think of a good example at the moment. (Yes, it is glaringly obvious that I need to read Tolkien before discoursing on quests. Well-spotted.) Well, there's an early Pratchett novel--one of the Rincewind ones--that spoofs the idea, if I remember right, but I can't recall any details and I've never been that fond of the Rincewind stories as a rule. I don't quite know why.

...yeah, I'm not contributing much to this, am I.

We've, as you said, danced around what not to do with quests earlier, so I'm going to try to compile a list of things that bother me, whether or not they appear in Eddings. A lot probably will have.

* Do not, for the love of socks (you keep on coining such fun phrases), drag your characters through every country on the map unless they have a d***ed good reason for being in each and every single one of those countries. Here's one acceptable explanation I can think of for the characters being everywhere. You have five countries--call them A, B, C, D, and E, just to keep things simple. Country A is your main protagonist's country, and B and C are neutral-shading-to-friendly with regards to A. D and E are sort of allies, and D is planning--for some valid reason--to declare war on A. If your protagonist has some sort of recognized political power, and is sent to B and C to try to convince them to assist A in event of war, and then goes to E to try to talk them out of declaring war on A, and then is caught and brought as a hostage to D, that would be something along the lines of a legitimate reason. Not an illegitimate reason is having your protagonist wander around chasing someone who may or may not have been there, when they were probably somewhere else all along--or having your protagonist actually following your antagonist/someone else, but giving the chase-ee no reason to be going to all those different places.
* If your protagonist travels with people, each person should have a good reason for being there. I've just remembered a quest-fantasy I actually rather liked. It's called The Ring of Allaire, and it's a bit cliched and a bit predictable (or maybe that was just me), but it's very lyrical in places, and the characters are quite real-seeming, and I did like it. In The Ring of Allaire, four characters are on a quest. One of them is a magician's apprentice named Tristan whose master (Blaise? something like that) was murdered at the beginning of the book and who's trying to avenge his master by finding the person--Allaire--who can defeat the evil wizard who had Blaise killed because Blaise knew more about Allaire than anyone else alive; one is the heir to the throne, whose name I cannot for the life of me remember, who needs to come along because he's supposed to marry Allaire (and because he thinks quests are shiny) and can't be king unless he does; one is Allaire herself, once they rescue her--she needs to come along because everyone else has forgotten she exists and she needs them to help her find the last ring (she's supposed to have a ring for every finger, and she's powerless until she has all of them); and the last is a girl whose name I also can't remember, whose guardian took Tristan, the heir, and Allaire prisoner--she helped them escape and went with them because she couldn't stand life with her guardian any more. They all had reasons to be there. "Because a prophecy says so" is not a reason.
* Your characters should have a good reason for their quest. This is actually a case where I think Eddings got something right--in the Malloreon and Elenium, at least. For those who haven't read them (and I simplify drastically to avoid spoilers), in the Malloreon series the protagonists' infant son was kidnapped for magical and political gain, and they go hunting all over the world to get him back (and pass through half the countries in one continent and all the countries in the other--see point 1); in the Elenium series the protagonist is trying to get a magical artifact that is the only way of saving the life of his queen, whom he's personally sworn to protect and about whom he cares deeply (and goes through all the countries on the continent, because this is Eddings after all). The prequel series to the Malloreon has the characters chasing frantically around for a certain extremely powerful MacGuffin for no clearly stated reason. That is, the bad guys have stolen it, but they can't use it (and in fact it will kill them if they try). The reader never exactly figures out why it's so vitally important that the protagonists get it back right that instant. That is something to avoid--if your reader can't figure out why your protagonists are crawling through the mud and fording rivers in flood and sneaking through forests for weeks on end with only their shoes to eat, then they're going to have a hard time believing in the quest.
* If the quest is the purpose of your series or novel, there should be character development involved as well as plot event. (You should have known this is coming, seeing as I have a work-in-progress called Aiaria's Quest which is entirely about a personal quest and only barely about physical moving around.) I'm not saying that every event should be a symbolic parallel for some internal development of your protagonist's, but s/he shouldn't end the series or novel in exactly the same mental place as s/he was at the beginning. Has s/he learned responsibility from leading a group of people through dangers? Tolerance from seeing other cultures' way of life? Compassion from spending a lot of time with other people, needing to understand how they feel? How to relax because there hasn't been an opportunity to sit on a high horse in an ivory tower? [/painful mixing of metaphors] Here's the real test: if you were to put your protagonist in a situation they were in at the beginning, would they react the same way? (And no, I don't just mean "Oh, well, he'd use the MacGuffin/she'd use her newly-learned swordfighting skills to smash the evil enemy dude!".) If they would, then you haven't written a novel or series. You've written an extended travel guide in narrative form.

I...might have had more to say than I thought I did?