However, the problem is that the fantastic multiverse does not posit any demands of its own, making it very difficult to find something that is concise in all senses of the word. This also manifests in mundane ways. For example, I was in the bookstore today looking for hardcore fantasy fiction – by which I mean an author who is in complete command over the plot, who knows what he is writing about, with a sense of tremendous conviction which alone is capable of pushing the reader from one page to the next. Now, a friend of mine, whose suggestions I trust blindly when it comes to this genre, had once made out a list of good authors I should be on the lookout for, a list that included the likes of Pratchett, Erikson, Goodkind, Donaldson, Feist, etc. All of them, I’ve since found out, are undoubtedly fantastic and talented; the imagination they professed, their command over the language, the conviction I was talking about, all them were at their best.
(These achievements are magnified in significance because, unlike the labyrinthine rigours of reality, the fantastic offers nothing in terms of, say, a contemptuous sociological environment or a prevalent idea or belief that is available for exploitation. All that is required must be constructed ground-up.)
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[/caption]So, all these authors that I was talking about have written many, many books. Steven Erikson is currently writing a series that is 10 books long, and each book spans a minimum of 700 or so pages; to wit, the last three books that have been published are 1,200 pages long, give or take a few. At the bookstore, I decide to pick up the first volume (because I lost the one I had), and it isn’t there. Then, I look for the first book of Robert Jordan’s ‘Wheel of Time’ series (13 volumes), and it isn’t there. The same goes for Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Tower’ series (8 volumes) and Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ series (37 volumes).
While the boundlessness of such fantastic worlds offers millions of readers an easy respite from any vicissitude of reality they find tedious, there is a loss of parallelism that is exemplified by a sense of being lost in a fictitious world just as much as they could be lost in the real one. I understand how authors have the liberty to write howsoever they wish to, so I must stress upon the fact that this is only my opinion, albeit a strong one.
This notion of parallelism seems to mimic a certain tendency to rebel on the author’s part on many levels, and manifests itself across most of the pages of fiction’s literature as a reaffiliation towards conflicts. Many good authors I know of, many acclaimed authors whose works I’ve read have fuelled their books by efficaciously recreating a conflict alive within them. These conflicts are many in number, many in kind. For example, I find that most of my emotions can be better chronicled through poems but I am a lover of prose; I’m a prosaist.
You might argue that words are words, that each word only encapsulates so much and so-so meaning, that it is up to the author to string them together to give rise to the perfect “flow”, to bring to life something that is as yet intangible. Poetry, many argue, and I would side with them, gives you some “space” – which I interpret as the liberty to interpret the poem as I wish. Therefore, to me, poetry is a special form of writing in which there is much room to lose oneself in; at the same time, it would seem like I, in a manner of speaking, am condemning prose to a pall of formality, of something that seems very structuralized, something that does not completely kill interpretation but restricts it vehemently. Is that because prose reads like a march of soldiers? Or is it because, apart from the semantic prong, there are also such things as the potential of a comma, of a period, of a colon, of a semicolon, of a pilcrow that can actively adjust the way a piece of prose is being read? Possibly.
That loss of parallelism (from earlier in this article) is manifested here as well. I believe that poetry and prose, even though very much being able to convey different ideas differently and better or worse, are also capable of delivering the same emotions similarly, which places the onus on the writer’s capability to manipulate the language. There is a poetic sense, a poetic emotion, in structuralism, in formalism. To elucidate on this, I have always believed that there are only two kinds of people on this planet: the ones who are wandering and know they are lost, and the ones who are wandering and don’t know that they are lost – whether they are lost or not is only a matter of chance. I’m a wanderer who’s lost. I say that only because I find in myself an extreme sense of goodness which I find disturbing since, more often than not, I gravitate towards, I relish the ecstasy of, sinning (not on heinous scales, however).
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[/caption]In being a wanderer who is lost, I only exploit myself, I prostitute my skills in order to be who I want to be, to be the person I cannot be, to be the person I would have been if not for such conflicts. Likewise, it is not how the words are string together but about how we, as writers, are willing to abuse our command over a language in order to get a particular task done, to get a certain message across. In other words, I believe that poetry is what it is only because of a bias that has been established by our ancestors, a bias that many will find convenient for the sake of what they are doing, but a bias that would seem unreasonable – even laughable in some cases – to those contending with conflicts. For a writer, you see, a conflict is the easiest way to express oneself because one doesn’t have to elucidate separately on the clashing entities. All one has to do is elucidate on the fight and the entities will automatically come to life.
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