In a guest post on Chuck Wendig’s blog, Richard Swan shares a few lessons he learned writing his novel, The Justice of Kings.
- The first million words are practice. After selling his first book series, Swan added up the word counts of all his previous (unpublished) novels. “I learnt two things: the first was that I really hit my ‘default narrative voice’ at around half a million words; the second was that I wrote and sold The Justice of Kings not long after the big one million (about 1.3). For me, at least, the million-ish-word mark represented a fairly stark shift in my writing fortunes.”
- The best world building comes from what you don’t see. For Swan, it’s the small things that matter. References to public figures, holidays, and past events that aren’t further developed give a world a sense of place and history. As an example, he notes that Obi-Wan Kenobi referred to the Clone Wars some 20 years before the war was shown in the films. “A tiny, throwaway line but that did a huge amount of work in building Obi-Wan’s backstory and the wider Star Wars meta,” Swan writes. “Little titbits like that can add a lot of flavour and give the world a lived-in feel.”
