Guest Post: K.J. Parker on The Two of Swords and the Merits of Serialization

I found this format particularly attractive because it’s something old, something new, and something borrowed. Obviously it’s new, but it also goes back—certainly as far back as Dickens, whose distinctive narrative voice and characterisation were shaped by the demands of serialisation. And I’ve always borrowed from history, names, characters, incidents; the first full-length thing I ever wrote, aged about twelve, wasn’t so much fiction but imaginary history, in the form of annals—no characters or descriptions, just terse reports of notable happenings that never actually happened, covering about 300 years.
I saw the mission statement as, first, cook up a backstory that would inevitably lead to the sort of conflicts and situations that would yield a really gripping narrative; second, see to it that the story is witnessed and recorded by characters the sum of whose perspectives gives the best possible view of the course of events.
So; there’s a world war between exhausted but grimly determined enemies; there’s a big cast of extremely diverse characters—but instead of each character or group having separate storylines, with the narrative darting backwards and forwards between them (and I don’t trust myself to do that without getting hopelessly tangled), I’ve gone for something a bit more like watching a Grand Prix motor race; from where each character is standing, he or she can only see a bit of the action as it goes past, while the reader gets to see the whole picture, but filtered through the widest possible spectrum of viewpoints; because great events affect different people in different ways, and a general’s version of the First World War (for example) would be vastly different from that of a soldier in the trenches, a war widow, or the farmer on whose land a battle takes place.

Lately I’ve had a lot of fun writing novellas, and I guess Two of Swords is a series of linked novellas. It’s a form that favours getting right down deep inside the characters’ heads, while leaving just the right amount of scope for world-building and the level of description you need in order to kid the reader into thinking this imaginary world is sort of real. What I’m aiming for is a kind of relay-race, with the narrative baton passing on at the end of each episode.
By the time I’d got all that lot in place, I didn’t really need to think about a plot. It was obvious (to a historian) what had to happen; I’m delighted to be able to say that the plot is growing straight up out of the ground, like a tree, because there’s only one direction it can go in.

For me, then, this is pretty much the ideal place to be. It’s a sequence of novels—I’m writing it in novel-length chunks of around 150,000 words—and at the same time a pearl necklace of consecutive novellas; I can indulge my taste for really big canvasses and at the same time zoom in close on individuals; there’s scope for suspense and complexity, but I hope I can avoid the risk of confused and tangled plotting by having just the one unified story. Rather glibly, I’ve called Two of Swords “making history”, but that’s really what I’m aiming to achieve; synthetic history, but none the worse for that. Basically, it’s the same thing I was doing when I was twelve years old, and it’s what I’ve always wanted to do when I grow up.