On Fantasy, Shakespeare, and the Decline of the Attention Span | Entry 2
Entry 2: On A Darker Shade of Magic (with a dimmer view of books)
As an aspiring author, it sometimes happens that when I read a book that strikes me as phenomenal and excellent, I am overcome by feelings of inadequacy and depression. This book is so fantastic, I think, that nothing I’ve written—or ever will write—could possibly compete. What am I even doing with my life?
This was not the experience I had when I read A Darker Shade of Magic.
Now, I want to be careful in how I say this, because if I should ever be so lucky as to have an agent or publisher combing through my internet presence to determine whether I’m worth publishing, there are a couple things I know they don’t want to see. They don’t want to see me being mean, and they don’t want to see me being arrogant. And if you say something like, “this best-selling novel is legit trash and the author is totally overrated—trust me, I’m way better,” then you’ve pulled a double no-no. So let me be clear: A Darker Shade of Magic is not trash, and if any book of mine ever attracts a tenth the fans of V.E. Schwab’s, I’ll count myself extremely fortunate. Schwab is obviously doing something right, and impressively so.
That said, when I read A Darker Shade of Magic, instead of becoming depressed about my own inadequacy, I felt angry at the injustice of the publishing world.
To paint the scene for you, the year was 2018, and I had just gone to a writers’ conference where I met a well-respected and successful literary agent by the name of Steven Salpeter and had the opportunity to pitch my first completed fantasy novel to him. He asked me about what kind of fantasy I liked to read, and then he recommended I try A Darker Shade of Magic. I did, but I’m cheap, and the book was only available at the library I visited in audiobook form, so I listened to it in my car over the course of a few weeks whenever I drove somewhere. Meanwhile, it slowly became clear that Steven was never going to respond to the sample of my novel I sent (per his request at the conference), and that despite his initial enthusiasm about my idea, he ultimately had no interest in becoming my agent.
This is not the best way to consume books, and it’s entirely possible that I would have had a better experience if I’d read A Darker Shade of Magic at a different time in my life—or actually read it, instead of listening to the audio.
In the book, Kell is one of the last of the Antari magicians, who have the rare ability to travel between four parallel Londons: Black London, which has been completely destroyed by black magic and subsumed by darkness; White London, which is somehow closer to Black London than the other Londons and is pale and leached of color, Red London (where Kell is from), which is full of prosperity and magic; and Grey London (our London), which has no magic. Cool, right? At the beginning of the book, we meet Kell and the many-sided coat he wears. He visits each of the three reachable Londons, carrying messages between them.
As I was listening to this in my car (and days went by with no further word from Steven), I quickly became bored out of my mind—and angry. The first thing they teach you in Intro to Fiction and Poetry Writing is that your character must want something: desire plus obstacle = plot. And yet, this book went on and on for hours following Kell through what amounted to a normal routine for him. He wanted nothing in particular, and nothing much happened. When a plot finally got around to developing, it was that he came into possession of an artifact of powerful black magic and had to destroy it by taking it back to the very dangerous place where it came from. Sound familiar?
Now, to be fair, I’m not normally one to throw stones at recycled plots. You know who recycled a lot of plots? Yeah, that old white guy I promised to mention occasionally: Shakespeare. The plot of Hamlet was lifted from History of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote about a guy named Amleth whose uncle killed his father, married his mother, and declared himself king. Amleth feigns madness to keep from getting murdered by his uncle but eventually gets revenge—just like Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet was based on a 1562 poem by Arthur Brooke called “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,” in which a man and woman from two feuding families, the Montagues and Capulets, fall in love and wind up killing themselves in just the same way and for just the same reasons as Shakespeare’s characters. Shakespeare even kept most of the names the same.
No, what makes a story worth reading—and rereading and rereading through the ages—is not the originality of the plot, but rather the skill with which the elements of the story are chosen and woven together to present something that is holistically compelling. The problem with A Darker Shade of Magic was not that the plot was recycled from Lord of the Rings. And it certainly wasn’t the premise. In fact, the premise was brilliant. No doubt, the four Londons, the last of the Antari magicians who can move between them, and the many-sided coat he wore were the main reason why A Darker Shade of Magic got published, sold so many copies, and impressed Steven Salpeter. It sounds like a cool book.
And hey, a lot of people read the whole thing and loved it, so it’s not like the execution was bad. It just lacked… depth. The characters lacked drive. I can’t put it any better than Katarina, a random reviewer on Goodreads (though I will edit her text because I think I actually can put it a little better): “Her plotline [Schwab’s world] was like Red London, vivid and full of possibilities. Her characters [were] like White London, dangerous yet somehow pale and faded. And me, well, I’m [my experience reading it was] Grey London[:] magicless[…] in the surface but waiting for the magic I know it exists [something] to ignite.”
And this is the sad reality of the publishing world right now: having a really well-executed, holistically compelling project might never catch anyone’s attention—but a real snappy premise will. This circles back to the decline of the attention span. If you can’t condense your incredibly holistically compelling project into a couple short sentences that make it STAND OUT from everything else out there, no agent or publisher or reader is going to get far enough into it to realize hey, this is really compelling. Whereas, if you can make your project sound really compelling in those same few sentences, you can sometimes hook people long enough to get them to buy the thing. Maybe you can even hook enough people to become an NYT best seller.*
*Though to be fair to V.E. Schwab, a great many people read her whole book and still loved it.
Erasmus: The worst always pleases the most because, as I have said, the majority of men are fools. If the poorer artist is most pleased with himself and admired by many others, why should he want to have true skill? It will cost him more, make him more self-conscious and uneasy, and please a much smaller audience.