Nick Brett
asked
Brian Staveley:
When you write your books do you make a specific effort to make them different from other books in the genre. Do you sit back and think "everyone does that" and try to be different or do you just let the story flow and if there are some genre similarities, then so what?
Brian Staveley
I'm not at all opposed to walking down some paths other writers have tread before me. Every genre (fantasy, horror, thriller, erotica) is defined by its tropes, after all. I think readers of erotica would be disappointed if no one ever got laid, and readers of fantasy, likewise, would be pretty bummed if there was no magic, if there were no kick-ass warriors, if there was no eldritch world lurking behind the present.
This isn't to say that I'm aiming to simply recapitulate Tolkien or Le Guin or whoever. The devil, as they say, is in the details. It's not as though Bach stopped writing fugues because they'd already been done, or country singers stopped singing about heartbreak.
In The Emperor's Blades, for example, there is an elite military force: the Kettral. The elite military force is a trope present in hundreds if not thousands of epic fantasies. We have brutal northmen and trained assassins, royal guards and all the rest -- there are elite warriors every time you open a cover. That didn't mean, however, that I wanted to repudiate the whole idea: I didn't. I just wanted to put my own touch on it. I hadn't encountered anything quite like modern special forces in a fantasy setting , and so the Kettral were born.
This isn't to say that I'm aiming to simply recapitulate Tolkien or Le Guin or whoever. The devil, as they say, is in the details. It's not as though Bach stopped writing fugues because they'd already been done, or country singers stopped singing about heartbreak.
In The Emperor's Blades, for example, there is an elite military force: the Kettral. The elite military force is a trope present in hundreds if not thousands of epic fantasies. We have brutal northmen and trained assassins, royal guards and all the rest -- there are elite warriors every time you open a cover. That didn't mean, however, that I wanted to repudiate the whole idea: I didn't. I just wanted to put my own touch on it. I hadn't encountered anything quite like modern special forces in a fantasy setting , and so the Kettral were born.
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