How Tamora Pierce’s stories are inspiring generations
Written by
Delilah Waan
I discovered Tamora Pierce’s books as a girl, in my library, after school.
By then, I had read loads of epic and heroic fantasy…and I had internalized a pattern: boys got to be the Chosen Ones who would ride dragons and defeat evil, while girls—common-born or royalty or exotic foreigner—were merely the pretty (always, always, they were absurdly beautiful) trophies the hero collected at the end.
That sucked.
Here I was, fortunate enough to be born in the 1980s, living in a country and society where women had the same rights as men, demonstrably just as smart and capable as any of the boys in my class but also demonstrably not conventionally attractive. Constantly being bombarded by popular media and teen magazines to only care about “being hot” to “get a guy” and to swoon over boys.
(Because what else was I supposed to do? Have life ambitions that weren’t marriage and children? Pffft! What a waste of a perfectly good womb!)
I hated that. I would retreat into my fantasy books in hopes of finding escape and STILL end up in secondary worlds where all sorts of impossible things are real—except, apparently, for who got to be the hero.
Heroes: Still male. Still white. Still the center of the universe.
The girls: Still perpetuating the same tired Disney-fied gender roles.
That all changed the day I discovered Alanna: The First Adventure.
(Sidebar: can I just highlight how wonderful it was that the book was subtitled “The First Adventure”? It was a subtle but important word choice I didn’t notice back then, but I appreciate now.)
Alanna of Trebond, Keladry of Mindelan, Veralidaine Sarrasri—they proved girls didn’t have to be meek and demure and sit at home waiting for boys and men to save the kingdom. They stepped up when they needed to, and they got the job done.
Tamora Pierce’s books are full of girls with ambitions greater than the roles their society allowed them. Girls who refuse to be limited by their gender. Girls who grow into women who will not be defined by one dimensional labels, like “daughter” or “mother” or “wife”, but who also do not outright reject societal ideas of femininity for the sake of being “not like other girls”.
Pierce also didn’t just handwave away all the inconvenient parts of being born female. Periods got page time—and not as the inciting incident for an arranged marriage plot, or as a plot device to avoid sexual assault! Periods were bloody (hah) and painful (double hah) nuisances that actively interfered with her protagonists’ studying and career opportunities and Alanna and Kel and Daine couldn’t simply snap their fingers and get rid of their periods, no matter how much they wanted to, because that was biological reality so they just had to cope—like I had to cope!—and get on with things.
I idolized all of Tamora Pierce’s female characters. Thayet, Buri, Rosethorn, Lark, Sandry, Tris, Daja—yes, even Berenene. They’re all vivid, fully fleshed, and relatable. I still idolize them, to this very day.
Girls can be heroes. Girls can slay monsters. Girls can adventure to far-off places where boys and men daren’t tread.
Girls do not have to marry the handsome charming prince even when he and the entire kingdom expects it—not even when they’ve been sleeping together, not even when she’s in love with him—because sex is one thing, love is another, and marriage is something else altogether.
Girls don’t even have to end up with anybody at all because women can be happy, leading fulfilled meaningful lives on their own—without any husbands or children, thank you very much.
I don’t think I can understate how influential Tamora Pierce’s works have been on SFF, and how important her books are to me, and countless others. I’ve read pretty much everything she has published, and if there’s one thing I’ve taken away from her books it’s this:
You can’t control who you’re born as. That’s life. The world will try to use that against you, to put limits on who you are and what you can do. That’s life too. Fighting against that is hard—but fighting to become the person you want to be, and fighting to make the world better is worth it.
Thank you, Tammy, for writing your stories. They were exactly what I needed as a girl. Your heroes were the examples that gave me the conviction I needed as a young woman. Your courage to write books with unconventional protagonists is what inspired me to write books from the perspectives that weren’t getting published.
And, some thirty years on from the moment I stumbled across Alanna’s story in my library, your books are still exactly what my daughter needs in her life.
Delilah Waan has read pretty much everything Tamora Pierce has ever published.
She is also the award-winning author of Petition, a story about an angry Asian daughter of impoverished immigrant fisherfolk fighting privileged rich kids in a ruthless job hunt tournament in order to save her family.
If Rahelu ever ran into Alanna, they’d probably wind up in the training yards—magic summoned, weapons drawn, ready to duel—within five minutes of meeting each other.
When it comes to the inclusion of explicit sex scenes in fantasy novels (particularly those not targeted towards romance readers), the decision tends to be divisive. Readers typically fall into two camps: those who find the sexual content gratuitous and/or unnecessary, and those who disagree.
I’ll admit that I used to be in the former camp. I didn’t hate or skim explicit sex scenes, but they often read awkwardly to me (sometimes to the point of being cringe-inducing). But even when they were well-written, I generally didn’t understand the author’s reasons for including them.
Case in point: the explicit sex scene early on in Fonda Lee’s Jade City, when Hilo visits Wen. We’re five chapters in (it’s titled “The Horn’s Kitten”) and this scene is our first introduction to Maik Wenruxian: she’s a stone-eye (someone without the ability to use jade magic) and the younger sister of Hilo’s two most trusted men.
When I first read this scene, I remember being extremely puzzled and put off. I couldn’t figure out why this interaction had to be shown on page—in that level of detail, with that kind of blunt, explicit language, and with that much of the word count devoted to it—instead of written as a fade-to-black or alluded to. There was nothing, I thought, that you couldn’t have gotten from a short sentence or two summarizing what happened. All of the important plot-relevant exposition you need takes places during the post-coital conversation the morning after.
Eventually, I got to the conclusion to the trilogy, Jade Legacy. It has another explicit sex scene that takes place between the same characters, many years later.
When I read that, I finally understood.
Hilo and Wen have a beautifully complex relationship that evolves and grows over the course of the trilogy which spans some thirty-plus years. Where they start (an up-and-coming gangster and his side piece, who has no place in gang business) and where they end up (as the mob boss and his most trusted advisor) is a study in contrasts. Who these characters believe themselves to be, who they are to each other, how they relate to each other and to the world—it’s a deep and nuanced exploration of all the ways in which love and duty complement and conflict with each other.
Looking back at the overall story, I don’t think those arcs and those later moments would have landed or been as emotionally powerful as they were without the explicit sex scenes. Those scenes ground the characters and their relationships in a raw and visceral way that other moments wouldn’t. When we see Hilo with Wen, whether it’s through his perspective or hers, we see him being vulnerable and open in a way that doesn’t come across in his other scenes. When we see Wen pursue the actions she does in secret, knowing why she makes those decisions, knowing how Hilo would feel about them, knowing how she feels about him, it adds stakes because we can guess at—and anticipate—the hurt and the fallout when he discovers it.
That was the moment when it clicked for me.
The sex scenes in The Green Bone Saga are not about the sex.
Which is a very long-winded way of getting to the point of this particular annotation: why did I write an explicit masturbation scene into Petition?
Because the scene is not about the sex.
But also because it’s the 2020s and hey, guess what? I’m sick of reading epic fantasy novels that feature subplots with female characters going on sexual/romantic awakening character arcs that culminate in her “becoming a woman” because some male character has “taught her” to do so and, somehow, no matter what her ambitions/wants are, she discovers that her life was “incomplete” prior to “falling in love” and suddenly finds ultimate meaning and purpose in life through being his sexual/romantic partner.
Just…no.
Girls and women do feel sexual desire and they don’t need a boy, or a man, or anyone for that matter, to satisfy that desire.
It is actually possible to feel sexual desire or have romantic inclinations towards someone and not want to take it any further because, you know, you’ve got priorities and being in a committed romantic relationship requires work and you don’t have the bandwidth for that.
And we don’t need to be ashamed of any of these things.
Of all the chapters in Petition, this is probably the one that I learned the most from even though it is one of the chapters that changed the least.
Because I write very similarly to how Naomi Novik writes—by starting with a character’s voice and inhabiting that character’s viewpoint—I generally have a very strong sense of whether a scene or sequence is or isn’t working. When I get the voice and the viewpoint right, the words just flow.
Such was the case with this chapter.
Chapter 21 concludes the mystery part of the cultist subplot and marks the turning point into the first climax of the book. (Petition is structurally weird because I consider there to be three climaxes altogether—but we’ll talk about that in later annotations.) There are five scenes in total:
Rahelu and her team in the alleyway
An Evocation of Xyuth and Dharyas’s last moments
The immediate aftermath of that discovery
An argument over dinner at the inn
Rahelu trying to sleep (added post beta read)
Aside from filling in 112 XXX placeholders and minor line edits (a net change of -266 words), what you read in the published version is basically the same as the original alpha draft. Scenes #1 through #4 were about as clean a draft as I typically write. The voice, the viewpoint, the character moments, the emotional beats, the overall arc—all of it was right. It worked.
Then the first piece of beta reader feedback came in.
I remember reading it and being absolutely devastated. For a few hours, I just sat there, thinking, “Oh god, they hate it,” over and over and over.
It didn’t work.
Why? Why didn’t it work?
I had no idea.
I kept looking at the feedback. While harsh, it had been honestly and thoughtfully written with a great deal of care behind it.
And yet.
When I had gone through every line of the text and considered every question they had raised, I couldn’t agree.
Fundamentally, I still felt like those scenes and that sequence were right. If they weren’t—well, I didn’t know how else to write them. But it took me three days of hard thinking to be able to articulate my reasons for writing these scenes and this sequence in this way.
Tragedy—and by extension, grief—is tricky to handle. Tragedy is an event but grief is a response; an individual one.
Considering the characters and their relationship to Dharyas:
Ghardon and Elaram: Dharyas was House Isca and they’re House Issolm. They may have studied together; they may have even interacted at social events. Most likely, this would not have been a frequent occurrence, given how much Dharyas likes to duck out on social events. They’re not colleagues or friends; they’re casual acquaintances.
Rahelu: She likes Dharyas. But, as Rahelu pointed out to Lhorne in Chapter 10, they’ve been friends for less than a day. After Petition Day, Rahelu never saw Dharyas again until she stumbled on her corpse in the Tattered Quill.
Lhorne. Not only are House Ideth and House Isca allied, he and Dharyas were close friends from childhood. Of all the characters present in this chapter, he is the one whose life would be the most impacted by her death.
For all of these characters, Dharyas’s death is personal.
They are graduates of the Resonance Guild. They were the ones who discovered her body at the scene of her murder.
But for Ghardon, Elaram, and Rahelu, it is not a personal tragedy.
They knew her but she was not their friend, their protégé, their daughter. Her death does not leave a gaping hole in their lives. Their reactions should, therefore, be proportionate to reflect that the shock, horror, and distress they feel is not, cannot, and therefore should not be treated as comparable—or even approachable—to what Lhorne or Tsenjhe or House Isca feel.
Ghardon, Elaram, and Rahelu can’t grieve for Dharyas, in the same way that Lhorne does. Portraying what they feel as grief doesn’t portray what Lhorne feels with the gravity that his feelings deserve.
For most of the characters, Xyuth’s death is confronting, but not personal. They’ve never met nor heard of him, prior to this. For Rahelu, there’s personal guilt from the possibility that her actions might have directly led to Xyuth’s murder and, by extension, Dharyas’s murder.
Though this is never explicitly stated, Rahelu is affected by these two deaths.
There is a marked change in the prose style in the aftermath scene, with long, run-on sentences and extensive parentheticals. This is not the analytical, structured thought process typical of Rahelu’s POV, nor do the sentences and paragraphs have the same cadence of her usual narration.
You have to read between the lines in the prose—how she remembers Xyuth had a consort and a daughter, how she reacts to the workers discussing how to arrange Dharyas’s hair, how later, at the inn, she eats everything in sight other than the pheasant dish—and connect these details together to deduce how she feels.
I could make this more overt but I’m not a fan of spelling out things that can be inferred.* The heavy reliance on subtext does make the prose more cognitively demanding to read but it’s an authorial choice I stand by.
There’s also the matter of how people in a high performance culture handle and express strong emotions in a high pressure, high stakes situation.
From the outset, the assignment is established as a stretch challenge even in the best of circumstances. The consequences of failure are life-threatening. None of the Petitioners can afford to go to pieces, so none of them do.
They have evil cultists to stop. They can break down afterwards.
One thing I’ve learned to do is to not action every piece of feedback** immediately. Reading is an individual experience. As feedback came in from the rest of my beta readers, it became clear that, for the vast majority, the emotional moments and the overall arc in the chapter did land. Nevertheless, I didn’t dismiss that one outlier in the beta reader feedback.
Neil Gaiman has famously said that people are generally right about how they feel but wrong about what the problem is and how to fix it. In my experience, this is true.
Originally, the chapter ends on a character moment I like quite a lot: my little dig at the trope of two guys fighting for/over a girl and ‘winning’ her.
There’s no such gendered practices in my setting and Rahelu has nothing to do with the conflict between Lhorne and Ghardon but people are people. Lhorne is romantically attracted to Rahelu and she to him. Ghardon knows this and has been goading them both. When Ghardon makes a bid to exploit this attraction and Lhorne falls for it, the implied sleeping arrangements are clear. Except Rahelu stymies them both by rejecting the game.
As fun and satisfying as this subversion of expectations might be, what it doesn’t do is close the emotional loop opened when the characters discover the murders. Throughout the chapter, there’s simply been escalating tensions but no release. Even though the personal conflict between Ghardon and Lhorne comes to a head with the duel, the outcome doesn’t resolve the question of how they’re going to stop the cultists or provide any emotional catharsis.
That’s why there needed to be one more scene.
When each of the characters are somewhat alone, the illusion of privacy allows them to be more honest. That’s when the prose can be more overt without coming across as either on-the-nose, overdone, or patronizing. And that brief moment of vulnerability is what provides the emotional catharsis we need.
*One of my favorite books is The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, whom I think is one of the most thoughtful and brilliant SFF writers of our generation. Baru is the kind of glorious, tightly written masterwork that I don’t even aspire to write some day; I simply like to read it repeatedly, admiring the beauty of its elegant construction, the way Dickinson’s deft understated prose uses subtext to express more emotion through restraint than most people do with an entire dictionary, and sing its praises to everybody I know. (back to reading)
**These days, I try not to read beta reader feedback as it comes in, because it’s better to look at it all at once so you can a sense of how the story is working across the board for the majority of readers. Makes it a lot easier not to freak out too! (back to reading)
When I started out writing Petition, I chose to write it in third person limited perspective. There were many reasons for that decision:
Most modern genre fiction is written in third person limited pasttense. Especially epic fantasy, when there’s lots of POVs. That’s not to say you can’t have multi-first person POVs (Naomi Novik’s multi-first person POV in Spinning Silver worked incredibly well) or a blend of first and third POVs (J.T. Greathouse does this in Pact and Pattern where The Hand of the Sun King is all first person POV and then The Garden of Empire sticks with first person for Wen Alder’s chapters and uses third person for the other POVs). But third person limited for all POVs used tends to be the default; I suspect because it’s easier to write and easier to read. And while Petition only had two POVs, I wanted the option to have more POVs in later books in the series.
First person is really, really hard to do well. When done well, it’s brilliant. (Examples that I’ve loved: Novik’s single POV first person in The Scholomance; K.J. Parker, however, might have written my favorite first person novel in Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City.) But when done poorly, it becomes really off-putting to read—I have DNF’d many a book for badly written first person POV.
There is no need for the story to be told in first person. Usually first person lends itself well to framing narratives—another technique that is brilliant when done well and irritating when done poorly—and I didn’t see this story needing one.
Second person is even more divisive. I’ve actually written a lot of second person prose (it’s the default when you’re writing case studies and immersive simulations) but it’s even harder to pull off in prose fiction than first person. Examples that I’ve loved: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower, and Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts Through Water. But all of those work because there are very specific plot and character reasons for choosing second person—and I didn’t have any of those reasons here.
Third person omniscient could have been fun. A lot of my favorite series actually flow between third person limited (a.k.a. a ‘close’ third) and third person omniscient. It’s really interesting to read The Empire Trilogy and Green Bone Saga closely to see how Feist/Wurst and Lee negotiate these shifts! I also love it when the omniscient narrator has a distinct voice as well—all of the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis do this, and the omniscient narrator often adopts first person too. But again, that adds extra layers and extra layers mean additional complexity and I did not want to bite off more than I could handle.
After deciding to write in a close third, the next choice was tense: past or present?
In my experience, past tense is more common but present tense lends a feeling of immediacy to the reading experience you don’t quite get with past tense. That said, I do tend to find that when I’m reading in present tense, I have to go through a bit of an adjustment period for the first couple of pages but once I’m into the story, I hardly notice the tense.
In the end, I cheated and used both.
For the most part, Petition (and its sequels) are written in third person limited past tense, with one big exception: any time the POV character is using or witnessing one of the time-based resonance skills, the Evocation, Seeking, or Augury is written in present tense.
This was a deliberate choice because I was after a very specific effect.
The core premise behind the magic is that emotions have resonances that echo through time. When you’re reaching back in the past with Evocation, or trying to glimpse the future with Augury, or trying to get a sense of how someone else is feeling in the present with Seeking, you’re actively experiencing those emotions in the moment of the working, regardless of when those emotions originate in time. The abrupt switch to the immediacy of present tense from past tense is the most effective technique to convey how this feels.
The other benefit is that the tense switch, in combination with indented, italicized text, is a very clear indication to the reader that ~Something Magical~ is happening. This is pretty useful as well because I often have POV shifts in Evocations, Seekings, and Auguries too!
…at least, that was my intent. So far, readers seem to be able to follow along without a problem, though it’ll be interesting to see what happens when they get to Supplicant, the sequel!
Many things have caught me unaware during the process of writing Petition but one wins the prize for the biggest surprise by a very large margin: the romantic subplot. That’s because I absolutely detest romance as a genre. (Sorry romance fans; it’s just not for me.)
I could—and have—gone on long rants about why: I hate the elevation of attaining a “happily-ever-after”/“happy-for-now” above all other ambitions, no matter how worthy; I hate how it insinuates that no one can be complete and fulfilled without a romantic partner and romantic love; I hate the myths it perpetuates about the nature of love, that love makes everything easy and effortless, that love conquers all; I hate how convoluted and artificial and contrived the majority of the conflicts to the romance are; I hate the angst (dear heaven, save me from the pages and pages and pages of angsting), the melodrama, the tropes, the eyerolling formulaic predictability of the plot, the—
You get my drift.
So why is there a romantic subplot in Petition, one that isn’t advertised in the blurb or cover?
I’ll tackle the easy one first: I don’t advertise or market the romantic subplot as a romance because it isn’t a romance.
Now the harder question: why put in a romantic subplot at all?
I didn’t intend to. Rahelu has no time for romantic inclinations, let alone dalliances. But while I didn’t want to write a romance, I didn’t want to go to the other extreme of pretending that romance doesn’t exist.
People do fall in love. People do yearn for love. People go to all sorts of extremes in the name of love. It is a human thing. And it turns out that when you put Rahelu and Lhorne in a situation where they get to spend time with each other, feelings develop.
Similar to the previous chapter, this chapter is full of dead ends for the main plot. Logic for tight plotting dictates that if nothing of interest has happened, I should summarize and skip over to the next plot beat that advances the main plot. In a shorter work, like a novella or a short story, I would’ve cut straight to the events of Chapter 20, but that felt like the wrong choice for a novel.
Why? Well, I think it’s because it risks turning the characters into plot delivery mechanisms. (Not that that was something I could articulate at the time.)
I’ve done some impossible jobs. Jobs that involve chaining myself to a desk in a windowless room crammed so full of people and documents that you can’t move without knocking over a stack of files or bumping someone else for 10, 12, 14 hours every single day because if you don’t, you won’t make deadline and heaven help you if you miss deadline because entire fortunes are waiting on you to meet deadline to decide whether they’ll rise or fall so you cannot, cannot miss deadline. Ever.
You would think that kind of job would make for a grim, stressful experience, full of hyper-focused Type-As too obsessed with climbing the corporate ladder to socialize—and there were huge stretches of time that fit that description to a tee. But I know, from personal experience, even when you are working on deadline in high pressure environments slogging through monotonous task after monotonous task in a pile that seems to replenish itself with more every time you look, people are still people. The work itself, when there are no exceptions to be found, recedes into the background and interpersonal dramas become the thing that passes the time.
You start noticing little quirks.
Idle curiosity provides a jumping off point for conversations which bloom into rapport (or disdain) and inside jokes and running gags that give rise to: hook-ups that turn into flings or serious romances; joy; camaraderie; silly pranks; absurdity that, if I told you exactly how it happened, you would tell me it sounds boring, unfunny, or ridiculous. (Which, robbed of context, would be true.)
It’s in these smaller moments that characters get to be more than what their role in the larger plot or their archetype suggests.
Sometimes, it really is just about the fish. There is no deeper purpose.
Other times, it’s not about the fish. There is a deeper subtext.
As they say: you had to be there.
Hence, the date.
Yes, they’re in the middle of investigating a series of gruesome murders.
Yes, they’re no closer to figuring out who the killer might be.
Yes, they’re running out of time.
They’ve also done everything that they possibly can for the moment; they need a break.
This date is the equivalent of hitting the bar for some after work drinks at 9 PM on a Friday night when you’ve spent all week fighting fires and you know you’re going to be back in the office again all day on Saturday from 7:30 AM because there’s no other way of keeping up with your workload and if you fall behind, your ass will get fired.
So: drinks.
Maybe something happens. Maybe nothing happens. Either way, you’re going so you can take your mind off all the things you’ve been worrying about for a few hours. You want that temporary distraction; you NEED it to stay sane.
But why then skip to the end of the date only to write the whole thing in flashback and mostly in Rahelu’s head?
If I were writing a romance according to proper romance beats, writing the event in chronological order, as Rahelu experienced it, would have been the conventional choice to make. But Petition is not a romance, nor is this a romance subplot. (It’s a romantic subplot, distinction being that while there is a romantic relationship, the focus is not on how they get together because that ‘how’ is not a given.) Petition is the story of the immigrant experience in a fantasy setting—and in that story, romance and romantic feelings and relationships are distractions; setbacks even.
Also, I’m really not a fan of how so often in fantasy and literature that’s not explicitly written to be romances that we still end up with so many story lines that conform to the conventional romance genre narrative template of: person meets potential love interest, person develops romantic feelings for potential love interest, insert some progression here, then BAM! They’re Together and now A Couple and That’s It.
No. Just no.
That’s such a narrow, idealized representation of relationships and romance and love and I find it incredible that it’s pervasive to the point of being the default in stories that aren’t marketed as romances.
Give me stories where relationships aren’t so neatly defined and simple. Give me “it’s complicated” dynamics like Gideon/Harrow and Harrow/Ianthe (and pretty much every pairing you can name) from The Locked Tomb. Give me characters who find romantic love and love deeply but do not allow that romantic love to subsume their entire identity and divert them from their purpose, like Lady Mara of the Acoma from The Empire Trilogy and Baru Cormorant/Tain Hu from The Masquerade.
We need more of them.
Chapter 18 is the kick-off for the murder investigations which make up the second half of Petition. Whenever I look back at this chapter and the outline I had for it now, it’s always very funny to me.
Not only am I someone who isn’t very into crime fiction, I’m also terrible with outlines.
But I knew when I decided to add in this murder mystery that I would have to have some semblance of an outline because I had to know, in advance, who the killer was, what their motive/s were, how the victims died, and what kind of clues Rahelu and her team of Petitioners would be able to find.
So I wrote down some basic questions like:
Who’s been killed so far?
Who is the killer targeting?
What is the murder weapon?
What is the killer’s motive?
Is the killer working alone?
How did they kill [extremely spoiler-rific character name]?
Who are they going to kill next?
I came up with 1-sentence answers to each of those questions and then I used Brandon Sanderson’s promise/progress/pay-off framework to plot the rest of the murder mystery.
Promise: there’s a killer going around the city knifing people with an odd weapon. If Rahelu and team can catch the killer, then they can stop the murders and also she can pay off her family’s debts.
Progress: ~921 words across 17 sub-bullet points that outline, in 1-2 sentences, what happens sequentially to solve the murders and confront the killer.
Pay-off: this one is obvious 😉
It ended up being more fun and easier than I expected mainly because:
Murder mysteries come with a built-in plot structure. Step 1: investigate the crime scene. Step 2: interview witnesses. From there, it becomes a series of pursuing clues and running into dead ends which dovetails very nicely with the “Yes, but…”/“No, and…” technique for building out the story.
I have the benefit of being in a writing group with Caitlin L. Strauss (author of the sci/urban fantasy detective procedural series, The Nocturnum Files) and Dan Harris (author of the humorous urban fantasy series, Unit 13, and some soon-to-be-published cozies). Seeing how they work behind-the-scenes to construct their stories has been a great help.
I also cheated by not writing a whodunit where the tension revolves around identifying and then figuring out which of the many possible suspects is the real killer. Instead, the plot revolves around tracking down the killer before someone else dies which, to me, is simpler.
One thing I did worry about—and that did come up in alpha reader and early beta reader feedback—was the sudden tone and plot switch from tournament to murder mystery. My solution for the tone issue was to add in the prologue and herald the plot switch with both Onneja’s Augury and repeated signals from Maketh that the stakes have changed. Late beta reader feedback indicated this worked for the most part though people were still confused as to how Rahelu suddenly had such excellent investigative skills so I added in a few lines of narration to clarify this.
Looking back at the various drafts, I think this was one of the most fun chapters to write.
While it’s not the first time we’ve got Rahelu interacting with her peers, it is the first time she’s doing so in relatively relaxed fashion. Strictly speaking, the first half of the chapter is full of dead ends and the latter half of the chapter—once we devolve from a debrief of their investigations to ribbing at Ghardon’s expense and a follow-up on the subject of Rahelu’s dinner plans—has no relation to the main plot at all.
The only thing maintaining a very light level of tension is the question of “who won the bet?” set up at the end of the first scene. I could have cut straight from the debrief to the next chapter but I think the story would have been poorer for it. Letting the serious conversation over lunch devolve into more lighthearted moments gives us emotional variety and the characters more dimensionality.
That, to me, is what makes a story both more fun to write and to read.
Chapter 17 is the shortest chapter in Petition. (Technically, the prologue, interlude, and epilogue are significantly shorter but they don’t really count.) The basic plot trope/beat—a makeover sequence—is pretty straightforward. And, as with most things that ended up in Petition, I didn’t set out to write it consciously.
I kind of hate the makeover trope on principle for many reasons:
It (often) places outsized emphasis on physical appearance and superficial trappings (like clothing, etc) over other attributes that I think are more important (like beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, etc). Like I genuinely haaaaaaaaate Sandy’s entire character arc in Grease because it can be summed up as: “girl meets boy; girl is compelled by boy’s entire social network to change everything about herself so she can be his Ideal Sex Object” which is just gross.
It feels lazy. (How to show a character changing? Let’s just literally alter their outward appearance and call it done!)
It’s been done to death. (Bet you can’t name a single fish-out-of-water story that doesn’t involve a makeover.)
So why did I put in a makeover scene if I can’t stand the trope?
At time, I couldn’t tell you why, other than “it feels right”. I felt that the story needed a change in tone, a change in pace, and also some more time developing the character relationships before we got back into the action. The House-born Petitioners dragging Rahelu off for clothes and resonance crystal shopping was just the most obvious idea that sprang to mind. But, in hindsight, I think there’s a few deeper reasons for including a makeover scene.
Makeovers are a staple in many stories
Perhaps it’s because we find them intrinsically fascinating because of the way they dramatize and juxtapose the before and after. Or perhaps it’s because all stories, arguably, can be boiled down to makeovers since—in the words of the great Ursula Le Guin—stories are about change. After all, if you go by the Save the Cat structure, you’re obligated to literally bookend your story with the before/after in your Opening Image and your Final Image beats.
What’s interesting to me is that most of the time when we hear “makeover”, we generally think “character makeover”—i.e. stories where the character needs to grow and transform to survive in the new environment. But there are other kinds of makeovers too—environmental makeovers—where the character stays the same but transforms their new environment. And sometimes, the transformation goes both ways with the character and the environment transforming each other.
It’s also interesting to consider where those scenes are placed in the narrative relative to the character’s arc and how they result in a different narrative effect.
Early in the narrative: the outward change is a physical manifestation of the new environment being thrust upon the character. The character’s arc is then about growing into that outward transformation.
Middle of the narrative: the outward change marks a turning point in the character’s arc where they stop actively resisting and start to pursue growth.
Late in the narrative: the outward change is an acknowledgement of the transformation that has already occurred. It’s the celebration, the victory lap, of a battle already won.
Chapter 17 happens shortly after the midpoint of Petition. It’s the first time Rahelu sets foot—literally—in a part of the House-born world she’s aspiring to join and she’s forced to make some compromises. At the end of the scene, she also, for the first time, decides to pursue something that’s purely for herself.
On top of that, we get to tie together several details (her family’s debts, their livelihood as fisherfolk, the loss of her Guild ring and tunic, Lhorne’s previous attempt to buy her lunch) into a character moment that develops the Rahelu/Lhorne relationship further while giving us a much needed change in tone and a breather from fast paced main plot.
Gender roles and clothing
A pet peeve of mine is gendered clothing. To me, clothing is both a physical manifestation of gender roles in society and an insidious method of imposing them. “Girls wear this; boys wear that. Good girls dress like this; bad girls dress like that.”
These days, I find it really difficult to pick up any fiction where the main conflict revolves around a woman or girl rebelling against traditional gender roles. These stories are important because that fight is still ongoing today…but I don’t want to read them anymore, especially not in my fantasy novels.
The power of fiction—all fiction, but speculative fiction in particular—is to pose the question, “what if?” and see where that leads. What would the world be like if this wasn’t true? How would our lives be different if that wasn’t a fundamental law of reality?
So why do so many fantastical settings carry over gendered clothing from our society as an unconscious default?
It’s not just that the gendered clothing is part of the default of “generic vaguely European medieval setting” that a Western audience automatically associates with “fantasy setting”.
It’s not just that so many fantastical settings incorporate real world gender roles and expectations as part of their default.
Why don’t these settings ever stop to consider the reason for gendered differences in real world clothing in the first place—and then consider whether those reasons even exist in that fantasy setting before importing real world fashions?
In writing Petition, I didn’t want to perpetuate any of these things. The reason Rahelu doesn’t wear skirts or dresses or gowns isn’t just because she comes from an impoverished family or because she’s attired for combat; Rahelu doesn’t wear them for the same reason that Nheras doesn’t wear them.
They don’t exist.
They don’t exist because I decided that in this world, gender equality is the default. Gender does not enter into the conversation of whether someone can do something; it’s simply not relevant to the decision. And if that’s the case, why would clothing differentiate between the genders?
The answer is, it wouldn’t.
So:
In Rahelu’s world, there’s everyday wear (tunic or shirt over trousers) and there’s formal wear (robes).
Clothing differs based on culture, wealth, societal position, and individual preference. It does not differ depending on gender or biological characteristics, other than for the obvious requirement of sizing. Hnuare’s shop, the Impeccable Mage, does not have a “men’s section” and a “women’s section”.
Ergo, if Elaram had been shopping for Ghardon instead of Rahelu, she would still be pulling out the same kind of clothes.
Epic fantasy has been my genre of choice ever since I stumbled across it at my local library. I can’t even remember which book or series it was exactly—perhaps The Belgariad by Eddings or Magician by Raymond E. Feist or it could’ve been Dragonlance by Weis and Hickman or maybe Pern by Anne McCaffrey. (Really, it could have been anything from the ‘80s and ‘90s.)
My parents could only take me to the library once a week and we could only borrow a maximum of ten books on one library card; that meant I had to pick books long enough to last me until the next library trip. That boiled down to “is this book thick enough that I need two hands to hold it comfortably?”
But since I devoured all the books so quickly, regardless of their size, I ended up with a very distorted sense of length as a reader.
That is how I ended up with an original outline that had called for ~25,000 words to cover the events of Petition to reach the end of Act I of the overall narrative. So in the very first attempt at writing Petition, I originally skipped straight from the events in Chapter 12 to Chapter 26.
(Yep. That’s a huge jump of some ~57,000 words or so. That version of the story is about ~38,600 words long.)
…Yeah. That didn’t work out. Clearly, I am incapable of writing an epic fantasy book that is only 75,000 words long. I was stuck; at the rate I’d been going, it would take me another ~80,000 words to write the next two acts I’d planned and I wasn’t confident I could pull off writing a book that long.
But ~38,600 words is waaaaaaaay too short to be a novel. (It’s a novelette? Novella? I never know where the line is drawn for those.)
That said, I was confident that the end of what would become Chapter 27 was the most emotionally powerful moment in the story yet. So I decided to cheat: I would add a subplot to the job hunt tournament to (hopefully) bulk up the word count by another ~33,000 words to end back up at my target of ~75,000 words.
I don’t exactly recall how I decided the subplot would be a murder mystery or that the murderers would be a bunch of cultists running around conducting ritual sacrifices. (It was probably because I was following Brandon Sanderson’s advice to build what you have before inventing new things; at that point, I had vaguely outlined what was involved in Act II of the overall narrative so the world building for the cult and the Endless Gate already existed.) Murder mysteries, though, require a lot more planning than tournaments so I took a week off writing new words to plot one in detail first.
Strictly speaking from a plot perspective, Chapter 16 marks a transition point to the second half of the book: the introduction of the murder mystery subplot signals a convergence between the main plot and the events foreshadowed in the Prologue and Interlude. Arguably I could have put the Interlude between Chapters 15 and 16 instead of having it before Chapter 15. However, since I was sticking to a linear timeline, the interlude chronologically happens before Chapter 15. I also like the switch up in tone where Chapter 15 sets up Rahelu’s expectation of the new status quo which is immediately upset by her seeing the assignment.
While my natural tendency is to write long scenes, it made sense to have a series of short arcs here, to tie up loose ends from the first half of the book and set the stage for the remainder of the novel with some “assemble the team!” scenes to introduce the main cast for this part of the story. Following the reality TV/tournament format, we’ve got the first elimination and a reset of the Petitioners’ board. Maketh’s speech serves two purposes: escalates the stakes of Petitioning again, and advance the House intrigue plot in the background.
Other noteworthy things:
Nheras Ilyn: the opening chapters of Petition set up the expectation that Nheras is going to be the primary antagonist for the book and we get plenty of that in the early tournament rounds. But with the way I set up the final round of Petitioning, that doesn’t really work unless I put Rahelu and Nheras in the same team and since the Petitioners are allowed to choose their own teams, that was never going to happen. I tried to mitigate that with a brief exchange as a reminder that the rivalry is still there but has faded into the background given the raised stakes.
The assignment board: Is this a deliberate nod to the adventurers’ quest board in ye olde standard sword & sorcery fantasy stories? Yes, yes it is. Did I intend to put that in from the very beginning? No, no I did not. How, then, did it end up in the book? I realized that fantasy iPads and computer screens would…actually work in my magic system and it would make sense for the society I’d created to use it. Also I’m a huge geek. And it was the easiest way of getting Rahelu’s arc to intersect with Azosh-ek’s while paying off on the promise of Onneja’s Augury in Chapter 13.
Elaram’s legal disclaimer: Probably my favorite character moment in this chapter though Elaram facing off against Cseryl and justifying giving Lhorne a mild concussion comes a close second. This chapter actually had the very first Elaram scenes I wrote since her introduction in Chapter 8 was something I added later (as part of beta read revisions) and her entire character grew out of that one line in Chapter 9. (“Don’t take it so personally! We’re just following the rules!”)
The trainee: we’ve seen Rahelu come pretty far in the book but I was conscious that because I was writing such a fast-paced book, I wanted another moment of character contrast. But I didn’t want to slow down the action just when we needed to be gearing up for more so I couldn’t put in another long reflective passage. (Not that Rahelu normally stops to do a whole lot of reflection anyway, because who’s got the time for that?) Hopefully having her notice just how different things were did the trick.
The shopping trip: Another thing that I didn’t deliberately set out to include, though once the thought occurred, it seemed like a good idea. I should note here that I originally thought Elaram would be the instigator but when it came down to the writing, it felt more natural coming from Ghardon.
Finally, one of my biggest worries about this book (other than, “is anyone actually going to read this and think it’s not terrible?”) was that readers might be put off by the rotating cast of characters. Even though Petition is basically a single POV book since Azosh-ek’s POVs are so few and far between Rahelu chapters, there’s no consistent cast of side characters. Every chapter or two introduces one or two new characters:
Ghardon in Chapter 16. (Ghardon, by the way, is the last of the notable characters to be introduced out of 27 total chapters, not counting the prologue/interlude/epilogue).
This is really an artifact of discovery writing. None of these characters—other than Rahelu, Onneja, and possibly Nheras—existed in my outline. They came into existence whenever I got to writing the end of one scene and started thinking about the kinds of conflict and who Rahelu might encounter next. Inevitably, it means having to go back through and scatter mentions of these characters in previous chapters during revisions, otherwise we end up with “pop-up” characters—characters who don’t feel like fully fleshed out individuals who exist in the world separate to the demands of the protagonist and the plot that pop up to fulfil a plot or character development in one chapter and then disappear, never to be seen of or hear from ever again.
Some days, when I look back over what I’ve written, I’m still not entirely convinced. Right now, I’m deep in the middle of doing alpha revisions on the third act of Supplicant, the sequel to Petition, and still grasping at understanding the motives of some of these characters. And there are certain ones whose motives still elude me entirely, even after trying to write scene after scene and chapter after chapter from their POV. But I hope that with more time and more words written, I’ll get better at creating characters who come across as real people.
I ought to have said back in the annotations for Chapter 13 that everything from Chapters 14 through to the end of Chapter 25 did not exist in the original outline, which called for the following:
Act I: Rahelu Petitions the Houses; becomes a Supplicant; is sent on assignment.
Act II: Rahelu completes the assignment. The assignment has huge consequences for the balance of power between the Houses.
Act III: House war.
Somehow I thought I was going to be able to do all that justice in…75,000 words.
…Yeah.
In that original version, the story skipped straight from the end of Rahelu’s audiences in Chapter 12 to the beginning of Chapter 26 and Act I ended with the end of Chapter 27. I got four (terrible) chapters into writing what was supposed to be Act II (and is now Book 2) before I became horribly stuck.
So I decided to cheat a little. I knew that final scene (what is now Chapter 27) was the best emotional scene I’d written and would make a strong ending. The logical thing to do here was to turn the book outline into a series outline and expand the ~38,000 words I had for what was supposed to be Act I into a full, 75,000-word novel. (Yeah, I still had delusions about being able to write a short novel.)
In my opinion, there’s only one good way to add length: add story. Again, I wanted something very tightly structured because I didn’t want to get too carried away and end up with something bloated.
Hence: the murder mystery that forms the second half of this book.
But I needed something to transition between the tournament arc—which is still ongoing since the Petitioners are competing with each other, though they’re doing so by completing assignments (quests) for the Houses—and the murder mystery subplot.
I also have a pet peeve about jobs and the recruitment process in general. I kind of hate it because the entire thing (as it exists in professional services) is a bait-and-switch for most.
The firms sell quite the dream to the bright-eyed grads fighting tooth and nail for a coveted position with them: a glamorous career where you’re using your hard-won skills and knowledge to present flashy, brilliant insights in pretty dataviz slide decks to the admiring applause of C-suite executives in the boardrooms where it happens.
The reality for most: 60+ hour work weeks wrangling data and documents that you don’t understand, triple checking figures and formulas with a calculator until your fingers and eyes bleed, going for coffee runs and other mundane tasks that make you wonder why you spent so long obtaining a very expensive university education to do things that don’t require you to use any of the knowledge and skills you’ve got.
Hence: the boring resonance crystal recharging assignment. Sorry, Rahelu. (Not sorry.) And sorry if you hated reading paragraphs upon paragraphs about it. (Sorriest to my beta readers, most of all, who had to read a very verbose version of it.)
Fortunately, this is fiction, not real life so things do happen.
Rahelu’s one-on-one time with Tsenjhe is one of my favorite character moments in the book. Too often in fantasy, women are set against each other. We expect the Nheras/Rahelu dynamic as a matter of default, where women are set up as rivals, often in the context of a man’s affections or approval or their suitability for these things and how well they embody femininity.
We rarely see all of the rich diversity of strong female relationships that exist in real life where women hold each other up. Even when we get female mentor/mentee relationships, it’s so often done in the context of “learning how to be a woman” or “learning how to deal with men” and I’m kind of sick of it.
Because just as men and boys can exist as self-actualized individuals and have relationships that do not revolve around the existence of women, women and girls do not need men to “complete” them as a person (please, let that Biblical notion die right there) and they can have fulfilling relationships that are not founded on any male-centric bases.
At the same time, romantic love and relationships is a pretty big part of life for most people. I don’t like the approach of just pretending it doesn’t exist either.
So it was important to me to show that Tsenjhe and Rahelu’s relationship is a strong one that is not centered around and would exist without Keshwar, even though he’s important to both of them. His name does come up twice in their conversations; both times, he is incidental to (and not the focus of) what they are discussing.
Because Tsenjhe and Rahelu’s identities do not revolve around how they fit into Keshwar’s life; they were fully realized people before Keshwar became part of their lives, will continue to be so long after he’s gone, and would have been so even if he never entered their lives.
When I wrote the published prologue, I did so very intentionally, knowing that I wanted it to form a little independent arc with the interlude and the epilogue. Yet I wanted to keep them as short as possible, so they wouldn’t “overstay their welcome” (as one of my beta readers put it) or steal focus from the main storyline of Rahelu joining the Houses.
But writing short things has always been a struggle for me. The initial draft of Azosh-ek’s prologue was 1,429 words long—and my alpha readers and I were agreed: it was far, far too long for a prologue.
Luckily one of them had an easy solution: end the prologue at “Time to be gone.”
That left me with a short fight scene about 1,057 words long. It was a scene that I liked quite a lot and had the right vibes. I added another 195 words to the beginning and hey, presto, I had an interlude!
If you’re reading along and you feel like you have no idea what’s going on in the prologue or the interlude, it’s totally okay. It’s meant to be “just vibes” at this point—hopefully intriguing ones!—that will be made clear later.
The storylines will eventually converge.
While I don’t have an exact outline of how everything will turn out, I know the general shape of it and, more importantly, the motivations of the characters and factions involved.
I do worry that by the time I get around to the writing, things will have shifted in my mind. (This happens a lot whenever I try to outline something in a reasonable level of detail; what’s actually written doesn’t really resemble much of what is outlined, but the overall concept doesn’t change.) Either way, I will do my very best to give you the most satisfactory ending I can.