A Giant’s Trek by Nick Stella (Text Publishing)
Guest author post by Nick Stella about A Giant’s Trek, an imaginative, well put-together fantasy adventure, at PaperbarkWords blog
I love a good quest.
A group of heroic characters bound together to achieve a common goal.
Striding across plains, wading through marshes, climbing over mountains.
Fighting monsters, solving riddles, casting magic.
What could be more fun than diving into several hundred pages of heroic characters striding, wading, climbing, fighting, solving and casting their perilous way across a world to destroy a ring, defeat a villain, recover a gem or rescue a captive and bring their daring escapades to a rousing conclusion?
Not much, for an avid reader of fantasy who revels in the idea of travelling through a world richly built, right down to the smallest denomination of its currency.
But for me, the fun is also in the writing.
A Giant’s Trek is undoubtably a book about a quest. A young giant named Ash travels into the wilderness for the first time to prove himself as a warrior. He is expected to return with an axe or a spear to help defend the village, but instead, he decides to seek out and learn an ancient magic that giants used long ago.
It’s about a young giant forging his own path, and therefore it was important to show that this was no easy feat. I dragged the characters from one hardship to the next, pushing them to their limits both physically and mentally, creating the occasional rift in the fellowship and even having a major character injured after attempting to prove his bravery.
I filled the quest with swamps and magic and volcanoes and battles, trying to emulate the scope and heroics I enjoyed as a young reader back in the early 1980s.
But once I got Ash to his destination, I found there was another side to the gold piece. One face might show a soaring eagle or a majestic dragon, but turn it over and you are likely to find a scowling queen or a king heavy in the jowls.
For after the quest, there is the return.
How was I going to handle the journey back?
Having written two hundred pages of Ash and company crossing majestic landscapes and battling vicious beasts, I was at a loss. How was I going to get the heroes back without rehashing the same territory or making the journey they had already completed seem like a doddle?
It’s unrealistic to write another two hundred pages detailing the characters making the same journey in reverse, but giving it only a couple of paragraphs seemed to cheapen the whole idea of the trek in the first place. I also needed to keep the pace of the book alive, as the conclusion was appearing on the horizon and slowing things down would have interrupted the urgency in the homebound mission.
Which is where world-building, another awesome aspect of fantasy, comes in: as handy as a hidden ace up your sleeve in a raucous card game around an upturned wooden barrel on a winter’s night.
What if the accomplishment of the quest opened up a system of portals that allowed the heroic characters to beam themselves back? Or what if they befriend magical horses that spirit them home? As long as these possibilities have already been built into the world, then the portals and the horses are a go! The beauty of writing in the fantasy genre is that the possibilities are endless—and even better is that there is no budget when it comes to imagination.
Back the heroic characters go, beamed through portals or astride magical steeds, bypassing, now quite satisfactorily, everything they fought their way past on the initial journey.
But for me, I drew a map, placing a river in just the right place. I spent a chapter with them on the boat, talking about what had to be done, keeping the urgency alive. A river is no portal or magical horse, but it kept the action within the boundaries of my created world.
The cohort of heroic characters returns, perhaps short one or two members, to widely proclaim that the ring has been destroyed, the villain defeated, the gem recovered or the captive rescued.
But this is the fantasy genre.
Another fiend has risen, another village razed, another queen deposed or another king gone mad.
Will there be another book? Another quest?
I hope so.
But maybe I’ll use the magical horses rather than the river next time.
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