Matthew Ward Guest Post: The Beginning is Not the Beginning

The Beginning is Not the Beginning. The End is Never The End.

Stories don’t arise out of nothing. Something always came before – happenings close or distant that set current events in motion. Thus any story we experience is just a snapshot in time. A fragment of history, curated by the author every bit as much as it is created.

At least, that’s how I feel.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved stories whose roots burrow deep into the past. Where the aftershocks of greats events still shape what happens day by day.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s custodianship of the One Ring is preceded by millennia of tragedy and war that not only shape the realms and alliances of the world, but also language and the literal physicality of Arda itself. Even Frodo, in the sleepy Shire, is distorted by a history he’s never known¹. Shannara, initially one of LOTR’s greatest imitators, quickly plots its own course as a tale of bloodlines bound – practically shackled – to the cycle of history.

In Babylon 5, early storylines are dominated by the backwash of ‘recent’ history, measured in years and decades. The engine that drives the characters and their conflicts is created less in the present, and more in deeds already done. When these mundane squabbles are subsumed by the battle between Vorlons and Shadows, order and chaos, the veil falls from your eyes. You see anew the marks left on religion, custom and folklore – you’ve been shown these things a dozen times before, but never grasped their significance – and realise that all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

(Cheeky quotations aside, the Battlestar Galactica remake doesn’t quite land its intentions, with plenty of unearned reveals in the final series². But that doesn’t undermine the splendid foundations laid down along the way.)

What makes me love these stories is that they could have started ten, twenty – a hundred – years earlier, and lost nothing in the telling. Or at least, that’s how they feel. But more than that, they leave behind a setting so richly imagined that you believe the road goes (ever, ever) on, even though you’ve reached the final page.

Of course this isn’t actually true. There’s a reason the author chose that particular snapshot of history for the narrative. The story in which you lost yourself spans only the pages you read or the runtime of the TV show or movie, or whatever. But, consciously or otherwise, you believe there’s more. You feel as though you can step into that world and watch breathless as the next great story unfolds before your eyes.

It’s this feeling, more than anything, that I wanted replicate in Legacy of Ash – to have that depth of history that welcomes you into a living, breathing world. After all, one of the better pieces of writing advice is that you should tell a story you’d want to read.

Aradane’s great realms and influential families – to say nothing of the gods themselves – stretch forward and back from the Legacy era³. Katya Trelan’s storm-chased ride is just another step in history’s long and majestic dance, but its consequences echo on throughout not only the Legacy Trilogy, but what comes after. At the same time, society reverberates with past events, both venerated and forgotten.

Like I said, I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to do this … but something strange happened along the way. Turns out, grounding your narrative in living history changes your writing process: you stop inventing a story, and you start remembering it instead. It becomes real (or at least real enough). Flailing plotlines snap together with the certainty of inevitability. Characters introduced on a whim are revealed as anchor points about which the entire narrative – the entire shape of history – turns.

Raven’s Eyes, that sounds pretentious … but that’s what happened. And goodness knows, Legacy of Ash is a far better book as a result.

So where does that leave us?

Well, that really depends. The story of the Legacy Trilogy is a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. All questions will be answered (including the ones about that reveal) and all plotlines resolved. By the time you reach the final page of volume three, you can close the book, knowing all there is to know about this chapter of the Tressian Republic and the Hadari Empire, the Trelans, the Akadras and the Sarans. Maybe there’ll be other chapters yet to come.

I’d like that.

But even if there aren’t – and if I’ve done my job – the world will live on beyond that final page.

Because the beginning is not the beginning, and the end is never the end.

¹ And I’m not even really talking about the long, expositionary monologues you get in the ‘Shadow of the Past’ and ‘The Council of Elrond’ chapters here.

² Not the only TV show to be hamstrung by the 2007/8 Writer’s Guild of America strike, but one of the few that came back strong afterwards.

³ Of course, I’m going to keep to myself how much of that I really know at time of writing, because to do otherwise would spoil the fun.

Matthew Ward is the author of Legacy of Ash, an epic fantasy novel published by Orbit Books, now available in paperback. If you want to know more about Legacy of Ash, you can read our review.

You can follow Matthew Ward on Twitter, or check out his website — thetowerofstars.com — for more information.