Prose Critique: Kindling
Narrow your details while establishing your storyworld
This opening scene introduces a magic-wielding warrior, Leum, as she travels north after the end of a war, in search of a new purpose for her warrior skills. The rest of the novel will see Leum and other “kindlings” use their magic to come to the aid of a village under the threat of siege.
Traci’s explanations for her edits follow in the footnotes. My sense is that Traci’s edits show how important it is for fantasy writers to narrow focus to those few details that will help establish setting and voice. The final draft of her opening page gives the impression of a sweeping epic without overwhelming readers as they learn about the nature of kindlings.
You wear your sword across your back, for you do not now need it at your side.1 A less sentimental person would have sold it by now, but you were always kind of a sap, weren’t you? Splitting your rations with the replacements, filching a couple oranges apples2 or an extra blanket for the orphans who dogged your regiment, begging for scraps. Sometimes you wonder what happened to them, but the truth is, you already know. We gave you a hard time about it, but, let’s be honest, we all had a soft spot for orphans—
For kids made homeless by war.3
The Kindar Peninsula had been at war so long tearing itself to pieces by the time you were commissioned entered the war. Amerand and Vedra, Vedra and Amerand. North and south. For a hundred years, those titans clashing raged, again and again back and forth, on the plains fields, the black sand beaches, the steep mountain slopes.—4
The flash of steel., the sound of the drums.—
And us—
And Kindlings.5 Those A force of elite, magic-wielding warriors, pink fire blazing flames rippling from their our balar weapons, carving as we carved great swaths through the ranks of the enemy our enemies. Amerand and Vedra, Vedra and Amerand—back and forth, the tides of these nations. A city swallowed. A village taken. An outpost overrun. We fought for Amerand. We fought for Vedra. For a hundred years, we were swept up in two violent, inexorable tides, ebbing and expanding, swallowing cities, villages, outposts—
You know what happened to them, because it’s the same thing that happened to everyone who got caught up in the war.
You put one foot in front of the other.6
The road’s dusty; the ruts, well-worn. All around you, the land howls.7 Wind Pine, sage, rabbitbrush, stone. You’ve never been this far north before—not that you can remember anyway.8 You were five when the kindling collectors came for you; after that, you went where the Queen Commander ordered, and that had always meant south, toward the enemy.
Now, though.9
But It’s been two years since you conjured fire from your fingers, two years since Amerand won the war.—
The Vedran government was dissolved royalty slipping quietly into exile;—
All the old maps, redrawn.—
Kindling warfare was outlawed on both sides As a testament to the Great and Harmonious Reunification, the Queen Commander (Long May She Reign) outlawed magic on the entire Kindar Peninsula, deemed too cruel, too inhumane, unthinkable in peacetime.10 No more child soldiers. No more kids burning out by eighteen.
Those poor children. Never again.
You suck air through your teeth, and it tastes of snow.
You’re in the northlands now, the wide It’s a harsh land, without a doubt, but that’s why it appeals to you. The ruggedness of it, the relentlessness of it. The plains rolling and breaking around you rising and falling like waves11 until they come crashing to a halt at the feet of the biggest mountains you’ve ever seen. while the wind howls across the countryside—
Pine, sage, rabbitbrush, stone—12
The sun blazing, the heat rising from the road—
A few days in the high desert, and you’re parched and sunburned, with new holes in the soles of your sandals (though, to be fair, they were already wearing thin weeks ago when you set off for the north).13 But you’re almost there now, almost to the mountains—
The mighty Candiveras, where the Kindar Peninsula kisses the continent—
And the nation of Amerand ends.
Note from Traci: Because there are a lot of changes in between the above draft (Draft 13) and the final (somewhere past Draft 33), I thought I’d include the first page as it appears in the published book so you can get a sense of just how much I moved around from those early attempts:
The war took you many places on the Kindar Peninsula (and in the years since the war ended, you’ve pretty much seen the rest), but you’ve never been to the northlands until now.
Too remote. Nothing up here but rocks and cattle—
Cow pies and dust—
It’s a harsh land, without a doubt, but that’s why it appeals to you. The ruggedness of it, the relentlessness of it. The plains rising and falling like waves while the wind howls across the countryside—
Pine, sage, rabbitbrush, stone—
The sun blazing, the heat rising from the road—
A few days in the high desert, and you’re parched and sunburned, with new holes in the soles of your sandals (though, to be fair, they were already wearing thin weeks ago when you set off for the north). But you’re almost there now, almost to the mountains—
The mighty Candiveras, where the Kindar Peninsula kisses the continent—
And the nation of Amerand ends.
Ahead of you, that vast and jagged border looms—sharp, immense, severe. The fortresses of gods or the gods themselves, at the tail end of summer and still capped with snow.
The Candiveras are all that stand between you and the kingdom of Ifrine beyond—
The rest of the world beyond.
You pause. You kneel. Scratch your dog behind the ears and adjust the tiny silver medal you wear around your neck.
If you had to take one last look at your country, you couldn’t ask for a better view than this.14
The Kindar Peninsula had been tearing itself to pieces long before you entered the war. Amerand and Vedra. North and south. For a hundred years, those titans raged, back and forth on the fields, the beaches, the steep mountain slopes—
The flash of steel, the sound of the drums—
And us—
Kindlings. A force of elite, magic-wielding warriors, pink flames rippling from our balar weapons as we carved great swaths through the ranks of our enemies. We fought for Amerand. We fought for Vedra. For a hundred years, we were swept up in two violent, inexorable tides, ebbing and expanding, swallowing cities, villages, outposts—
You can still remember how it felt, fighting on the vanguard, there in the thick of it with a squad of your kin—
The weight of your armor. The give of the earth. The magic sparking wildly inside of you and rushing out through your blade—
But it’s been two years since you conjured fire from your fingers, two years since Amerand won the war—
The Vedran royalty slipping quietly into exile—
All the old maps redrawn—
As a testament to the Great and Harmonious Reunification, the Queen Commander (Long May She Reign) outlawed magic on the entire Kindar Peninsula, deemed it too cruel, too inhumane, unthinkable in peacetime. No more child soldiers. No more kids burning out by eighteen.
And the ones who remained?
The ones who survived?
We were given a choice.
Surrender our balar weapons for land and a stipend, or be turned loose, to live and fight and be put down if we ever dared to disturb the new and uneasy peace.15
You can read more about Kindling here.
I really love this sentence, but it absolutely was not working as a first line, I think because it’s a bit too narrow in its focus—the POV character Leum’s weapon, rather than Leum’s surroundings or even Leum herself. Now it appears on page 3, once we’ve gotten to know Leum and her world a little better first.
In the final draft, this is “apples,” although I no longer remember exactly why I made that change—it just seemed to fit the worldbuilding better!
Lately, I’ve been talking to my students at the Low-Res MFA in Creative Writing at UNR about the importance of specificity in storytelling, and I think this change is a nice example of that. Instead of the vague language around “sometimes” and “what happened” and this reference to some knowledge that the reader isn’t privy to, I’ve replaced it with an intrusion from the narrators—the royal “we”—in which they reference an empathic connection to these “kids made homeless by war,” which I hope makes this moment a bit more poignant as well as raising a few questions: Who are the narrators? Why are they telling this story? Why do they feel so deeply for these war orphans?
This is the beginning of another section that I felt was needed, but it wasn’t doing its best work here, in the second paragraph, where we’ve barely been introduced to Leum. Now it appears as an entirely separate scene on page 2, with some adjustments for specificity and rhythm.
At this point in the drafting process, I hadn’t yet polished up the voice of the narrators, who, as we find out here, are in fact other kindlings, other child soldiers, like Leum, who lost their lives in the war. As I continued to finesse the voice, I leaned into the choral, polyphonic nature of it: the sentence fragments, the em dashes, and as you’ll see in the finished first page I’ve included at the end, the parentheticals.
This entire section was cut. In its place, I added Leum’s memories of the war, which are much more visceral in nature, grounding the narration in her body as well as providing some exposition on the nature of her magic and the new state of the world:
You can still remember how it felt, fighting on the vanguard, there in the thick of it with a squad of your kin—
The weight of your armor. The give of the earth. The magic sparking wildly inside of you and rushing out through your blade—
But it’s been two years since you conjured fire from your fingers, two years since Amerand won the war—
The Vedran royalty slipping quietly into exile—
All the old maps redrawn—
I like the balance in the series of “The road’s dusty; the ruts, well-worn”, and these series later became one of the features of the narrators’ voice, but all I kept from these few sentences is the verb “howls,” which I think is so perfect for the tone--lonely, evocative, raw.
This is where Kindling actually begins, although the final sentence has been much changed. I like the directionality of starting here—Leum’s attention pointing the story northward, toward where the heart of the action will take place.
The idea of the kindling collectors is important—it’s how the kindlings are recruited—but it didn’t end up being important enough to include in the first few pages. Now, this bit of exposition doesn’t appear until several chapters in.
Like the previous information about the war, I moved this information to a dedicated block of exposition on page 2. I also emphasized the rhythmic elements and brought out more exposition on the state of the world and what happened to kindlings after the war.
I love this image, but I wanted to clean up the phrasing a bit, changing “rolling and breaking around you” to simply, but equally visual, “rising and falling.”
I thought this more detailed look at the land was a good place to include that verb “howls” from above as well as that lovely four-part series, “Pine, sage, rabbitbrush, stone—” As part of the choral nature of the narrators, this also where I started playing with assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds, like in “stone” and “road,” to amplify the musicality of the voice.
There’s that parenthetical I mentioned! I think of these interruptions as different voices in the narrative chorus emerging from the mass to point out a detail, voice an opinion, or sometimes even contradict the POV character, which was such a fun voice to write in.
This passage is the end of the first scene, and something I like about it is that it’s already telegraphing Leum’s loneliness and rough edges, her goals and motivations. She’s looking to leave her country, the country that promised her so much and then betrayed her, took her family, took everything that ever meant anything to her, and then set her adrift.
The end of this passage leads us, finally, to the line that started it all: “Now you wear your sword across your back, for you no longer need it at your side.” I think it’s a more fitting place for that line, the exposition about the war leading into the information about kindling warfare being outlawed leading into a more intense focus on Leum’s weapon and, later, what she’ll do with it before the end of Chapter 1.