1985: THE HERO AND THE CROWN by Robin McKinley
She could not remember a time when she had not known the story; she had grown up knowing it.
I’ve been putting my writing out for other people to read for about six and a half years now, and I’ve been writing for fun my entire life, so I’ve always been really interested in the advice that other more famous writers give on how to write. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, in addition to cataloging all of the grammar rules that you can quote to people if you’re an insufferable pedant, also includes a lot of really good advice on how to create and manage the more abstract sense of “style” in your writing. My most recent novel was an homage to/parody of James A. Michener’s historical epics1, so I read Michener’s own guide for writers and tried to duplicate elements of his process when putting together the novel, in order to ape his structure and try to approximate some of his style.
Two pieces of writing advice really stand out to me, though, from two authors that had a famously direct and concise style of writing fiction. The first is from my favorite novelist, Kurt Vonnegut2; while his novels all dealt with massive weighty moral questions, they were famously pretty short and used very accessible language and style. As part of an article he wrote giving tips to readers on short story writing, and presumably as part of what he would also tell his students at the Iowa Writers Workshop, he told aspiring fiction writers to “start as close to the end as possible”. If you’ve read any of Vonnegut’s work, you know that there isn’t much in terms of broad exposition or scene-setting; in fact, in many of his novels including Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast Of Champions, Vonnegut usually starts off by directly addressing the reader as himself and stating the exact reasons that he wrote the novel and what he wanted readers to learn from this particular work. He does not lead you down a long and winding path to the point, he opens with the point.
Another author had a similar piece of advice: Elmore Leonard, the revered crime novel writer whose writing was always tight and smart and funny and propulsive, and whose work went on to become movies like Get Shorty or Out Of Sight or Jackie Brown or television series like Justified, none of which contains a single wasted or boring scene. He has, perhaps, the all-time greatest canon of opening sentences of any novelist, and it lives up to the final of his “10 Rules For Good Writing”: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”
Robin McKinley, author of 1985 medalist The Hero And The Crown - presumably a shortened version of the draft title The Hero And The Crown And The Sword And The Skull And The Ribbon And The Dragons And The Ointment And The Witch And The Cats And The Red Stone And The Tower And The Thing And The Silver Water And The Plants That Make You Sleepy - was not familiar with any of this advice.
More recently, another successful author has given (relatively) famous writing advice specific to the high fantasy genre in which Robin McKinley wrote.
That dude is Brandon Sanderson, who, among other things, completed the Wheel Of Time series after Robert Jordan died, and wrote multiple sucessful high fantasy epics, including the Mistborn trilogy and the ongoing Stormlight Archive. I love these books so much that I've taken great pains to never learn Sanderson's personal political views, lest they be terrible and ruin his books for me3.
Sanderson is also known in genre fiction for articulating "Sanderson's Laws of Magic", which outline his guidelines on how authors should use magic in fantasy writing. What the three laws reduce down to is this: if you're writing about magic, it helps if the magic makes some sort of sense:
An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
Weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers.
The author should expand on what is already a part of the magic system before something entirely new is added, as this may otherwise entirely change how the magic system fits into the fictional world.
Like all writing advice, these aren't universal4 and there are plenty of counter-examples; Tolkein never explained how Gandalf's magic worked, the magic just kind of happened. What matters more than a detailed set of rules as to how magic works is creating a world that is coherent and consistent and enjoyable to read. You should at least try to have your made-up fantasy world make a little bit of sense and not just throw every different possible variant of what you thought of up on the page and call that a book, which is how most of The Hero And The Crown works.
The Hero And The Crown is - kind of - set during a war between the fictional kingdom of Damar and the threatening Northerners, led by a man named Nyrlol whom rhe Damarians believe to have been recently possessed by a demon and thus hellbent on destroying their kingdom. The novel's protagonist, Aerin, is the daughter of the king and his now-deceased second wife, who was a witch, which means Aerin might be a witch, or at least the kingdom suspects that, but it's not really clear what witches do or what powers they have or how evil they're supposed to be, and also other Damarians apparently have magic "Gifts" that they inherit at birth and begin to manifest during adolescence, and Aerin doesn't seem to have one of those Gifts, and also it doesn't seem to matter that much because we never really go into detail on what anyone else's Gift is, or how those Gifts actually affect anything in the world, or whether Aerin actually has a Gift.
This gets you to about page 50 of what certainly feels like the longest Newbery medalist ever written. As you can see, we have three non-overlapping magic systems here: demons, witches, and Gifts. None of these will be explained at any level of detail, none of them will contribute meaningfully to pushing the plot forward, and none of them will be revisited in the entire second half of the novel. Also Nyrlol, who sounds like he's named after an over-the-counter sleep aid, never comes back. Are you excited yet?
If you're not, rest assured that the most thrilling thing that happens in the first one hundred pages of the novel is a longing glance at a wedding, which sets off rumors of a budding romance between Aerin and the heir to the throne, her distant cousin Tor. Aerin will later forget about this completely, fall in love with someone else, consummate that love in a scene that seems to be handled very poorly, and then will come back and marry Tor at the end of the novel for basically no reason. The longing glance will set off a minor rivalry with another young woman at the palace who will then dare Aerin to eat a magic plant that will make her very ill and require a weeks-long convalescence. Aerin is the only person that the magic plant makes sleepy, everyone else loves the magic plant. This is never explained. The magic plant is also what defeats the villain at the end of the novel. This is also never explained.
The Hero And The Crown actually picks up after the first 100 pages, when Aerin starts fighting dragons. Yes, there are dragons here too, and they have no real relationship to the plant or the witch or the demon or the Gift, but Aerin does find a formula in an old witch-book for a fireproof anti-dragon ointment, which allows her to go out and start killing the dragons who have been terrorizing the kingdom, including the dragon tyrant Maur, who severely wounds Aerin but is ultimately defeated. The first dragon fight and the final fight with Maur are the best parts of the novel, although the intermediate dragon fights are all compressed into a montage because McKinley had to make room for all of this other shit. Maur's skull is mounted up in the banquet hall of Aerin's castle, although it's later revealed that the presence of a dragon skull has a severe negative impact on the souls and morale of the Damarians, and also the skull is telepathic, which is magic, but a different unrelated magic from the other magic.
Also, there's a crown in The Hero And The Crown. The crown is supposed to fix everything through some kind of magjc, but some old king lost the crown generations ago, so now Aerin has to go find the crown. She does this by going on a journey after she's done killing dragons, because she only kills dragons for maybe 75 pages of a 300-page novel. On that journey she meets a mage, which is different than a witch, named Luthe, who has yet another type of magic - god damn it - and he makes Aerin drink magic silver water which makes her immortal, or at least less mortal than she was, which she can take with her, along with a wreath she arbitrarily made out of sleepy-leaves, to fight the bad guy in a magic living dark tower, who is not Nyrlol but her uncle, who is also a mage, or maybe a demon, or maybe a witch because he's Aerin's mom's sister, and it's good that they're related because the uncle has some sort of evil magic and can also only be defeated by a family member, which she does by tossing the wreath at him, which defeats him for some reason and teleports her to a faraway forest, where Luthe the Mage finds her again and stays with her until she recovers enough to bone him:
“Mm,” he replied. “My love, I feel it only fair to warn you that I am feeling quite alert and strong tonight, and if you choose to sleep with me again, it is not sleep you will be getting.” “Then I look forward to no sleep whatsoever,” Aerin said contentedly, and Luthe laughed and dropped his spoon.
I'm pretty sure this is the only "we ain't gonna get much sleeping done" crack I'll read in any of the medalists, but admittedly my memory is a little hazy on From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Anyways. The crown shows up at this point, which is good, and it becomes even more powerful because Maur dropped a magic red stone when he died, which makes the crown some sort of super-crown, so Aerin can return to her home and get rid of the dragon skull and give someone the crown and help the army repel the Northerners and eventually become queen, marrying Tor, who is not the man she just slept with or fell in love with, but she's also kind of in love with him.
Throughout all of this, the explanations that McKinley offers for the questions "why is any of this happening?" or "how the hell does any of this work?" come out to, ultimately, "look that's just how it is please don't worry about it". Like this to explain the magic dragon stone:
“You don’t know what you’re saying. A dragon’s bloodstone is not for good or wickedness; it just is."
Or this to explain the sudden revelation that Aerin's uncle, Agsded, is the bad guy:
"Agsded beat in her brain; a moment ago she had told Luthe she did not know the name, and yet now she was ready to swear that it had haunted all the shadows since before her birth."
Or this explanation of Aerin's sudden telekinetic gifts, which comes out to "oh yeah I learned this yesterday":
"Remembering something else Luthe had taught her, she gathered a few dry twigs and a heap of dead leaves together, and set them on fire by glaring at them."
Or this completely unexplained and never again referenced piece of mythology used as a throwaway line, hundreds of pages in, as Aerin begins to scale Agsded's evil tower:
"She would be a new god: the God That Climbs. It was no more improbable than some of the other gods: the God That Isn’t There, for example (more often known as the God That Follows or the God That Goes Before), which was the shadow-god at midday."
Between Strunk and White and Michener and Vonnegut and Leonard and Sanderson and countless others, you can find plenty of advice for writing fiction, and no writing advice is "universal". What works for one person won't work for another - that's what art is - and you have to try things and screw up and rewrite in order to find your voice and your style. The closest that I think any piece of writing advice can get to something "universal" is this: try to leave out the parts that make readers say "what the hell is this?"
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2005 medalist, Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata.
Surprisingly, with a pitch like that, the self-published novel still ended up only moving about twenty copies.
About whom I’ve written at length elsewhere.
Sanderson is adjunct faculty at BYU and a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, so just playing the probabilities, I am not likely to agree with his views on, say, gender norms. But, when he was an undergrad at BYU, his roommate was future Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings, so it's possible that he's the rare Cool Mormon.
You can certainly critique Sanderson's work as well; there are parts of Mistborn that feel like you're playing a video game, which obviously won't be for everyone.