Three great lessons I’m taking from reading Rebecca Yarros’s Iron Flame to make me a better writer:
Find imaginative ways to weave context into your story
Get the pacing right
Provide reminders about who peripheral characters are and other key details
Iron Flame is the second book in Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean Series, a fantasy series centred around dragon riders. That’s about as much context as you need for this.
**Minor spoilers included below**
Find imaginative ways to weave context into the story
Iron Flame is set primarily in Navarre, a fictional continent that exists within in a wider fantasy world. Immediately this puts the reader at a disadvantage; they know nothing. They have no geographical grounding of where they are, no historical knowledge to help contextualise the present, no understanding of norms, values or culture. The existence of humans in this fictional universe are pretty much the only recognisable elements that tether the world of Iron Flame to the real world.
You’ve probably read the first few pages of a book before that’s introduced all manner of made-up words and names of places that leave you feeling lost and slightly alienated. That’s not the way you want your relationship with the reader to get started.
You need to recognise that they know nothing and write with that in mind, which is great because it’s an open invitation to tell them everything about the amazing world you’ve crafted. Go wild!
But wait. Whilst you can’t jump straight in with unannounced place names, objects and characters, neither can you spend a hundred pages cataloguing the history of every king, queen, mage, sage, squire, dragon, goblin and sentient rodent that ever lived.
So this is where skill is required.
And where I really like Yarros’s approach.
Iron Flame is written from the first person perspective of dragon rider cadet Violet Sorrengail, meaning we know only what Violet knows and experience only what Violet experiences. We aren’t privy to the machinations of the other characters (who are often conspiring against her), or of the actions that take place outside her bubble. Nor does it give Yarros much opportunity to dump a load of history, lore, geography and culture on the reader. That is, unless she writes Violet as a bookworm and history buff, a dragon rider that was supposed to be a scribe, a.k.a. a character that loves history, lore and learning new things.
Violet’s genius coping mechanism for retaining control amidst high pressure and often deadly situations, is to recite snippets of history, as if revising for an exam. Very frequently out of her comfort zone in the Rider’s Quadrant at Basgiath War College, we get a wealth of minor snippets of information relayed to us in this way. This tactic is utilised a lot more in the first book (Fourth Wing), but continues into Iron Flame.
It works so well in Fourth Wing and Iron Flame because it feels like such a natural thing for the character to do and is even quite an endearing trait.
‘“Green dragons,” I mutter under my breath, “known for their keen intellect, descend from the honorable Uaineloidsig line, and continue to be the most rational of dragonkind, making them the perfect siege weapons, especially in the case of clubtails.” I finish as I line my body up with the first metal rod and get ready to sprint forward.
“Are you…studying?” Aurelie calls up from where she leaps onto the first ball below.’
The other tactic Yarros employs for sharing historical and contextual knowledge is by including an excerpt before the start of each chapter drawn from some historical text or other. Again, these are bitesize chunks of context, only ever a single sentence long, but highly informative and often used to arm the reader with key understanding ahead of upcoming events. The sources quoted in these excerpts include historical texts like the Dragon Riders’ Codex, official documents, a notebook from Violet’s brother that she relies upon for navigating the perils of the War College, letters sent between characters in the book and even the translated manuscript of a Rider’s journal that Violet is working on translating during the events of Iron Flame.
Chapter Five of Iron Flame is preceded by an excerpt about Major Varrish, a character that will pose a constant threat to Violet throughout the book. The excerpt, in just a single sentence, reveals a lot about the dangers of the man Violet is up against and is particularly pertinent information for the reader to possess when Violet ends-up in an interrogation situation with the man later in the book. Death feels like a very real possibility having already read this excerpt.
‘After three consecutive deaths of prisoners during interrogations, it is this command’s opinion that Major Burton Varrish should be reassigned from an active wing until further notice.
-Missive from Lieutenant Colonel Degrensi, Samara Outpost, to General Melgren’
These two tactics combine to provide the reader with a surprisingly rich and deep knowledge of the world, to the extent that you feel the presence of a long history of events that have taken place beforehand. We’re not just visiting a setting that exists only as far as the main character can see, there’s a rich history and a vibrant world beyond the characters immediate location.
Too often I’ve been drawn to reading a book by the promise of an enthralling fictional world but left disappointed by the end because I barely know anything about this new world I wanted to explore. Your world is more than just a stage for your story to play-out on, let us roam, tell us where we can get a good meal, show us the best spot to watch the sun set.
It helps that a key theme of the book is that a large chunk of history has been redacted from the archives and is being censored from the public, which functions to leave us accepting of the fact that our knowledge is limited. The narrative of Iron Flame revolves around Violet working to uncover the truth and break from the suppression, so we learn as she learns. It all fits together nicely as if it just fell in to place naturally without the need for any planning, and maybe it did, but there’s a great blueprint in there for worldbuilding and how to assimilate the reader.
Have you seen an examples of this being done well elsewhere?
Get the pacing right
Iron Flame is essentially two books merged into one, giving us a Part One and a Part Two. This is, arguably, most noticeable through the pacing.
Towards the end of Part One the narrative hurtles through at breakneck speed. There’s no chance to take a breath. No chance to relax. It’s one major thing happening after the next. As a reader you’re left perpetually on edge with a knot in your stomach.
Sprinting at light speed for a hundred pages is too long. I was left pleading for a slow down, which eventually arrived in the form of Part Two. Part Two embarked on a new narrative, feeling very much as though you’d just started reading the next book. This was reflected in the pacing, starting slowly and ambling on slowly for an extended period. After the frenetic nature of Part One, the pacing felt almost glacial and after a while I found myself wondering when, if ever, it was going to accelerate again.
There was such a notable shift in pacing and on both sides of it I was left a little frustrated. Pacing is what carries the reader through the length of the book. Done well, it’ll grease the reader’s journey through the narrative, drawing them in to add excitement and drama but providing balance so that reading doesn’t become overwhelming or, at the other extreme, boring. Done poorly, pacing feels artificial and contrived and ends-up doing the very opposite of helping the reader flow through the narrative.
Provide reminders about who peripheral characters are and other key details
…‘a dragon emerges from behind the left side of the stone, driving Mom and Mira toward us.
Not just any dragon. Baide.’
Who is Baide again?
This is page 561. Baide was last mentioned over 300 pages ago. She’s a fairly peripheral character and a lot has happened since she last featured. And there are a tonne of names to remember in Iron Flame, a lot of which are unfamiliar words, particularly when it comes to the dragons.
At this point, over a thousand pages into the series, I probably have good recall of 12-15 characters. There are a lot more characters involved but it’s difficult to retain much more than that.
It was four paragraphs before Yarros brought Jack Barlowe into the narrative, where it then became obvious Baide was Jack’s dragon. Living in a world of your own creation, it’s hard to appreciate that people could possibly forget who certain characters are, their traits or the different locations in the book, but the reader is just nowhere near as immersed as you and needs reminders and prompts.
Iron Flame has students, professors, members of the rebellion, signets, squads, locations and dragons, all of which require some recollection of identity and context to fully follow the whole narrative.
It’s better to repeat information than leave the reader disoriented.