Here There Be Dragons

Earlier this year I volunteered to write a story in the Discworld fandom. Dragon’s Egg Blue features a baby dragon, and early in the writing process the phrase “here there be dragons” came to mind. It summed up the challenges I faced with the story, and also became part of the solution.

What were the challenges? Well, I’d never attempted fanfiction for a book series. Everything I’d published has been for fandoms of television shows. TV series have a crew of writers and therefore the style can change from week to week. As a fanfic writer that gives me a lot of leeway, with many styles to chose from if I want to emulate the feel of the show. Of all the book writers to be faced with, Terry Pratchett is a daunting choice. He has a particularly distinctive style and sense of humor. If I tried to copy that, would I fall flat on my face? If I didn’t try, would readers be disappointed?

Those were the dragons I perceived in my path, and they were an intimidating set indeed.

The specific request I’d received was for a story about canon characters Angua and Carrot, two members of the City Watch who have a romantic subplot in the series. I decided to set the story early in their relationship, and needed a plot that would have them interacting throughout a story. My “what if” centered around dragons. In the Discworld there’s a sanctuary for cute little swamp dragons. What if a dragon disappeared? Maybe stolen? Or . . . What if a mysterious dragon’s egg was delivered to the sanctuary? Not a swamp dragon egg, but something different. A snow dragon, perhaps.

That gave me a plot. I outlined how the egg traveled from the mountains to the city and arrived at the sanctuary. For each step I considered the clues Angua and Carrot might discover, and then worked out how they would follow those clues back to the source to find where the baby dragon belonged.

Next I applied an element of Pratchett’s style. Often he includes short, humorous and/or mysterious scenes of seemingly random characters. It isn’t always clear on the first reading how they relate to the plot, but in the end he pulls the elements of the story together. Following his example allowed me to break up long, angsty scenes of Angua wondering if Carrot regrets being involved with her now that he knows she’s a werewolf. I have short scenes in a tavern and in the Patrician’s palace, where something odd and somewhat humorous is going on, and which don’t immediately seem tied to what Angua and Carrot are doing. Eventually, however, their investigation takes them to the palace and the tavern, and we see how everything is related.

Sometimes the humorous elements of Discworld stories feel like free association, and when I found my mind wandering in a scene, I didn’t follow my usual approach of quashing my mental meanderings as a dragon to be avoided when writing. Instead I followed the dragon to its lair and found a treasure of humor. I’d been writing about Angua, who’s thinking that she might leave Carrot and take the baby dragon back to its home in the mountains. The lyric “climb ev’ry mountain” had popped into my head, and adding a set of references to The Sound of Music gave me a moment in the story that felt at least a tiny bit like something I’d experienced in the books.

That gave me the courage to face another style dragon. Discworld stories often have footnotes interspersed with the kind of amusing backstory which novice writers are warned to leave out. Stories are supposed to be lean, and exclude non-essential details which interrupt the flow, and we struggle and practice to leave out fascinating bits that we discovered in our research and character building. Pratchett embraced his own version of breaking those rules, using footnotes to include asides and jokes and even to address us directly as readers.

I’ll admit I shied away from the head-hopping dragon. That’s another writing no-no Pratchett mastered, and although I was tempted to try it, too, I barely skimmed the edges of it.

In the end, I wove the “here there be dragons” phrase into the story itself. It helped me recognize that in addition to dealing with a physical dragon, several characters have metaphorical dragons they’re facing. By using the phrase in multiple ways, I had one more element to tie scenes and characters together in a coherent way. Essentially it acted as a frame for the story.

Dragon’s Egg Blue is posted on AO3 and Fanfiction.net.