How to Write a Good Fantasy Ensemble, with Victoria Aveyard

As the protagonist around which the ensemble revolves, Corayne was the center of the story, but Aveyard always imagined it as an ensemble piece. Aveyard also says she wanted Corayne to be different from the protagonists of the stories she loved when she was young. “I went into Realm Breaker absolutely knowing that my main character and leader would be this teenage girl, the bastard daughter of a hero who wants no part of him,” she says in our email interview. “So Corayne’s parameters were in my head early on, but I also absolutely knew she would be part of an ensemble team of deadly misfits. Obviously, Corayne is the core and emotional anchor.”

Of course, the field of fantasy has changed a lot since The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954, or even since its latest pop culture renaissance brought on by the movie trilogy in the early naughts. N.K. Jemisin, Kameron Hurley, A.K. Larkwood and many others have set out to do the same thing—to represent people like themselves in fantasy fiction—and succeeded. In the introduction to Realm Breaker, Aveyard expands on this somewhat, saying:  “I struggled to find my own self in their pages and imagery. And if someone like me, a straight white girl, is struggling, how must others feel? I remember turning to fanfiction to feed the hunger for more, for myself.” 

And in that classic fanfiction way, Realm Breaker doesn’t just take the tenets of its source material as gospel. “I also wanted to run in the other direction a little,” Aveyard says. “The Fellowship are, for the most part, all morally pointed in the same direction. Only Boromir really delves into any emotional complexity and failure, and we lose him early on. I wanted people who were very much flawed and real, who make mistakes or live morally gray lives, who do not believe themselves to be heroes or want to be heroes, but must become them anyways. As for the villain, I like to think of him as an Evil Aragorn, which was a joy to write.”

In Realm Breaker, that complexity means heroes who have already failed, an assassin who finds herself wondering whether the quest is worth fighting for more than money, and more. “I did my best to make each character stand on their own as a person,” Aveyard says, “and therefore act as a person in their situation, with their particular background, would. I stayed as true to their established characters as possible, which makes for a lot of great conflict between very different people set towards the same goal. And I didn’t want to sanitize or force development. It’s a very organic process, growing these people together and making sure they feel real.”

Different chapters have different point-of-view characters, allowing the reader to have knowledge not all the characters share. “The challenge in any story with multiple points of view is making sure each voice sounds different and distinct,” Aveyard says. “Luckily, these characters have such different personalities, that wasn’t as difficult as I anticipated. What helped most was internalizing as much as I could about these characters and their internal compasses, so I didn’t have to be so conscious of their characters while writing their POVs. It’s easier to flow when you don’t have to constantly think NOW WHAT WOULD THEY DO HERE, because you’ve absorbed them and their way of thinking. You already know how they’d react.” 

The finale, when all the work she put into those characters comes together into an ensemble battle, was one of the most fun aspects of writing a large group, Aveyard says. “I had a blast with the set pieces, particularly the climax at an oasis village. It felt like a real payoff of all the set up and development. I can let all these people out of their cages and let them really fight. Not to mention, there’s a moment where Corayne essentially gets passed between all the warriors like some football, to get her safely to her destination. It was a delight for me to visualize the whole sequence, and get it down on paper.”