Legacies: The Power of the Past – Matthew Ward Guest Post

Hello and welcome to the first ever Track of Words guest post – The Power of the Past – in which the fantastic Matthew Ward discusses the importance of legacies in storytelling. With the second novel in Matthew’s Legacy Trilogy just released via Orbit, I’m delighted to present this guest post as part of the Legacy of Steel blog tour, alongside some fantastic bloggers and SFF websites. I’ll link out to all the other stops on the tour at the end of this article, and I would highly recommend you check out all the reviews, interviews and guest posts that make up the tour.

First, however, I’ll hand you straight over to Matthew…

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As might be obvious from the titles of my books, I firmly believe that legacies – proud or otherwise – are central to storytelling. They’re the bedrock of worldbuilding.

Before I get into precisely why that is, let’s be super-clear about the term itself. Like so many words in the English language, ‘legacy’ has several meanings…but the one we’re interested in is this:

“Anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor”

It’s a wonderfully broad phrase, covering physical traits or psychological ones (nature or nurture), possessions, reputations, treaties, freedoms, limitations…In fact, anything that sculpts your day to day life in some way, shape or form is the legacy of past actions.

Legacies are textured history, given life by those that bear them in the present. As a result, they’re also the future – the deeds (or lack thereof) of today living on a month, a year, a thousand years down the line.

Legacies as Storytelling Tools

Done right, a legacy-rich world is a living, breathing world – it’s a web of causation and consequence that fills every decision with importance. The bad blood from a long-ago war. A family feud once thought settled. Say, are we sure that god we betrayed and buried alive is actually dead? Why do we make the sign of the Goddess before crossing running water? It’s everything from borders and geography to ritual and politics.

This is especially useful in tragedies, where you not only want the story to plunge into the depths of misery after moments of joy, but you ideally want the reader to see the chasm coming long before your characters reach it. A tragedy without foreshadowing is merely an unfortunate event.

Better still, legacies give characters a ready-made set of conflicts – fantasy often turns on a chosen protagonist shouldering the weight of the past. A family impoverished by famine that was in turn caused by that long-ago war. A friend possessed by a buried god who was nowhere near as dead as anyone thought. A daughter cast out from the village for not honouring the goddess and inviting disaster. Bilbo’s ring. “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

You get the idea. The past shaping the present. But more than that, by grounding your story on legacies, you invite the reader to imagine the ones that continue once your story’s done. To consider what lies beneath the stones you’ve left unturned. The world lives on beyond your vision…which is something a number of classic stories never quite manage.

One element about legacies I particularly admire is when you get to see them play out across generations. Terry Brooks’ Shannara really came alive for me during The Heritage of Shannara (set three hundred years after The Sword of Shannara). Yes, the earlier books revisit key bloodlines and the mistakes and triumphs of the past, but Heritage spreads the net even wider and in less conventional ways. The famous sons of the Creel/Screl bloodline go from blacksmith to thief to freedom fighter over the course of generations – touched by destiny as the result of an ancestor’s choices, and denied escape.

Living in the Past

But of course, you’ve got to be careful. If you’re not, your story becomes all about the past, and not the present. Because while legacies are rooted in days gone, they’re owned equally by the ‘now’. A legacy that has no impact on the present day is just a myth. Less than a myth, in fact, because myths influence behaviours all the time.

I suppose the key word is ‘relevance’. For a legacy to matter, it has to exert force on a character, or their world. That doesn’t mean they have to know about it (although that always helps), but the reader should at least be aware of the possibility.

And aware or not, your characters must make choices to embrace or reject that legacy. Otherwise they run the risk of becoming what Anathema Device is tempted by at the end of Good Omens – a professional descendant, dancing on the strings of some illustrious forebear or event.

This is something that The Lord of the Rings sometimes struggles with, for all its many strengths. History is often recounted by characters as if it has a value purely for existing, where sometimes it doesn’t actually matter to the story, for all its connection to the world.

It’s one of the reasons that Tom Bombadil is so easily cut from most adaptations of LOTR – on a baseline level, he doesn’t really matter to anyone. Maybe he’s Illúvatar, maybe he isn’t, but his direct legacy on the world and its characters is so thin he might as well not be part of the story, if we’re being ruthless (and I happen to like Tom Bombadil…).

Backstory Ballast

Legacies can also prove challenging in another important way: they take up a lot of space. And what can all too often be the very worst case of space…exposition. Staying with The Lord of the Rings – and again, this is a book I love dearly and that has taught me a great deal – there are some chapters that read more like histories than stories. For all that the exposition in Shadow of the Past and The Council of Elrond is delivered by characters, it remains exposition…and very, very lengthy. It’s the second most common complaint people make about the book, the first being the ever-prevalent poetry.

(While of course they should be saving their ire for that good-for-nothing the-grass-is-always-greener middle-class dilettante, Frodo Baggins, but I digress…)

A Path Through the Past

Fortunately, the solution to both problems outlined above is always the same: put your characters front and centre. Weave your legacies into the story so that they are bound to your protagonists’ and antagonists’ efforts, whether through confliction or conciliation. Let them shape the events and pieces of the world your heroes interact with, and that your villains exploit…even if it’s only for a moment.

I’m making it sound simpler than it is. However, bring to mind a story you wanted to love, but couldn’t, and I’ll guarantee you a dislocated legacy is part of the problem – something that should feel pivotal, but somehow never does. Dodge this problem, and you’ll be left with a story for the ages.

And now, at last, we reach the point on the article where I make a shameless plug about my books. Come on, I even put the word ‘legacy’ right in the title. There’s only one way to know if I’m practising what I’m preaching…

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Matthew Ward is the author of Legacy of Ash and Legacy of Steel, available now from Orbit. In another life, he helped shape the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, and serves as the (somewhat) maniacal Creative Consultant on Fatshark’s Vermintide 2.

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Massive thanks to Matthew for this brilliant article! If you’re hungry for more about Legacy of Steel and The Legacy Trilogy, here are links to all the other stops on this blog tour:

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See also: my interview with Matthew about Legacy of Steel

See also: my review of Legacy of Ash

If you’re in the UK and would like to support local independent bookshops, you can buy Legacy of Steel by clicking on the button above*

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