Thomas Elrod is joining us today to talk about his novel, The Franchise. Here’s the publisher’s description:
A land filled with magic and dragons and wizards and warriors.
Thousands of people live and work within its borders, fearful of their enemies and loyal to their king.
The classic fantasy world of The Malicarn has been brought to life on the big screen in a series of phenomenally successful blockbuster movies, almost entirely populated by characters in total belief that their sham fantasy lives are real.
A fan-favorite actor finds himself doubting the studio’s work, but this franchise has an almost unstoppable momentum, and bringing freedom to a population that already believes itself to be free won’t be as easy as he thinks.
What’s Thomas’ favorite bit?
My book has a lot of points of view. It jumps around in time and between different characters’ perspectives constantly, something that might drive some readers crazy but also, in a way, feels like it mirrors the media and information ecosystems of our modern age. There’s always more stuff, coming endlessly. How do you make sense of it? That’s, in a way, the central conflict the different characters in my novel are facing as they try to figure out what is real about their world, what isn’t, and how they feel about that.
What the constant jumping around allows me to do as a writer from a craft perspective, though, is introduce one-off characters and marginal POVs that might add a bit to the plot or story but who otherwise don’t have a large role to play in the rest of the novel. It’s like having a bunch of little short stories sprinkled in among the rest of the book, which is a lot of fun.
One of my favorite chapters which does this comes about two-thirds of the way through the novel. Not to spoil too much, but there is a British Secret Service officer named Roger who comes into the story quite late. He’s an outsider whose role is really to jumpstart the final act and push forward the plot toward its conclusion. He’s a plot device, in other words. In early drafts of the books you barely got any background on him at all, and he doesn’t even show up until this quite late point in the story.
However, because I already had this structure of interstitial POV chapters from different characters, I had a chance to write one for Roger as well. Up to this point, all of the characters are involved in some direct way with the fantasy franchise films at the heart of the novel, either as characters, writers, actors, or behind-the-scenes crew. Roger isn’t involved in any of that and when we first meet him isn’t even aware that this main story is happening.
Whereas the rest of the characters are obsessed in various ways with fantasy storytelling, Roger is obsessed with spy fiction, and it is his repressed desire to live like the heroes of the books and films he watches which ultimately leads him to develop a secret covert operation that involves infiltrating the fake fantasy film set. But the chapter, because so much of it feels like a complete detour, was very fun to write and contains some of (I think) the funniest character bits of the whole book. Roger is such a ridiculous figure, a real buffoon, and those are some of the best characters to write.
His chapter does eventually swing back around toward the main plot itself, and ultimately it is useful to understand Roger’s motivations even as he recedes into the background, but having a chance to detour so completely so late in the novel – something very few writing guides or mentors would ever encourage you to do – was a lot of fun, and I hope people enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
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BIO:
Thomas Elrod lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and daughter. His writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Independent Weekly, and elsewhere. The Franchise is his first novel.
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