7 Lessons for Writers from Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings
Usually at the end of the month I do a roundup of the books I read that month, but today I am going to do something different - a deep dive into one of my favorite books/series, and why it’s a masterclass for writers.
I just finished re-reading The Game of Kings, the first in The Lymond Chronicles, a series of historical novels about, loosely speaking, the adventures of an extraordinary young Scottish nobleman, Francis Crawford of Lymond, in 16th-century Europe. I started my Lymond journey at age fourteen, when I foraged The Game of Kings from a used bookstore somewhere in Georgia while traveling with my father. I devoured it despite the occasional struggle to keep up with what was going on. I adored the language and delighted in the challenge of putting the puzzle together - who was the protagonist, really? Was he the outlaw, traitor, murderer, drunken reprobate he seemed? Or was there another story behind his behavior? What was he looking for and why? How did all the seemingly disparate pieces fit together? I didn’t get all my answers in one read - or in several rereads over the years. In fact, I still find new links, foreshadowing, and clever points with each reading.
The books have been in print since they were written in the 1960s-early 1970s. They, and Dunnett’s other books, have influenced numerous writers, as evinced in this article, “All the Writers You Love Probably Love Dorothy Dunnett.”
Why are they so beloved of writers, as well as attracting passionate readers for decades? There are online forums, Facebook groups, websites, Tumblrs, and even books written by readers for the sole purpose of helping other readers delve into the deepest pleasures of the books, especially the Lymond Chronicles, her first historical series. These are not fanfiction (though that exists too) but books that elucidate the numerous historical, classical, mythological, literary, and musical illusions that sprinkle the texts.
The books are densely written, in a very particular style, packed with actual historical figures and events, and span a decade and several countries with exquisite historical detail. It’s said by lovers of the books that if you can get through the first fifty pages of The Game of Kings, you’ll be indelibly hooked. It was certainly my experience.
And as a writer, I am still awed by Dunnett’s skill. Not just with language itself (oh, her glorious work with language!), but with all the aspects of writing and storytelling. As much as I love her books as a reader, perhaps it’s as a writer that I’ve truly come to understand what a great writer she was, and tried to figure out just how she did it.
I’m going to walk through a few of them, focusing on The Game of Kings in particular, as a master lesson on craft. I could honestly write an article on each of these, with examples from the book - but I don’t want to give away too many spoilers for those who haven’t read it!
The beginning: starting in the right place, and asking compelling questions from the beginning that draw the reader into the story. The book begins:
“Lymond is back.”
It was known soon after the Sea-Catte reached Scotland from Campvere with an illicit cargo and a man she should not have carried.
It goes on from there, to a hilarious scene where said Lymond sneaks into a smuggler’s house, confronts the smuggler and his esteemed guests, taunts them, and disappears into the night (after confounding them with a rather drunk pig). This scene is crucial, for it sets up several mysteries that will carry us through the rest of the book: Who is Lymond, really? What does he want? Why is he returning to Scotland, where he has a price on his head? Why confront these people, instead of just sneaking in? It also introduces us to his character, one who speaks (rather maddeningly) in literary quotations and classical allusions, forcing us to figure out what he actually means behind the veil of words.
This is powerful, because it’s the questions that lead us through everything that is to come. We’re compelled to read forward to find out what will happen: will Lymond get his seemingly just deserts, or not?
It also perfectly does what writers are told to do: start their story “in the middle of the action.” We don’t see him preparing to come to Scotland. We don’t hear his thoughts about what might lie ahead for him in Scotland. No, it starts with his arrival - and we are just as bewildered as the lords he confronts as to his motives.
In fact, this is a key aspect of character-building in the novel. Lymond is the unquestioned protagonist - everything revolves around him - but we never, until the very last page, enter his actual thoughts. Instead, we see him from the perspective of every other character: his brother, who seeks passionately for his own form of justice against him; his protégé, WIll Scott, who goes from naive, to admiring to resentful and in fact follows his own full redemptive story arc as he clashes with The Master, as Lymond is known.
There are a lot of point of view characters (family members, friends, and enemies) and yet they are so individual, so exquisitely drawn, we always know whose perspective we are inhabiting. They all have their thoughts about him - who he is, what he really wants, whether or not he should get it - and it is through them that the picture emerges. We don’t fully understand his history and how it has affected his present until the trial scene at the end, when many things start to make sense, to us and to the other characters. A more complicated character than Lymond is hard to imagine. If you as a reader find it challenging to figure out what is really going on and why, well, you’re pretty much in the same boat as everyone else in the novel. When you finally see and understand the full scope, you begin to appreciate the skill it takes to not only build a character this way - but to build a dozen other characters along the way that we know so well we’d recognize them in a minute if we were plumped down in the middle of their turbulent, often violent lives.
Setting/Worldbuilding - The novel, as I’ve mentioned, is jam-packed with historical detail, plus all the literary allusions. One of the challenges for the reader is that the characters speak as they would have then, the way we might quote books, movies, or music or other cultural touchstones. It also would help if you were familiar with other languages: Latin, classical French, Spanish (one of the most hilarious scenes in the book is when a certain Spanish Don confronts an English commander and the translator is, er, not quite as fluent as he thinks). A lack of understanding of these elements won’t hinder your overall understanding of what is happening, but the books that have been written by fans to explain them are worth reading on your reread, so you get the nuances and in-jokes. (These include two volumes of The Dorothy Dunnett Companion, by Elspeth Morrison, and The Ultimate Guide to Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings by Laura Caine Ramsey).
Another aspect of her worldbuilding is that the books are set in various recognizable places throughout Europe. Although the books are fictional and so are the main characters, many of the places, events, and characters are drawn from history, so vividly you feel like you are there, and I’ve had a peculiar sense almost of déjà vu walking around Edinburgh, Blois, and various places on Malta, among others, from reading The Lymond Chronicles. Yet again, it doesn’t overwhelm the story, but adds to it. We’re not treated to Michener-esque pages of exposition on history or architecture or historical figures. We know the little red-haired girl named Mary being taught naughty riddles in the garden by a nameless “monk” will grow up to be the tragic Mary Queen of Scots. This is the essence of world building: all the details are woven in around what is happening in the moment, in the story. It creates a sense of place and time so vivid we feel like we are there.
Which brings us to the Pace. It never drags, despite an almost bewildering amount of action and historical detail. There are two aspects to pacing that a writer needs to consider: the overall pace of the story, and the pacing in individual scenes. At one point about ⅔ of the way through the novel, Dunnett skillfully builds a series of scenes where a number of major players, acting independently, ultimately are forced together in a way that compounds tragedy on tragedy - yet it never feels episodic, like “one damned thing after another” but a multifaceted denouement of everything that has gone before. The building suspense keeps us reading, wondering Is this really going to happen? And Oh, no, how will this person survive? And Will the biggest secret of all be kept safe?
And when drilling deep into a scene itself, such as the duel between Lymond and his brother near the end of the book (both duels, really - the ones with sword and dagger, as well as the later, more mortifying, one with words) she does what so many writers don’t. She takes her time, until we are sweating with the spectators as they watch two of the best swordsmen in Scotland - who happen to be brothers - dueling to the death, while knowing all the time that the true tragedy is that only one of them is actually trying to kill the other. To give the right level of detail and keep the pace up to the point where the reader is nearly as breathless as the spectators is an art that takes time to master.
We’re so invested because by that point we understand the Stakes, both inner and outer, that are driving the narrative and the characters. Dunnett is a master at creating stakes and putting her characters in physical and psychological peril. We have the major external stakes: will England succeed in forcing little Mary Queen of Scots to marry young Edward VI? That conflict forms the external action arc of the novel, as events occurring in the novel’s present and past involve what was known as England’s “Rough Wooing” of Mary.
We see the stakes for particular characters: Lymond, for example, has ever-escalating stakes that revolve around whether he will be able to prove his innocence of treason before the law (or his brother) catch up with him. Secondary characters have their own set of internal stakes; Lymond’s brother Richard, for example, is so driven to destroy his brother that he nearly destroys his marriage, his relationship with his mother, his friendships, and his standing at court in the process. As we begin to think that maybe Lymond isn’t quite the devil everyone believes he is, we hope that something will happen to move Richard beyond his hatred, even as we understand why he feels that way. The trick is balancing both the larger external stakes and the internal stakes in such a way that the reader cares about what is going on. They need to have real meaning for the characters and the world they inhabit.
Stakes, of course, are the source of Conflict. Just as there are external and internal stakes, there are also external and internal conflict. Dunnett balances both kinds expertly. The backdrop of the “Rough Wooing” is all conflict, on the battlefield and in the courts and noble houses vying for power and influence. The other external conflict is more personal to the main character of Lymond: “Will he or won’t he be hanged/proven innocent?” Since we never hear his direct thoughts, we don’t see most of his internal conflict. We only catch glimpses from the perspective of other characters of how his past has haunted him, and what drives him to return to Scotland in this attempt to clear his name.
Most of the Internal conflict is within other people such as Will Scott and Richard Crawford, who struggle to figure out who Lymond really is. An honorable man, or an inveterate rogue? There are also internal and external conflicts within the various Crawford family members who are also struggling since Lymond’s return has upended their carefully designed lives. Because Dunnett has built her characters so well, we always know exactly why they are doing what they are doing, even if we want to shake them and tell them they really, really have the wrong end of the stick.
Last but far from least, Dunnett succeeds at that most crucial of tasks, taking the reader on an emotional experience. Readers read not for the what, but for the why. They want to care about what is going on, and for that to happen, it has to matter to the characters, deeply. Some might argue that Dunnett veers into the melodramatic at times, but she’s never afraid to make them care. We always know they care, because they are fighting for what they want with every fiber of their being, whether it’s for their literal lives or their honor, or their place in the world, or their self-regard. She also knows how to convey what the characters are feeling without resorting to tired cliché or labored emotional description. The fact that I can point to every character, major and minor, and know exactly what matters to them, what they want more than anything, is an enormous feat. In a novel like this, where the action and adventure is so strong, a lesser writer would have focused on that and only let us see one or two characters. Instead, we have a tapestry of people who we care about, because we know what they care about.
Dunnett even tantalizes us with a final, unexplained mystery - what really happened with the youngest Crawford sibling, Eloise. We know she’s dead, and how; we know she’s the key to destroying Lymond’s carefully constructed facade of detachment; we know her death haunts Richard too. But there is a conversation that never quite happens, that leaves us wanting more… and that is, as we eventually discover, part of the central lynchpin mystery that holds the series together and is not resolved until the last book. Too many authors make the mistake of trying to explain everything, when it is the mystery that teases readers and leaves them demanding more. The trick, of course, is to know what to leave as a mystery, and what to explain. Dunnett rarely explains anything, in fact. She expects her readers to figure it out. (Fortunately, these days there are plenty of online groups and forums whose participants are happy to help if you really get stuck.)
This, my writer friends, is called Reading Like a Writer. Picking apart the best books you know, to see if you can figure out how the writer created the effects that so moved you on the page. Note that this can (and should) only be done with a story you already know. It’s always best to first experience the story as a reader, and only then go back and look at particular aspects of the writing and storytelling and see what you can learn. I’m still learning from these books, and I imagine I will be enjoying them as a reader and as a writer, for many more years.
