The writing of Robert J Clark

A Feast for the Imagination

© Robert J Clark 2007

Background

Background

Historical Timeline

Whilst still at school in the early 1970s Robert J Clark began imagining a vast fantasy world populated not by magicians and fantastic animals but by ordinary human beings.  This would be a world where magic existed but would play a back-ground role and where sometimes the little man could make a difference.

 

At first this nebulous child of his mind was ill-formed, but gradually the world matured and as it did, so too did those who lived within it.  Soon it became clear that a structure was required and so Robert J penned a series of detailed maps to link all the various places together into a cohesive whole and also developed the entire history of the world in a complex timeline.  These helped the creative juices flow and soon he had embarked upon a five volume story called The Broken Sceptre Sequence.

 

Each of the five volumes would be made up of three books thereby defining five and three as magical numbers in the Tynasian universe.  This epic journey began in an age before computers and when adolescence and girls had not yet begun to impinge upon the imagination.  The first five books were completed in longhand—each around 60,000 words (a fairly common length for a novel at that time).  Then the dreaded writers block struck and so with the main protagonists poised on the edge of a wide river the pen was put down and the imagination given a rest.

 

Yet the story did not die; it was resurrected in the form of a series of short stories about one of the cities mentioned in the original books and took the original protagonists and placed them much earlier in their lives.  This was the dawn of the Tynasian Chronicles.  A good friend read these short stories and commented that within each one was a novel waiting to get out.  Duly inspired, Robert J set to work to create what is a force majeure of fantasy writing.  Spanning years, and interweaving a series of interconnected plots and sub-plots into a gripping series of adventures, the Tynasian chronicles are marvels of the fantasy genre.

 

And they still go on, for the author is now set to begin work once more on the Broken Sceptre Sequence, thereby bringing the journey full circle.