Happy New Year. As the year is beginning I've decided to join a few more groups to put some effort into. I'm eager to take part in discussions, even if only to fulfill my fantasy of having a social life where I can talk with friends at a cafe.

So, I'd like to introduce one thing about me pertinent to this group. I like bildungroman. Unfamiliar with the term? It's the literary technique of writing a story that tracks a character's formative years, usually from young until adulthood. In fantasy literature this is often done with the hero or heroine of the story.

Two of my favorite book series that have done this are Age of Fire and The Demon Cycle, written by E.E. Knight and Peter V. Brett respectively. What I particularly enjoy about these stories versus others I have read is the way they use bildungsroman to not only provide an in depth development of their characters, but a wide and expansive development of the worlds in their books.

Both authors don't just follow a single character, using the lives of multiple characters instead to tell different tales from different parts of their worlds. Age of Fire is a story about dragon siblings, all simply trying to help their kind survive in a world that fears them. The first three books can be, in fact, interchangeably read, as E.E. Knight dedicates each book to one of the dragon siblings, each time returning to the very moment they were born.

The many adventures each sibling encounters not only develop their character arcs at an intensely intimate level between the character and reader, but it also provides the reader with a way to see multiple corners of the fantasy world, immersing them deeper once the plot thickens after the third book.

Peter V. Brett also manages to do this, but by diving his books between the characters instead of full dedication. It produces a slightly different effect. The Demon Cycle series is, as the name may suggest, tells the story of a world plagued with demons for centuries, with humanity being haunted by the magical beasts as soon as the day welcomes night.

The way in which humanity deals with and fears the demons is reinforced throughout each character's story, solidifying the narrator's claims about the seemingly unstoppable threat of demons, while simultaneously crafting a world in which the audience can suspend their disbelief. Seeing multiple characters from young live through their world as if demons were commonplace introduces the reader to how parents raise and protect their children, and how different locales trade and interact in slightly different manners.

But beyond all this talk of other fantasy, I like to integrate it into stories here on this site. Fanfiction is an interesting facet of literature, sometimes preying upon the audience's uncontrolled--and occasionally lewd--imagination rather than presenting a well-rounded, developed world. Yet sometimes there are attempts to craft new and original portrayals of pastel coloured horses and the continent they live in.

Bildungsroman is an essential technique to understand to improve one's fiction. Too often writers are obsessed with the idea of their character, throwing their "cool" and "outlandish" what-ifs at the face of the reader to hook them in, or building off a specific relationship that the fans will always like to see (Starlight and Trixie FTW). Instead, taking an approach where character development is the plot of at least part of the story should develop a far more satisfying re-imagination of our favorite characters, and could quite possibly improve the overall quality of a fiction.