I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just can’t stand it anymore. I mean, even the Pajama-Gram ads for Christmas are sleazy. The country’s falling apart, they’re wildly celebrating the surgical mutilation of boys into pseudo-girls and girls into pseudo-boys–did you know we “need” more of these freaks in our armed forces, according to the US Air Force?–and our nation’s leaders, perpetually at war against the American people, do everything in their power to nullify the last election.
But you know what’s great about fantasy? None of this garbage has to make it into your story.
For those of you who might want to try your hand at writing fantasy, remember this: the allure of a fantasy world is that the “real” world–the Al Sharpton-atheist-transgender-renegade church-Washington D.C.-public education world–can’t get in! Well, not unless you let it in–and why would you want to do that?
You might ask, “Well, if you leave all that stuff out of the fantasy world, what’s left to put in?” But you wouldn’t ask that if you understood that all that rubbish mentioned above is only pasted onto reality. None of it is an integral part of reality. Can’t you imagine a real world that gets by just fine without militant homosexuals, Occupy Wall Street, or the state of Massachusetts?
A reader once asked me how I deal with feminism in my stories. The beauty of it is… I don’t! When I enter my fantasy, I close the door on feminism; it can’t come in after me. In fact, I close it on a lot of contemporary “isms.”
Divorce your fantasy world from aspects of the real world that weren’t there yesterday and aren’t going to be there tomorrow.
Because those things aren’t real. They make us sick, they undermine our country, and they stink to High Heaven; but they aren’t real.
Excellent! That’s what I try to do. Which is why it makes me so mad to see ‘fantasy’ books that are basically thinly veiled remakes of our world, just with swords and magic stuck in. That’s why I believe firmly in ‘writing what you want to read’, because usually you can’t find it anywhere else 🙂
What I really hate is a fantasy written for young readers in which a big piece of the story takes place in… school! Aaagh! Every other YA fantasy novel seems to do that.
Please don’t get so caught up in writing your own reading matter that you never get around to my books.
Yes, that seems so stupid to me. It’s not like anyone likes school :/
To tell you the truth, I haven’t been reading or writing much of anything lately. I never seem to have the time 🙁
My sister always says that, Laura–and she’s been saying that for 40 years. It’s a good habit not to get into.