Don’t forget to provide your imaginary characters with an imaginary landscape.
I won’t add more helpful hints to this little essay. No–there’s something else I wish to add, which didn’t occur to me seven years ago.
Here’s another aspect to the question. Let’s say you can write believable fantasy. The next question: why do so? Why?
Increasingly I’ve come to view fiction as parables. They’re not factually true, not about real people–but they could be. Parables have to be believable: how else is a parable to teach the lesson it is meant to teach? Our Lord Jesus Christ knew that very well, and made abundant use of parables.
As did, for example, C.S. Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia. It’s longer than Christ’s parable of The Good Samaritan, but they are obviously related to each other.
One thing I enjoy about your novels is that Obann comes to life. It’s a place with believable geography and consistency. That’s very important, and especially so when we are talking about a series of books, where places are revisited, over and over. Having a mental picture of these places, and a sense of their history, makes the stories all that much better.
In movies, continuity is a real challenge. For example, a character’s dialogue has to reflect what they could actually know at that point of time in the story, or continuity will be disrupted. Likewise for places; a place has to be introduced to the story, and put into context, before it can be used, but that has to be done carefully, so as not to reveal future events. If a cornfield is introduced in chapter 6, it can’t be revealed that it will burn down in chapter 8, until chapter 8.
One of the things I’ve noticed in yiur books is that you have very good control over continuity. I never find myself knowing what will happen ahead of time. I’ll contrast that to television, where I almost always can get ahead of the timeline, because the setup to events is so obvious.
I would really like to hang my hat in Durmurot for a while.
I get exposure to a lot of fantasy when the conservative channels I watch show what Joe Biden and his host of demons in the MSM are saying.
I suppose I could call it “literature of imaginary worlds” or something… but “fantasy” is handier.