Category: Fantasy Criticism

It may take several posts to cover this issue, but that way I can always stop if no one’s reading them.

I wish to make it clear that by “fantasy world,” I don’t mean the divorces from reality and common sense routinely indulged in by our leaders and opinion-shapers, dopes and twaddlers. Nancy Pelosi can gas all she wants about an America where everybody’s on the dole and all sitting around composing symphonies and painting landscapes. This makes clear the distinction between fantasy and B.S.

A fantasy world is a world imagined by the story-teller, in which the story happens. You can also set your fantasies in what your readers would recognize as the real world. But it’s fun to make up a whole new world.

I wonder if you’ve noticed something about “other-world fantasy.” When a hobbit has to have his appendix out, what does he do? Tolkien didn’t say. The Shire, as he imagined and described it, had no hospitals, no dentists, and no taxes. Well, he did say it was fantasy, didn’t he?

These are the kind of details no one ever seems to include in a fantasy world. All right, who wants to read about having a toothache and going to the dentist? One of the reasons we read fantasy is to escape the annoyances and burdens of the real world.

Would it work, do you think, if a fantasy story did include such things?

I doubt it.

The first step in creating an other-world fantasy is to imagine a world, or setting, which you will enjoy writing about and others will enjoy reading about.

But if you’re just going to flap your jaw and not write anything, you might as well teach college.

 

If you’ve populated your fantastic tale with characters that the reader can believe in, and find interesting, and care about, you’ve already won half the battle. But you still have to decide on a setting for your story.

You could, of course, set your fantasy in the real world, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Many writers have done this most effectively. Frank Belknap Long had fairies living in a New York City brownstone. And if you’re thinking of vacationing in H.P. Lovecraft’s picturesque seashore town of Kingsport, Massachusetts, don’t even think about climbing the Rock and trying to peek into the windows of The Strange High House in the Mist; and if you know what’s good for you, steer clear of The Terrible Old Man. These real world settings, in the hands of a skilled writer, help the reader to believe in the fantasy.

Or you could set your tale in the real world of the past, another time, another place. This isn’t done so often, because a historical novel is already a kind of escape for the reader. It’s a kind of time-travel, and fantastic in its own right. Among the few good examples of this that I can think of, L. Sprague DeCamp’s The Dragon at the Ishtar Gate, stands out. If you want to try this technique, good luck.

My own fantasies are of the “imaginary world” variety, for which J.R.R. Tolkien and his tales of Middle-Earth stand tall in a very numerous crowd. Here, you invent a world to house your story.

Another time, I’ll discuss how to go about doing this. It’s complicated. But the reasons for adopting this approach are simple; and the main reason is, it’s fun! Fun for the writer, fun for the reader. Unless you do it very badly: few things are quite as bad as a badly-done imaginary world.

I think the only thing more fun than reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels of John Carter of Mars would be to write them in the first place. If you can study these, and Tolkien’s works, and come to understand how they did it–well, kimosabe, you’re in business. If you can learn from the great fantasy writers, then you’re ready to write fantasy.

I read a lot of unpublished fantasy novels. People send them to me, hoping I can help. Most of the time, I can’t.

Believe it or not, most unreadable fantasies are bad because they’re unoriginal. That’s not something any editor can fix, so it’s best not to write an unoriginal novel in the first place.

(Yes, I know there are terrible, unoriginal fantasies that do get published. If you wish to imitate them, be my guest.)

It’s not easy to come up with something new and fresh and different. But you can start by avoiding stuff that’s already been done to death by everybody else–stock characters (like the incredibly clever thief, his brawny barbarian sidekick, and the invincible warrior woman) and stock situations in particular.

In fact, this is very difficult. Almost anything in imaginative fiction has already been imagined, and written about, by someone else.

Which brings us back to characters.

What makes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea a classic and a favorite? The character of Captain Nemo! What makes The Chronicles of Narnia a continual delight? A whole cast of characters who are fun to read about, and so convincingly drawn by C.S Lewis that they can carry the most outlandish story without dropping it.

If your characters are right, the whole story will be right. Usually.

But we’re writing fantasy, and so everything has to be different from the reader’s everyday world. The kind of fantasy I like offers a fun mix of characters–some are like people you already know; some will be beyond your personal experience, like kings or cardinals, but still similar to persons you’ve heard of; and some are just way out there.

That’s what I’ve tried to do in my Bell Mountain books. The protagonists, Jack and Ellayne, are like a lot of kids you used to know. Villains, like Lord Reesh and Merffin Mord, will remind you of individuals you’ve seen in the news or read about in history. And then there are a few–Wytt the Omah, Helki the Rod (truly a wild man), or Ysbott the Snake–who are just plain off the scale.

Why do I do this? Two reasons.

It’s fun to write and fun to read.

Also, the down-to-earth characters anchor the reader in the story and help him to believe, while the weird characters give the story wings.

I could also talk about fantasy settings and other items in my tool kit; but again, it’s only a blog post, not a seminar–and I can always come back to it later, if you’re interested.

The hardest thing about writing fantasy is getting the reader to believe in the fantastic things that you’ve made up. The reader wants to believe in something far-out. Otherwise he wouldn’t be reading fantasy.

But still, how do you do it? How do you get someone to feel like he’s really been to Narnia, or heard the Ringwraiths howl as they were hunting him, or ridden with the green Tharks over the dead sea-bottoms of Mars?

It ain’t as easy as it looks.

Not that my work can be compared with any of the above: but according to most of my readers, I have done this successfully.

How?

You could write whole books on this subject, teach whole courses, and this is only a blog post. It’d take a lot of posts to answer the question. So let me just show you one item from my toolbox, which I think is the most important one:

Make your characters real.

If they’re people, even if they’re kings or heroes, make them so the reader can easily imagine interacting with them–and please lay off the stereotypes! Tolkien’s Aragorn, aka “Strider,” is both a hero and a king; but he also displays a full range of emotions like the rest of us. He gets tired, he gets lonely, happy, sad, or angry. Sometimes he makes a wrong decision. He’s everything he ought to be, but doesn’t come off like a plaster saint. As the story goes on, I root for him but sometimes worry about him, too: sometimes I fear he’s not going to make it.

Which is all to say, make your human characters human.

But what about characters who aren’t human? Well, that’s what makes it fantasy.

How do I write Wytt, the fierce little Omah in my Bell Mountain books? Readers tell me they not only believe in him, but love him. How do I do that?

Very carefully!

Wytt works because he conforms to a standard, purely imaginary but a standard nevertheless, of what an Omah is, what he will do or won’t do, how he will think or feel or react differently from any human being. Readers enjoy Wytt because he’s different–not like some of those “elves” or “dwarfs” you meet in a really bad fantasy novel that might as well be greeters at Wal-Mart, because there’s nothing on the inside that really makes them elves or dwarfs.

I know I need to say more on this subject, but I’m running out of space. I’ll come back to it later, if you’re interested.

Today is Good Friday, a holy day. Although I have already been exposed to more disgusting and infuriating news stories than I can easily count, I will report on none of them today. All they prove is how desperately the human race needs salvation, how utterly incapable we are of providing it ourselves, and the magnitude of what Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross.

And so, I think, a few words about the art of writing fantasy…

It should be easy to write fantasy. Just put the imagination into gear and let ‘er rip. Only it doesn’t often seem to work out that way, does it? Somehow, some of the most unimaginative and unoriginal writing you’ll find anywhere is found in fantasy.

In the interest of forcing fantasy writers to be more creative, and interesting, I propose the following changes to the genre.

1. Expel these stock fantasy characters: the wizard, the lusty tavern wench, the resourceful thief with a heart of gold, his hulking barbarian sidekick, the invincible female warrior, the helpless damsel in distress, dragons, dwarfs, and elves. Begone! Take a long sabbatical. You have been so overused, that you are now no more exotic than the bank teller, the checkout clerks, the boss who is a pain in the neck, or the guy who’s supposed to come and fix your cable and somehow never gets there. When the uncommon becomes common, it’s time to look elsewhere.

2. No more super-powers. So much of fantasy is tailored to the Young Adult market; but teens are the last readers in the world who need to be titillated with images of cool kids who are like the superheroes in comic books. Please try to make your novel look less like a video game or a comic book or a Dungeons and Dragons game.

3. That goes for “magic,” too. I mean, really, is it too much to ask that characters in a novel get things done by using their brains, rather than just reciting a magical spell or flying around or reading minds,whatever?

Well, if we’re going to get rid of all these routine elements of fantasy fiction–what’s left?

Achtung! Nothing about fantasy should be routine!

Let’s see if we can actually surprise our readers, shall we?