Tag: fantasy writing

Murdering Fantasy REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

From April 27, 2016

Y’know, I’m beginning to think ill of publicists. They’ll take anybody’s money.

Today a publicist invited me to read a great new fantasy novel “about a female warrior with a kind heart.” When the Sarmatians went culturally extinct almost 2,000 years ago, that was the end of the only nation that actually produced female warriors on purpose. Look it up in Herodotus if you don’t believe me.

Since then, The Invincible Female Warrior has become the most commonplace–and the most annoying–cliche in half-baked fantasy literature. Along with crusty but benign old wizards and know-it-all elves: but really, Ms. Gorgeous with the unbeatable kung-fu moves is the worst of them all–except for maybe little kids with fantastic martial arts skills that enable them to wipe out full-grown male villains.

The book seems to be self-published. This is what gets me about self-publishing: no quality control. The publicist ought to be ashamed for taking this author’s money and trying to hoodwink people like me into reviewing it. I won’t give the author’s name because it just wouldn’t be humane. By the way, though, she wants a pretty hefty chunk of money for this book.

If you are an aspiring writer, this author commits a literary stumble that I’ve told you about before ( http://leeduigon.com/2015/10/21/a-silly-name-can-ruin-your-fantasy-novel/ ).

Do not name the principle characters in your story after familiar household products. Trust me, it doesn’t work. Here we have an Invincible Female Warrior named “Aleave.” Does that at all bring to mind the brand name of a popular headache medicine?

If you conscientiously avoid all the cliches that make fantasy so prone to low expectations on the readers’ part, and write a great story populated by memorable characters, and yet succumb to the temptation to give those characters names like Drano, Tylenol, Pennzoil, or Fancy Feast–well, you might as well not have written it at all.

‘What’s It Like to Write?’ (2016)

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It does seem like quite a long time since Jack climbed up the wall of the Palace (Book No. 6).

There aren’t many people who don’t think they could write a book, if only they had the time for it. But what’s it really like, to write a novel?

What’s It Like to Write?

I would just love to get going on Bell Mountain No. 14, whatever it turns out to be. But the weather hasn’t been playing ball, not at all, and anyway I haven’t yet received whatever the Lord is going to give me to get the story started.

What I don’t get is why there are so many starkly un-imaginative fantasies published. I mean, how many know-it-all elves and invincible female warriors can the reader stand?

And somehow Abbott and Costello Save the Universe never got written…

‘A Defense of Fantasy’ (2015)

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I was hoping to watch some BBC Narnia today, but now I have to go pick up a prescription for my cat.

Anyway, as I try to rest between books, I thought it might be edifying to revisit the question of whether fantasy can be profitably used in God’s service.

https://leeduigon.com/2015/01/31/a-defense-of-fantasy/

I really can’t blame readers who think fantasy is at best idle nonsense, and at worst, some kind of dalliance with the occult. But that can be said about anything, can’t it? There’s music that glorifies God, and there’s music that debases man and everything around him. When was the last time you heard somebody zoom down the road with a hymn playing on his car’s sound system?

So of course we can use fantasy in the service of the Kingdom: and the more who decide to try to do it, the better.

Abner’s Literary Felony

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Here’s how Michelangelo painted it, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Successful fantasy author “Abner Doubleday” (not his real name) has, in the series of his novels that I’m reading–novels which he says are dedicated to the glory of God–committed almost every literary offense under the sun. And I’m only halfway through the second book.

But Abner is full of surprises, and yesterday he provoked me to cry out.

If any of you folks out there contemplates writing a fantasy novel, please be guided by these essays.

In addition to packing his novels chock-full of fantasy cliches, Abner has discovered, and indulged in, the vice of allowing the world of here and now to break in on the fantasy and control it.

See, he’s writing novels about the ancient world before the Flood, retelling the early chapters of the Book of Genesis as a comic book without pictures. The villainous evil bad guys (that’s how he’d say it) are supposed to be divine beings who rebelled against God and came to earth as false gods. They are devoid of redeeming features.

Abner has also made them modern, 21st century liberals, only stopping short of giving them names like Barbara Boxer or Barack Obama. But at every opportunity, these beings, these devils, yap about “hope and change” and “fundamental transformation” of the ancient world, do everything in their power to turn all human beings into welfare dependents, invent modern feminism and inflict it on the antediluvian world–I know it’s only a matter of time before he drags in the minimum wage.

As much as I detest liberalism, and loathe all its works, may I be fricaseed if I ever cram it into one of my novels. Our world’s political and social issues have no business cropping up in a fantasy world.

Why not?

Well, obviously, if you suddenly start writing about Climate Change or Income Inequality, the reader is going to remember that he’s not actually in a fantasy world but only reading a stupid book whose author is trying to lecture to him. Any reader with a modicum of self-respect will walk away from it.

But more importantly, the issues specific to our time, no matter how important they are right now, are only fleeting symptoms of the great disease–sin. The great problem is the Fall of Man, which has been with us from the beginning and has taken many forms. In my lifetime, for instance, it was communism in my younger days and Obamaism today.

It doesn’t matter what we call them. They are all aspects of the same thing.

By importing the Democrat Party agenda into the ancient world, Abner has trivialized the far greater issues raised by the Bible–issues which remain the same from Genesis through Revelation. Contemporary liberalism will pass away and be replaced by something else just as bad, and bad for the same reasons.

It all boils down to the same thing.

The Serpent told Eve, “Ye shall be as gods,” if only you’re smart enough to disobey God’s command not to eat of the forbidden fruit. And Eve believed him. And Adam believed Eve, and tried to blame the whole business on God Himself: “The woman that you gave me, Lord, she made me do it…” No wonder the pair of ’em got kicked out of Paradise.

 

Fictional Characters as Real People

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We haven’t been talking much about fantasy-writing on this fantasy-writing blog. Oh, we discuss plenty of out-and-out fantasy–like the campus rape culture, Global Warming, microaggression, income equality achieved by the brute force of government: stuff that has no basis in reality whatsoever. Why, just today, one of the Red Pope’s henchmen blasted “Climate Change deniers.”

Sometimes I just can’t stand it anymore. So on to something more constructive.

The picture above (if it comes out!) is from The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, showing Jakob Grimm (Laurence Harvey) sick in bed, to the point of death, being visited by all the characters in his fairy tales. This is what I’m getting at today.

If you’re writing a fantasy (or any other kind of story) that you want your readers to believe in, you have to believe in it. And the thing that makes any novel fly is characters. You have to believe in your characters.

Teach yourself to see each and every one of them as a real person–someone who has a whole life in addition to the tiny bit of it that you’re writing about.

That does not mean you have to map out a cradle-to-grave biography for every walk-on character. That’s a primitive technique that can easily lead to overloading a story with irrelevant information. You don’t have to actually know that character’s whole life: just be fully aware that he or she has one.

The needs of the plot, if you allow it, will generate characters as needed. They come walking into your story from Character-Land, ready and willing to do a piece of work for you.

For instance, in my just-started book, The Throne, I needed a new commander of the Thunder King’s bodyguard–and in walked a big, fierce, superstitious lout named Bassas, fast with his fists, greedy for gold, but with no real idea of how to spend it, and some small scrap of honor left in his soul. I already know I’m gonna love this guy!

True, this is not the easiest thing in the world to do. It takes years and years of practice.

But once you’re able to do it–boy, can you have fun writing!