WRITING GOOD FANTASY

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A friend of mine recently decided that she wanted to write a story. When she showed me her plans, I noticed a list of genres and their pros and cons. Under the heading "Fantasy" was the idea that it would be "easy" to write. Uh-uh. Not so. This is a common trap that many young writers have been known to fall into - myself included. Writing fantasy may be easy, writing GOOD fantasy is very difficult.

What a lot of people find attractive about writing fantasy is that anything can happen. Our characters can be and do anything we want them to; they need not be constrained by the laws of nature - at least not OUR laws of nature. Yet, with fantasy, the responsibility falls on you, the author, to set the limits. You make the rules. But there must BE rules. What's more, once you have drawn the limits you must either stick to them or rewrite. There must be consistency. You cannot allow random occurrences just to pop up in your world without explanation.

Magic often plays a key part in fantasy which gives our hero the power to do the impossible. Say, for example, person A has the means to travel back in time. If so, are they allowed to meddle with time and change the past? What possible consequences could arise from that? How does magic work? Is it something that the person has inside them? Perhaps, like in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, they draw power from a single source. Maybe, as Eddings' Elenium and Tamuli trilogies, magic comes from the Gods. Can anyone learn to use magic (or whatever you want to call it) or only specific types of people? Things should not happen at random; there ought to be a pattern to events, whether revealed or not. Your audience may not know why something happens, you, as the creator of your world, should.

Make your world believable. Yes, this is an alternate universe, but the key to any good novel is to transport the reader into your world. I do not mean "believable" in the sense that it could happen in our world, but that the reader could imagine these things happening in some world somewhere, at some time.

Make your characters believable. Whether human, elf, faery, immortal; whatever; they should have some qualities your reader can relate to. Give them flaws. Not everyone can be kind, beautiful, brave, intelligent, good-natured etc. all the time. Yes there will be some characters you like and some you don't, but don't be biased. Maybe Legolas spends an hour in front of the mirror every morning (when he's not out shooting orcs.) Perhaps Arwen has a stash of junk food under her bed at Rivendell, but is still one of those annoying people who never puts on weight (like myself.) Unfortunately we don't see that side of them, which may be (I know this is controversial, sorry elf-lovers) why their characters aren't all that developed. Look at the people around you. Try to see the negative side of the oh-so-perfect person you wish you were like. On the other hand, try to see the positive side of your enemy. One of my favourite villains is Edding's Martel in the Elenium, because despite being the baddie, I find him rather likeable. He is genuinely sorry when one of his men kills one of Sparhawk's. He is not all bad.

Give your villain a motive. Very rarely do you find an Iago-like villain who is evil just for the sake of it. Why does he hate your hero? Is he jealous of something your hero has, such as power or popularity? Maybe your hero once thwarted one of his cunning plans, and he wants revenge.

Resist the temptation to kill characters off for the sake of some action. Yes, I like a good death scene as much as anyone else, but keep it limited. Is it really necessary? I am in the middle of reading James Barclay's Chronicles of the Raven. At the end of the first book, I think about twelve of the characters on the cast list have been wiped out. It is an old cliché but less is more. Fair enough, if your characters are soldiers, there is more likely to be more deaths among them than if they were just ordinary citizens, but keep it to a minimum. If every other chapter, one of your characters dies violently, the effect wears off. The reader will sit there predicting who will be next to fall of the perch, rather than paying attention to the actual plot. I have found myself doing that same thing, it is not the best way to read a book.

How to deal with your villains in the end? As I said before, you do not have to kill them all off. It is the usual thing to happen in fantasy books, but it is not a must. Try to think of some other punishment - or maybe they do not get punished at all. Maybe they get away with it and are still "out there" - that leaves your story open for a sequel.

Give your world a history. Make sure you know more about your world than you let on; just for your own satisfaction. Sketch out a quick timeline with key events; wars, revolutions etc., and expand on the important events. I don't mean you have to spend your entire life writing a Silmarilion-type history, but make sure that when you need to make references to the past, that you know what you're talking about.

Who's in charge? Is your country a democracy, a monarchy, dictatorship, anarchy or aristocracy. Maybe a mixture of two. If you have a king or queen, do they have actual power or is all the dirty work done by someone else? How much power do they really have? I live in England. The official line is that the Queen is the boss, but in reality she is little more than a figurehead. We have pictures of good ol' Queen Liz on our stamps and coins, and she makes her annual speech at Christmas and signs a load of documents, but really the Prime Minister is in charge. If your country claims to be a democracy, how democratic is it really? Are the government friends or enemies? Maybe they are well-meaning but out of touch with the real people. Does this form of government work? There are no leaders in Tolkien's Shire, but it works just fine, because the hobbits are quiet, peace-loving folk. In reality, the Shire probably just wouldn't work, but that's not the point. In Maggie Furey's The Artefacts of Power, the Mages have all the power, but are hated by the ordinary folk of Nexis.

Get to know your story. Get to know your fictional country as well as you know your own. What's more, get your reader know it as well. Make it REAL. Make your people real. One thing I find helpful is filling in questionnaires as if you are your character - don't tell me you haven't be sent at least one over email by someone with nothing else to do! Get under your character's skin. Revise and rewrite, and rewrite again. After you’ve finished a story or a chapter, leave it for at least a week before you come back to it, that way you approach it with a fresh mind and can pick out any mistakes. You won't find my fantasy book on this site yet, because I am constantly making changes, even to the first chapters. It is a hell of a lot of hard work, but well worth it in the end.

I think all I have to say now is good luck, and hopefully I will see some of your work in the bookshops at some point in the future.

Lots of love,

Lindiniel.