Fantasy Writing: Praised Corruption?

A rant/look at what fantasy writing has become today, and what

will happen to it in the future.

Fantasy writing is greatly loved by millions of readers around the world. Among such great fantasy books may be the most well-known fantasy book in the world – The Lord of the Rings. Many people consider this a great fantasy book, yet have never read it. However, they have read OTHER fantasy books.

Comparing fantasy books of today to The Lord of the Rings may seem preposterous, but this is in fact a great sign of how fantasy writing has changed over the generations.

Now, following the lead of The Lord of the Rings, almost every medieval fantasy story today has four key elements: magic, elves, an evil king, and an unknowing peasant hero. As every fantasy story follows this lead, the rare few stories that differ and use a wholly different style of fantasy is applauded and loved, yet the stories with those four key elements are also loved by many readers.

Why is this so? Has our modern world come to appreciate only hair-breadth escapes, powerful action, and long, drawn-out sword battles? Political intrigue, schemes, assassins, gold, most or all of these never affect the "normal" medieval fantasy story. However, in a series like The Wheel of Time, all the "not required" elements of a fantasy story have been added in, and as evidence to many readers, the series is an amazing concoction.

Many fantasy stories spotted on Fictionpress today, and on other sites, are very random. They skip around. They make no sense. Magic is distributed freely – everyone can use it, and the people who are magic users are not persecuted or feared in any way – in fact, they are loved and revered! Almost every fantasy writer thinks nothing about "HOW" magic would come into existence, or "HOW" it would be used, or "WHOM" it should be given to. Every hero, heroine, servant, serving girl, everyone has the potential to use magic! This would not really be so, even if magic were in the real world.

To explain… fantasy is not in a whole different world than ours, does not have different rules than our world. Indeed, everything about it is similar. However, there are slight differences. Say, for example, if you introduced magic to your fantasy world. Then, a whole new set of rules would have to come into existence – who would be able to use magic, what kind of magic would it be, how it would be used, and many more. However, in the same way as if it had been in this world, magic-users would no doubt be persecuted or hated by most, or all. Having such a power would be disastrous, scary, fearful to many people, threatening their very positions of power.

Thus, fantasy is not written in a different world with different sets of rules. Rather, when you write fantasy, you must write it according to the rules of this world, or else your whole writing will sound like you just made everything up!

And no!! Fantasy is not about "making everything up"!! If it were so, fantasy writing would just be a jumble of unorganized, crazy thoughts.

To end this rant, I will say this. Fantasy writing is a precise art, a skill, something that must be learned. It can't be grabbed by a novice at writing and be expected to master quickly. Every type of writing is like this. If you grab it by the horns and expect to master it the first time, you are an absolute arrogant fool. However, you will know and accept that eventually you will get better. You will succeed barely at all on your first tries, but as you try again and again you will become more experienced, and eventually there will be few fantasy stories of yours that are not a success.

My point is, you can't expect to master such a precise skill quickly. It takes time. And for those who are rushing blindly, trying to create a masterpiece as soon as you try fantasy writing, you will undoubtedly lose.