Why do you write fantasy, anyway?
A question from an acquaintance who wanted to know why I didn't go instead for more profitable genres, like memoirs (because I'm boring and I don't even want to read about my life), or mystery/suspense (because trying to write suspense makes me nuts, and I don't have the brain capacity to stretch all the twists of a mystery through 150K words and still have it end up solveable; besides, I always know who dunnit, and never have the patience to invent all the right clues, which kind of defeats the purpose).
I write fantasy because that's where my head goes when it's not being used for something practical. Actually, it goes there while I'm doing practical things, too, which is why my husband says I should have a notepad strapped about my neck so that people can leave me messages while I'm 'out'. I can't help it--I see a picture of an old english interrogation room, and my mind is immediately populating it with a handsome giant questioning a snarly renegade. I watch a documentary on the moon, and I see the silhouette of a man standing in front of it, two other cresent moons behind him, as he and his braid swirl down from a roof. It's just how my mind works.
One of the best things about writing fantasy is that anything is possible. I can make any world I want, populate it with any society I want, give it any kind of climate, any configuration of physical 'reality' I want--geography, astronomy, biology, religion, politics, etc.
Easy, right? Well, you'd think, but no, not really. You can't just do anything at all. There has to be structure, there have to be rules, even if you're the one making them. There has to be reality, even if you're the one inventing it.
Can a world exist with two suns and six moons? How do I know?--this isn't sci-fi, it's fantasy--but in between my pages, if I can give it just enough reality, I can make it exist. It's a balance, though, and I don't always hit it. Though, I'm not the only one--I've read lots of really good fantasy stories that every now and then flicked me out of the carefully built world because the author forgot a rule, or maybe just ignored it.
It's like building with glass bricks. If an author is good enough, they can paint their world over the transparency in believeable colors so a reader can't see through to the fiction on the other side. I think the books that come to a reader's mind when someone says 'fantasy' are the ones that manage that without flaws, or with flaws a reader is willing to forgive because the story was otherwise so good.
Building societies in fantasy is an intriguing thing. Because once you build your world and make rules for the characters in it, you and they have to stick to those rules. Some of the characters have magic? That's great, but that magic needs to have rules, too, or everything steps too far out of 'realistic' and you lose the characters' reality to a roll of the eyes and an oh, please, I can see right through that paint. Sure, if you run up against a plot conflict that's unsolveable, you can always go get the Eagles to rescue you from Mount Doom, but not everyone is Tolkien, and most won't be forgiven the deus ex machina. It's a transparent fix and shatters the 'reality' you've built from the glass bricks of imagination. It's cheap. But when you have a character subtly picking up a few of those glass bricks along their journey and carrying them to the end to fit them into the final picture, that's when a world resonates.
I think the best worlds are the ones that build themselves in the author's mind and on the page at the same time, even when the author isn't quite conscious of all of the building blocks they're scattering along the way. The author forgot about that passing reference to Protagonist's allergy to strangle-weed that makes him cough fire at inopportune times and was just meant as a throwaway detail to complement characterization? Well, the story didn't forget, because oh, look, Protagonist lives another day to save the world because he coughed up a fireball when he walked into a patch of strangle-weed 300 pages later and Antagonist's lightning bolt missed Protagonist because Protagonist was trying to put out the sudden brush-fire and wouldn't stay still, damn it! Which let Protagonist get a bead on Antagonist and do the thing that heroes do, even if heroes don't generally defeat Antagonists by coughing up fireballs at them like a cat with indigestion. And, silliness aside, none of it mars the paint on the glass, because Protagonist had been carrying those glass bricks along with him the whole time.
It's great when that happens. When you read your draft over completely for the first time, and find all these neat little blocks you didn't know were there, and make your finished world into something real and solid.
Anyway, I guess I just write what I love. And I do love me a good fantasy. Yeah, I could probably write contemporary stories, set in this world, with cell phones and the Internet and Starbucks for lunch. That's where a lot of authors' magic is, where their glass blocks have already set into foundations. But that's not where my magic is, that isn't where my glass blocks are waiting. Mine are all over there in La-la Land, sitting in the back of my head somewhere, quietly fabricating themselves and mortaring into my imagination so that I can one day pick them up and build something with them.
And if fantasy is supposedly not one of the more 'respectable' genres out there to be writing in? *shrug* When did I ever claim to be repsectable?
Write what you know. Write what you love.
I do, and I do. :)
Although, one of the annoying things about writing fantasy is that the credibility of the phrase, 'Oh, god,' is now lost to the worlds I write, because none of them have just one god. My characters could say, 'Oh, gods,' I suppose, but I've never liked that and can't make myself use it. So, unless I want to invent new curse words (which I, naturally, don't rule out), I usually have to go for, 'Oh, fuck,'--or 'Oh, pick-a-milder-oath,' if the shoe fits better--which makes my characters a little more foul-mouthed than they sometimes need to be. I really would love to be able to have one of my characters gasp, Oh, god! in the throes of orgasm just once. Annoying, yeah, but a small thing, and I wouldn't be me if I didn't find something to gripe about. ;)
