Hey, guys. This here is a rough-and-dirty guide to fantasy writing. Bits of things I've learned, my thoughts on the genre as a whole, some anecdotes and whatnot. I'm not going to circle any one particular aspect of it for too long for your skimming benefit. Feel free to comment, share, tweet to your little hearts' content. Take care, love you, and keep on writing on.

FANTASY IS, LIKE, SO HOT RIGHT NOW METHINKS

Dragons, swords both short and long, fair maidens, clanking armor, charging steeds. Epic yarns of heroism, enormous battles, soaring lush landscapes, magics both light and dark, haunted castles, dastardly sorcerers, wizened wizards. We love them. Ever since Tolkien reinterpreted Nordic mythology with The Hobbit, fantasy fiction become a mainstay in pop literature. And it's huge right now, thanks in part to HBO's wildly popular Game of Thrones series and video games like Skyrim, Dragon Age, and Dark Souls. I can't even tell you how many new fantasy series, both as TV shows or movies or as paperback and ebook, are debuting next year. It's a lot, let's just say that. If vampires were the hot ticket item a couple years back, fantasy is definitely the thing now.

FANTASY'S FLEXIBILITY

And because of that, a lot of writers want to write their own tales, adding their own take on the genre. Which, since wonderfully enough, fantasy is immediately open to adaptability and interpretation. Don't believe me? Okay, well, here.

Pop Quiz. Tell me: are elves super-tall and blond, or short and squat and live in a tree, baking cookies all day? Are trolls huge walls of angry meat, or small, blue, lithe, and tusk-toothed? Answer: yes to all.

WE ALL KNOW IT

You can do whatever you want with your version. Because fantasy, unlike sci-fi, has a wide base of what I call shared knowledge. You don't have to explain what a caravan looks like--if you don't want to. Conversely, with sci-fi, there's a lot of explaining needed. Which, don't get me wrong, people love. With Knuckleduster , it was a lot of fun coming up with carotene lenses and explaining how they work (and then seeing people argue online about how this is possible and/or not possible). Some readers will complain there's not enough info dumps and jargon. Some will say there's too much. You can't please everyone--and that's a blog post for another day.

But that's sci fi. With fantasy, that shared knowledge is there and immediately half of the explaining is done for you.

Quick Example. What's a proton laser look like, sound like, and do? Okay, there's a paragraph dedicated to just that. Now, on the other hand, what's a battleaxe look like, sound like, and do? Oh, what's that? You don't need even a single sentence to expand upon the facets of battleaxery? Yeah.

YOUR WORLD, YOUR PEOPLE

Pick up any twenty fantasy novels by newer authors and you'll often see a bulk of them start out describing the land in which their story is set. Rolling hills, chimneys, the odd hay cart, dirty faces, etc. And that's great, but where are our characters?

Elmore Leonard, known in my household as Saint Leonard, said that you should start with the people because while intricately-wrought, highly eloquent descriptions of rain can be pleasing, your reader isn't picking up your book to learn about the adventures of storm clouds. (Or are they? If so, give me a link to your book about hero storm clouds ASAP, I wanna read it.) Otherwise, they're here for the people. So start there. What are your people doing, what are they thinking? Better yet: what are your characters wanting?

SHAZAM, CONFLICT

Get your characters moving in a direction, toward something, anything. You know what someone sitting still thinking about stuff is? That's right, boring as dirt. Have your character leave the house, ask someone for something they deeply desire. A fair maiden's hand in marriage, a cup of orange juice. Have that person they approach tell them no. Have someone else say hey, I'll help you but only if you help me. Adventuring ensues. Boom, story.

NO ONE IS STATIC

Something I learned from one of my personal heroes, Jeff Smith, creator of the amazing Bone series: Any state your character is in at the beginning of a scene, they should be feeling something entirely different by the end of it.

My addition to the advice: Don't just go straight across the spectrum from sad to happy or meh to enraged. Mix it up. But never have your characters remain in any one emotional state for longer than a couple of scenes at max. They'll start to seem cardboard-y.

Think about even the most stoic, hard-bitten characters in literature. The silent, cloaked, sword-for-hire type of guy. Even he, although with a constant stiff upper lip, will have his emotional state changed throughout any scene (and numerous times per book). You remember him as hard-edged and quiet, but when you go back, he was shifting moods as often as the other characters. Another example of this: The Dude from The Big Lebowski. You remember him as being laid-back and being all, "The Dude abides," but he's freaking out about one thing or another almost constantly throughout that movie. You don't need to have your characters FLIPPING THE FLIPPING-FLAP OUT all the time, but some shifting one way or the other is good--even if they do retain that die-cast furrowed brow like our becloaked sword-for-hire.

R-R-R-R-REMIX!

One man's total reinterpretation and revitalization of a well-trod genre is another man's hacky rehash. I can't tell you how to be original, you have to figure that out for yourself. When I was working on Fabrick initially, I wrote down the things I wanted the story to have that would set it apart. I wasn't forcing the individuality of my story, keep in mind, but I was letting new spins come to me organically.

This list included 1.) a group of heroes, working together. 2.) The group made up of nothing but side-kick types, the B-story people, no Joseph Campbell standards. (While Clyde does go through the Hero's Journey, admittedly, when he learns he's in line to take his father's place on Geyser's throne, even he's surprised about the fact he could ever be anything more than a conscience sponging servant.) Next, 3.) a setting unlike anything I had ever seen before.

It's fantasy, but there are TVs and cars. There's magic, and there's space ships. It's on another planet, but at one point a strange place called Europe is mentioned.

That last thing totally threw one of my readers for a loop. They all but demanded I include in the next book an explanation on whether or not Fabrick takes place on a much-changed Earth, a planet near Earth, or what. "How do they know about Europe?!?!?!?!" I believe the quote went.

So you're probably wondering, did I do this on purpose?

Heh. *shrug and smile* Maybe.

My point is, the minute your readers have you pinned down and know what to expect, you've lost them.

Sure, some will stay with you because your work is comfortable and you can provide an escapist safe haven for them, and while that is fantastic--why I read Brian Jacques as much as I do--it's not dangerous.

Do you want to be dangerous? Well, those leather pants in your closet says you did once upon a time. Why not now, in your fiction?

Fact of it is, despite what reality TV might be heavily implying, people are smart. Well, people who regularly read are anyway. And those fine, beautiful people want to be challenged, surprised, and sometimes even confused. Really. Think about ten of your favorite characters of all time. At least one of them in there you're not sure if they should be classified as a good guy or a bad guy. Quite possibly it's why you like them in the first place. Maybe they're both, maybe they're secretly one but posing as the other.

Mystery, as it is for relationships, is vital for continued interest.

Quick Tip: For every card you lay on the table, sneak another up your sleeve. Every time the reader has been made to be comfortable with a place in your story (they're recovering after a fight, etc.) or you've just revealed something about one of your champions, introduce another mystery right away. Surprise them. Kill somebody off. Someone likeable, preferably. Give it the ol' George Martin.

R-R-R-R-REMIX, PART II

Don't give them the standard fantasy stuff.

That's been done. Done to death, in fact. That dead horse has been so beaten, it's starting to pop out on the other side of the globe by this point.

And while letting the shared knowledge thing work for you, give the story-o-matic a good spin, maybe a few spins to really get things good n' screwy. And not just make the good guy the bad guy or some such nonsense. I mean really mix it up. Hey, what about a wizard with an AK-47? How'd he get it? I dunno, that's your job now. Explain it, don't, just run with it. (That's a poor example, FYI. You can do better than that, I know you can.)

Oh, oh, I know! Have your characters, despite being clad in armor and bodices and everything, speak in cool urban slang. Instead of warring houses, have it be they're fighting over turf. Like West Side Story and Rumble Fish meets The Wheel of Time. Oh! And they have steam-powered boom boxes, right? And instead of jousting, they have single combat break-dance-til-yer-dead competitions. Ahem. Sorry. I could go on but I'm not giving any more ideas out for free here.

My point: if you're going to write fantasy, do, but write your fantasy. I don't want to read that other person's book, I've already read that. And while I dug it, now I want to read your book. If I wanted to read that other person's book again, I'd just do that.

YOU CAN ALWAYS TALK TO ME

Hey, I'm in the same boat as you. I struggle for ideas, I sometimes have ideas and then forget them (that's the worst), sometimes I have bad ideas. But you know what, we're all in this together. If you want to talk to me about your stories, or if you want some feedback, I don't charge, nor do I bite. Want to message me? Go ahead, the little box is right down there, go for it. Tell me, ask me, anything you please.

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