What's up in fantasy?

[JoeGKushner]

To be honest, I think you're way out there.

Stuff from Howard's library is being reprinted because it's good.

As with all things, the cream rises to the top, then is distilled with hacks, then eventually the cream rises to the top again.

Good fiction, regardless of genre, will provide entertainment and let the people who read it take what they want from it, regardless of the author's intent.

As far as what's happening in fantasy... well, a lot of it is still the same no? Farmboy saves the world and all that. The Heroic Journey. Makes me miss Kane and Karl's writing of a clear anti-hero who wasn't sorry for himself, just couldn't conqueror the world.

 

[Turjan]

As far as what's happening in fantasy... well, a lot of it is still the same no? Farmboy saves the world and all that. The Heroic Journey. Makes me miss Kane and Karl's writing of a clear anti-hero who wasn't sorry for himself, just couldn't conqueror the world.

Ah, we are riding the monomyth again ? Which brings me to the point that the definition of "good" can have many different meanings. I don't see that it's always the "good stuff" that's rising to the top. It's more or less the one that caters to our instincts. The truly good stuff delivers for our instincts and inspires our thinking. But that's a rare combination .

 

[WayneLigon]

I think the only people who could be offended by the series are folks who go into it thinking it's going to be the best thing ever. It's a self-important bit of business with weak plotting and a real difficulty differentiating character voices by any means other than the most clumsy methods.

So, is there anything you actually do like?

 

[GlassJaw]

I'm a writer, and I feel that my calling is to entertain people. But I don't want to just feed what I perceive to be this growing sense of directionlessness. What can I write in the realm of fantasy that is entertaining -- that makes the world seem appropriately meaningful -- without simply creating escapism? The Hero's Journey is classic, but how do I make its core story resonate with readers today?

What's up with fantasy, nowadays? What do we want?

I want artists, of any genre or medium, to stop taking themselves so seriously. This thread reeks of self-indulgence. I consider myself a musician, writer, and artist and I'm a huge supporter of the arts but I don't do it for anyone else or because I think I'm providing a valuable and necessary service. While having your creation appreciated by an audience is the greatest gift an artist can receive, create because you want to it share with others. Never feel that you are doing it for "our" benefit. You are entertaining, not curing cancer.

If you want to write a novel: write a novel. Don't ponder the merits of a stage. Don't pander to the lowest common denominator: audience.

Nicely said. Just do it.

 

[Estlor]

There's a reason cliches become cliches. There's something to them, something timeless that really lets you hang a nice story on top of them so long as the cliche is just the motivator and not the plot.

I've been writing for, oh, about eight years (and doodled with the idea for five before that), seriously writing for about two. I've seen a big jump in the quality of my work because I'm finally moving beyond the surface of what I want to write about. If you picked up the first draft of my manuscript eight years ago it was about what happened and nothing else. If you read it today, it's got aspects of life in it. I find myself writing about things the average person can relate to, even if they're not an elf or a mage or a knight wielding a massive zweihander. Things like what it means to grow up, about family and relationships, home, finding yourself... that kind of stuff.

And that's why the hero's journey is such a great medium. Just as the hero starts one place and physically moves to another through the course of the quest, they grow as a person through the trials and tasks they must overcome, learning something about themselves or the world around them in the process.

But, in the end, the hero of my story still has a lot of the same problems we all have. He doubts himself and his abilities from time to time and his family life leaves something to be desired. That doesn't make him any less heroic; on the contrary, it's about finding the hero inside all of us, even if we're slaying high gas prices, not troll warriors.

 

[Breakdaddy]

I like that the RPG world seems to be mirroring the computer world. D20 is Windows, GURPS is maybe Mac, and HERO might be Linux. It makes me more comfortable thinking that games will keep drifting more and more into the lives of non-gamers. Games aren't arcane texts anymore, generally -- they're designed to be quick and fun, the way any game should be.

Nice observations. I would say that White Wolf's WoD would be Mac, not GURPS (I like both systems), but not bad. The analogy works better for WoD for a number of reasons. The biggest are 1) that it is touted as a more "artistic" system than D20 and 2) that it is relatively easy to use like a Mac, GURPS is not. I dont know why I even cared about this enough to post, I might be a little looney.

 

[WayneLigon]

I'm a writer, and I feel that my calling is to entertain people. But I don't want to just feed what I perceive to be this growing sense of directionlessness. What can I write in the realm of fantasy that is entertaining -- that makes the world seem appropriately meaningful -- without simply creating escapism?

I don't think it's so much directionless than, since there is so much of it, it's going in all directions at once. Fantasy - and SF - is large enough right now that you can probably find a market for almost anything.

If you're asking about 'what are the current trends and how can I best write something that goes along with those trends so that I have a hope of being published', then go read what publishers are saying. Talk to people that look at publishing markets. You know how Dungeon usually says something like 'And don't send us anything dealing with Santa Claus, rescuing a princess, anything where the party has to do X'? Publishers are exactly the same way, especially short story magazine editors. Usually they have a list of things they never want to see again, such as 'Don't send anything where a dwarf or elf is a private investigator'.

If you're going for any market, know your market. If the editor says ''we don't publish stories about vampires, or anything with gore or sex, or anything over 200,000 words', then don't send him your erotic vampire trilogy proposal. You'd think that would be obvious advice, but from what I've read, he'll still get 20 or 30 erotic vampire trilogy proposals a year from people who think that they are the ones who will be the break out author.

That's one reason to have a good agent, especially once you've sold a couple of things. They can give you advice on what might sell well.

Check out review sites (such as The SF Site) and then go back through the archive to see if you can see common trends. I'm sure you've read through at least a couple books on creating characters and on writing in the genre. Now look at some of the publisher-side stuff. Become familiar with Locus.

Really, you should look both at what's out there and what's not out there. Romance novels with a significant fantasy element to them are becoming more popular, so much so that you'll see them shelved among both genres. Does that mean you should try to write a romance/fantasy? Maybe, or maybe by the time you actually have something ready to shop around, the trend will have died. It's pretty much a crapshoot like that.

 

[The Shaman]

...I know tabletop games are much more fun. It's the difference between watching the Superbowl and playing football with your friends, or the difference between buying a CD and having an impromptu musical number with two guys you meet randomly in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Computer games are for the folks who are really talented, folks who are good at entertaining lots of us at once, folks who will some day soon hopefully include me. But tabletop games are a hobby, something uniquely personal.

(Emphasis added.)

Well-said.

Fantasy is crap, for the most part, since Dragonlance and its follow-ons showed that you don't necessarily have to be a famous writer or, in some cases, even a GOOD writer to be successful. So now fantasy shelves are filled to the groaning point with endless trilogies that read like something from a freshman creative writing course. That is, when they're not competing for space with gaming novels of all sorts, which at times make average fantasy novels look great.

Of course, the good writers are also riding this wave, with the writer becoming more important than the book they're writing. Who cares what the new Terry Pratchett novel is about, it's Terry Pratchett! Let's get our daily updates on the progress being made by George RR Martin and J K Rowling!

I can't recall reading a fantasy novel written after 1985 or so, other than the Harry Potter books.

Anymore I spend my time with REH or ERB or HRH or the Professor or Jules Verne and some of their more obscure brethren.

 

[Breakdaddy]

I think you should write a lord of the rings version where they use the falcons to drop the ring to the crack of doom. That would kick ass.

There are falcons in LOTR?

 

[RangerWickett]

Well, I wasn't really asking for writing advice, so much as presenting where I'm coming from. I know what I want to write, and I'm doing it already. I was just saying that the trends of fantasy matter to me because only a fool works in an industry without paying attention to what people want. A bit of pandering is healthy; it shows respect for the audience.

I agree with the commentary on satire. Stories themselves usually just tell a story, but satire puts a worldly context to a story, making it more deeply layered.

Of course, then there are stories that are just good fun to read or watch, like The Hobbit or the first Star Wars. You don't always have to push the envelope to be talented.

I'd like to work in video games and comics. My roots are still traditional prose fiction, but hell, so far I haven't sold anything. I just think it'd be fun to cross genres a bit, and play with the game medium.