I started writing fantasy when I was eight.
One day I walked into a T.J Hugh’s store and saw a My Little Pony toy that had leaves on its flanks. It was called Ivy. I realised in my eight year old brain that the name Ivy existed. She instantly became a character in my mind. She was mercurial. A fairy, then later, an Elven warrior, she was amazing. Ivy was mine and she lived in a world I’d created just for her.
I eventually picked better (more suitable?) names for characters but the drive to create them stayed with me. The fact that one little thing in the reality could impact me so much I’d create a whole character and world around it. But that’s the beauty of Fantasy writing, isn’t it? Reality forms fantasy, they’re two peas in a pod. Everything we live, breathe and think day to day – somehow adds another fort, mountainside or kingdom to the world that we’re already forming in our heads.
The things we experience as normal humans in a normal world make us strive for the extraordinary.
Storytelling, myths and legends have existed as long as we’ve been on this planet.
To me, writing fantasy is just carrying on the long tradition of storytelling. Although with fantasy you get to create more. Envisioning something bigger than the world we live in, giving into the power of creativity and imagination that is already built within us as human beings.
One of my favourite parts about writing is being able to look back and read through mythology, picking and choosing and wondering how on Earth such creatures were ever imagined. Then doing it myself. Taking beings that have existed for hundreds of years and reinventing them. Changing their meaning and fitting them into your own creation. mostly all mythical beings have been used time and again in novels but that doesn’t mean you can’t reinvent and struggle for originality. It’s all part of the fun.
Your characters don’t physically exist, but at the same time they do. To have characters that convey the emotion of living in a reality, they have to feel. More importantly, your audience has to connect with them.
It sounds impossible. How could someone living a day to day live connect with a dragon riding warrior in a past that never happened? It’s a test that constantly keeps the mind going. You’re never just telling with fantasy, you have to experience it too along with your character for the emotions they feel to get across to the reader. It’s your world they live in, you know everything about it – so you experience it with your characters as you write it.
You may have never been in a war against a Centaur army, or lost an arm battling with a witch, but you know what you’re talking about because your imagination allows you to.
Essentially I love Fantasy because you’re making something out of nothing. Forming your own rules, religions, kingdoms and dynastic empires. The challenge is to take something that is so strange there is no way it is plausible and making people want to lose themselves in the world you’ve created. The challenge of conveying a world that you’ve built and nurtured in your head and getting all the details onto paper without swamping the reader. The tip of the iceberg.
I could go on for pages about why I love fantasy, but it’s simply that nothing is off limits. You want a ten armed soul eating a demon that resembles a mammoth… you can have one. The world will have to encourage it but you don’t play by the rules of reality; you can make up your own. History didn’t have to happen, the world can be anything you want it to be. It’s a fresh canvas every time. Writing fantasy is opening up your mind to the possibility of more. It’s never ending. And that’s what is amazing.
Above all, Fantasy writing is what I do because, I can create anything.
Writers' Island 