Those are tropes, but they don't take any less "skill" to write. Let's say you remove the scene where two characters grow closer through an unexpected side effect of the magic system, and replace it with a scene where the characters grow close through an unexpected find on social media, or an unexpected person shows up at a restaurant and says hello. Is the scene with magic really easier to write?
It's not. Character development, structure, technical writing, theme, and the like are going to be the same across genres. Writing any kind of fiction well, and consistently well, is not easy to do, which is why there are so few people making a living writing fiction in any genre.
It's not going to be easier to write, but mine was a list of things that couldn't exist in the real world, because magic anything can't exist in the real world, and friendship can't grant superpowers. That response wasn't about skill in any way, it was about specific examples of things in Fantasy that differ from other genres, which is a direct response to your earlier question asking about how Fantasy directly differs from other genres.
From my own experience, learning to write readable prose that a stranger will actually read, even if they don't like it, is the real struggle. Ideas are easy.
Agreed. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Every writer I know has way more ideas than they can possible write.
I'd say having to make up your own rules for your world is harder than just following the rules of the real world. Because it's not just about making up "whatever you want," it has to make sense and be believable still...there's a reason why the term "suspension of disbelief" exists and it's extremely important in fantasy. I honestly think that any person who thinks that fantasy is easier to write, haven't actually written fantasy.
Yes, I agree. Soccer is the best sport. Honestly though, I don't quite understand why this was posted. Is there a joke I'm missing?
Yeah, that's what I thought, but I was giving the benefit of the doubt there. Was I moving the goal post at some point, or am I now irrelevant in this conversation and should just bow out?
Re the rules of the real world, with fantasy or "alternative world", you can choose which rules to use. I have a plot point that turns on death and inheritance. I don't have to go look up the exact inheritance laws of a specific setting in a specific decade and say, "Dang. My plot doesn't work. Do I cheat or figure out a different plot?" Instead, I can rummage around and read about inheritance laws and customs, and pick one. I should make that choice fit the rest of the setting, but I do still have the freedom of the choice. That feels kind of easier, and in any case, it's more fun.
Fantasy plots are much easier to pull because it's much easier to connect point A to point B. If you have a character who has to travel from Portland to Paris but is a wanted man and has no passport, in a crime novel you'll need to come up with lots of clever events and solve a lot of little problems in order to achieve that. You'll have to explain how he evaded police, how he went through check points so easily, and of course, you'll have to take into account the time he's going to waste because his travel won't be instant. In a fantasy novel you just invent something. Oh, there's a portal and he went through it! No additional hassle. You've sent your character from point A to point B with much less effort. And that can be quite appealing when you try to create your stories. Or, if you're one of those writers who like to imagine themselves as a character, you can be whatever you want to be. Want to be a princess mermaid who rides in a pumpkin driven by unicorns? It just has to be fantasy. Another reason for the abundance of fantasy writers is that we all start there, with the childrens books, and a lot of kids go on and keep inventing fantastical stories. There are only few kids who grow up plotting crime mysteries or stories about WW2. That said, it's also worth noting that new writers approach writing thinking it's going to be all smooth sailing and the easy plotting adds to that illusion. Lord of the Rings? Pfffft, I plotted my three volume elf-and-dwarf adventure in one afternoon It can't be such a big deal to be a writer, right?
If it's not relevant to the plot, not necessarily. The following is not any more problematic, IMO, than the portal fix in the fantasy novel. Eighteen hours, four forged passports, and a few hundred thousand in bribes later, John walked up to the Starbucks in the Rome airport. I don't agree. "Fantasy" doesn't mean, "We don't care even a tiny little bit about the story being believable." If you add a magic portal, you need to consider the extensive changes to your story world to account for those portals. How do they affect immigration? Shipping? Security? Who makes them? Who pays those people? What are the laws around them? etc., etc., etc.
You seem to have a very narrow view of what a fantasy novel is, it's not all magic, elves and dwarves. There's no such thing and teleportation or "portals" in the world I've created, because they don't adhere to the rules I created for it, so yeah, I would have to find some other means. Seriously, this idea that there's no rules and you can just make up whatever the heck you want in your fantasy novel and it'll work is getting really tiresome and rather silly...that's NOT how fantasy or storytelling in general works.
I think there's a different kind of work in a fantasy novel, and I can absolutely see how it could be easier to do that work than another kind of work, for some people. The work of a fantasy novel is more self-contained, if that makes sense. It can all be in the author's imagination. Writing a historical novel or even a contemporary novel with a vivid setting takes real-world research, and especially in historical fiction there's a substantial contingent of readers out there just waiting to pounce on any factual errors. I've written contemporary fantasy that required research because it was set in the modern world, but I've also written a novel that was fantasy mostly because it was set in an alternate history. No magic, no damn elves, no dragons, but not our real-world history, either. Imaginary kingdoms with imaginary conflict in an imaginary setting. And, yeah, I did that because it was easier. I borrowed ideas from the Greeks, the Romans, the medieval period - wherever the hell I wanted! I got to choose the elements that worked best for my characters and their conflict without worrying about whether these elements matched historical reality. It would have been way harder to tell the story I wanted to tell if I'd been constrained by real-world facts. I still had to keep my world internally consistent, but that was fairly straightforward. This won't apply to all kinds of fantasy, but for me, at least? I wrote that story as fantasy because it was easier.
This is what I think makes writing fantasy the most attractive to a lot of fantasy writers, even if they're not fully aware of it. The fact that you aren't confined by history or the real world but are instead in complete control of it is absolutely massive when it comes to world building and making a story. History, geography, how expansive your lore is, everything gets to be your discretion. Of course on the other hand, depending on how serious you get about building your fantasy world, you may end up having a lot of work to do if you flesh the world out to great lengths (like George RR Martin and his Song of Ice and Fire, for instance). But for the vast majority of fantasy writers, they never consider getting quite that complex.
I mentioned Erikson, above. He makes Martin look like a slacker when it comes to world-building, though I agree Martin does flesh out his world quite a bit.
Historical fiction has got to be the hardest. Even Robert Howard said it was too much work to be worth doing (for the money anyway), which is why he filled all the serial numbers off his cultures.
I make all those non-existent. The problems you created there are all problems of our current, real world. They don't have to exist at all in an invented world. Why the planets in Star Wars have only one eco system (the desert planet, the jungle planet etc)? Because that's how they are in the invented world.
Well, you're encountering a bit of a fundamental issue here. On one hand, a planet doesn't exactly need logical reason to be anything other than a single biome. A magic portal, however, does have logic behind it. How are the portals made, what do they cost to create, how do they change the way people move? You can choose to ignore some of these questions, but there will be readers who scrutinize that choice. You can write-off that portals are made by wizards casting a spell and have no costs associated with their creation or maintenance and that people don't really use portals because commonfolk are afraid of them. That'd conveniently tie-up logical issues with portals, which is what you'd want to do in order to stop people from questioning them too much.
So you have a story on a world that doesn't have any immigration issues, security issues, shipping issues, or, presumably, most of the other issues that exist in the real world? That's likely to be a weak story, in my view.
A world that simple is going to be pretty deeply boring, IMO. Security, for example, a non-issue? So there’s no violence in this world? A portal from absolutely anywhere, into the king’s bedroom, is fine? If it’s not fine, then security is an issue.
