Am I the only person in this forum....

Discussion in 'Setting Development' started by NaughtyNick, Sep 1, 2011.

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  1. Tesoro

    Tesoro Contributor Contributor

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    While I agree with you I think a lot of fantasy writers (at least from what it seems on this forum, which is the only place where I get in contact with them) try to copy the successful concept of previous writers, which I think is the wrong way to stand out. For example, I don't think writing about vampires right now is the best way to stick out from the crowd, even if you change details and plots. If you are really going to stand out you would have to take a totally new (or rather recycled, since it's all been written before, but not from recently=the last 20 years or more) concept and create the next big thing in fantasy. don't follow somebody elses lead, look ahead and use your imagination, the real, creative imagination and try to predict what could be a fresh and interesting "new" idea that no one has thought of lately and make it your own.
     
  2. IfAnEchoDoesntAnswer

    IfAnEchoDoesntAnswer New Member

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    Well, yes, one can be original in fantasy, in other genre fiction, or in literary fiction. And one can be unoriginal in any of these as well.

    If "a majority of the best written books are NOT fantasy", it's because the majority of BOOKS are not fantasy. Fantasy is only one genre (or only one collection of genres, depending on how you break it up.). It would be remarkable if "a majority of the best written books" were all the same genre or type of literature.

    I guess I'm not sure exactly what point you're trying to make here :confused:? So I'm not sure if I've addressed it or not. :confused:
     
  3. IfAnEchoDoesntAnswer

    IfAnEchoDoesntAnswer New Member

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    Have you found this to be more true of fantasy writers than other types of writers? Because my experience is that it's often true of beginning writers in general, regardless of what genre or style of writing they do.
     
  4. psychotick

    psychotick Contributor Contributor

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    Hi Naughty Nick,

    You want some fantasy MC's that stand out for character. Try Ki from the Windsinger series, by Megan Lindholm. Thomas Covenant from Stephen Donaldsons first trilogy of the white gold wielder. If you want them to do something, i.e. action fantasy heroes, try John Norman's Gor series, old but good, or even further back Conan by Robert E Howard. If you want them amusing L Sprague De Camps' Incomplete Enchanter, or most of the MC's from Pier's Anthony's Xanthe series.

    You'll find the same range of character developments in fantasy as you will in every other genre.

    Cheers.
     
  5. Tesoro

    Tesoro Contributor Contributor

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    I don't know, I haven't thought of it. You could be right that it's common among all writers, but as for myself I have never found inspiration from a novel I have read to start writing my own. My ideas pop out from nowhere and to be quite honest I can say most of them doesn't resemble anything I have ever read. (maybe that is why I want to write them, because I wanna write the stories I would have liked to read?) The problems I deal with in my novels are the ones I struggle with myself, and I can't remember having read books about it before in the genres I usually read. But this was about being unique, to stand out (as the post said to which I replied) and what I wanted to say was it seems to me lots of aspiring fantasy-writers try and take advantage on the vampire-trend that has been around for a while now and since the market seems a little saturated ATM I don't think that is the right way to stick out. a better way would be to write about something that feels fresh and to do it so well that your novel is going to create a new trend, not squeezing the last drop out of the old one. I can admit it's difficult to come up with something that feels new when everything has been done already, but since in fantasy there are less limits that in "real-life-fiction" there are so many more ways to be unique and they should take advantage of THAT. I have seen some people here with pretty interesting story ideas, so it's definitely possible. i didn't want to discourage anyone, rather the opposite. to have the courage to think about old topics in new ways.
     
  6. thewordsmith

    thewordsmith Contributor Contributor

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    Well it's been not so few years since I was 20 years old but I write fantasy. I also write romance, mystery, police procedural, spy thriller, family saga ... ALL of which are make believe! Just because some fantasy novels take place in other worlds does not really make them any less real than a love story or murder mystery in Islington. They are, as I already pointed out, all make believe. None of them are real! And when you take an environment in a city you know and put it in your story, you still end up adding elements of pure fiction to that otherwise real place. So, how does that differ from a fantasy world?

    Next are the characters that populate your story: Is it really so much different to present a character who is hirsute or whose skin has a slightly greenish grey pallor as opposed to someone who has brown skin and white hair but who may be a couple of feet taller? (Sounds like racial bigotry to me!)

    And, bear in mind, not all fantasy takes place in some other, distant world. Many, many of them take place right here on good old terra firma Earth.

    If you don't like fantasy, that's fine. No one is saying you must write fantasy to be an author. But, on the flip side, fantasy worlds can be just as beautiful and artistically portrayed as any real world setting.

    Just sayin'.
     
  7. StrangerWithNoName

    StrangerWithNoName Longobard duke

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    See my title. Here Sci-fi was never popular, fantasy is taking over in the last years with writers like Licia Troisi:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licia_troisi

    but of none of these writers gets any kind of media coverage. Plus, about 75% of the current population of this country read less than a book per year. I think this says it all and explain why I'm writing in english.
     
  8. StrangerWithNoName

    StrangerWithNoName Longobard duke

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    I disagree: what makes LOTR LOTR and makes it a giant in comparison with all the other fantasy novels is the VISION of a different and consistent world.
     
  9. BallerGamer

    BallerGamer Active Member

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    We all have our opinions. I do agree that there isn't a created universe as large as Middle Earth (I believe Tolkien has more than 20 encyclopedias or history books of middle earth alone), and people dig that. But I enjoy books or movies for its experience. I'm no anthropologist or historian, and while I'm occasionally piqued by the intrigue of conquerors and rulers that lived in our past, if I were to study even the smallest seams of detail, I would be bored to death. And that's where I see Lord of the Rings crossing the line.

    I'm not bashing LOTR, I still love it (Peter Jackson's version), that's just me, and I can fully understand why anyone would love the novels. I don't think there is any book that has such a prominent example of love and hate as LOTR. Literally there are those that think it's amongst the all time classics, as rightfully as it should, and the others that see it terrible. I don't think they're terrible, but it's too dry for my tastes, and I don't need to know all the diehard details of what is happening nor do I care for the lyrics of the carols of hobbits when they go on journeys.
     
  10. Lightman

    Lightman Active Member

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    That would be inaccurate. Books that fall into general fiction (which does not include all real world scenarios - take romance or mystery) are generally classified as "literary fiction." There are publishers that deal exclusively with literary fiction and those that deal exclusively with any given genre. From what I've read (I've never attempted to sell a novel), publishers who deal with literary fiction expect more out of the writer than fantasy publishers do, because literary fiction is harder to sell.
     
  11. IfAnEchoDoesntAnswer

    IfAnEchoDoesntAnswer New Member

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    This is true of me as well, and most of what I write is fantasy :).

    I would argue that's not a case of "fantasy writers are more likely to be trend-hoppers" but rather of "the current trend that the trend-hoppers are jumping on happens to have fantastic elements"

    When a blockbuster, say, western comes out next year, and westerns become the next big thing, then the trend hoppers will shift to writing westerns. The western market will be over-saturated with a million nearly-identical stories, and people will complain that people who write westerns just jump on trends and copy what's popular, and that westerns tend to be poorly written.

    At least, that's my take.

    (Personally, I've never been interested in vampires, and have no reason to write about them. Also, I'd call vampires "paranormal" rather than "fantasy", B\but that's splitting hairs. There's never going to be universal agreement on where genre boundaries should fall.)
     
  12. Lemex

    Lemex That's Lord Lemex to you. Contributor

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    To backup Lightman.

    Or, 'Literary Fiction' seems to me to be those books that are hard to classify otherwise. Where - for example - would you put Topic of Cancer.
     
  13. Tesoro

    Tesoro Contributor Contributor

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    :D you're right, It really seems like trends in stories are more usual in fantasy. (but I think swedish thrillers seem to be suffering from the same syndrome: little idyllic town where nothing ever happens and everyone knows everyone, and suddenly this dead body is found and everyone is now in chock when realizing there is a murderer among them... :eek: :p a little like Twin Peaks... plus there is always this soon-to-be-retired police that resolves case after case of seemingly unexplainably cruel murders....*yawn*)
     
  14. Lightman

    Lightman Active Member

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    "...a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity." :p
     
  15. Quorum1

    Quorum1 New Member

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    In the bookstore I worked in we had separate sections for general fiction vs literature. Also, if you look on the back of a book you will find small print in a corner with the classification, literature and general fiction are distinct (as are mystery and romance - this is how it is in Australia anyway). This is because publishers recognise that different customers will pick up Amy Tan or Chuck Palahniuk (literature) compared to Dan Brown or Jane Green (General Fiction).

    Literature is harder to sell, but general fiction absolutely moves faster than fantasy, and if the expectations for a general fiction author are higher than a fantasy author it doesn't show in the quality.

    There is no sense to disparaging fantasy books or fantasy writers. Saying that a writer needs to work harder to publish other types of fiction implies a belief that one is better than the other. Now if you were saying that a Booker Prize winner is more difficult to write than a standard fantasy, that I would believe.

    At the end of the day I write what I love, you (hopefully) write what you love, one doesn't have to be better than the other.
     
  16. skeloboy_97

    skeloboy_97 New Member

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    Im fourteen, and i have never wrote fantasy. I've read maybe two or three, they were alright, but I get a little bored with them. Much prefer crime thriller sorta thing..

    :p :)
     
  17. TerraIncognita

    TerraIncognita Aggressively Nice Person Contributor

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    Less than a book a year? That's a pretty dismal statistic. :/
     
  18. cybrxkhan

    cybrxkhan New Member

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    One thing I also want to add - not all fantasy is about epic battles between heroes with swords or weapons or huge armies.

    Sometimes, fantasy is about, you know, normal people, doing normal things in their normal lives. Like having romances. Or raising kids. Or trying to survive with their crappy job and trying to not get fired or trying to make enough money. Not all fantasy is some "escapist" "delusion" about epic wars and so forth, and not all war fantasy are always about big battles between vaguely defined sides/armies.

    I mean like me, myself, one of my projects I guess you can call fantasy since it takes place in another world, although steampunk might be slightly more correct (even then I don't like using that term, since the steampunk aesethic is kept to a bare minimum (the setting more closely resembling actual Victorian Europe, say, than normal steampunk)). Most of the main characters are important leaders in the government of some empire, and yes, there are epic battles and political intrigue and blood and all that jazz here and there, but that's not my real focus. My true focus is simply on the main characters trying to deal with daily problems. The Prince, for instance, tries to juggle around his two wives and their awkward - but genuine - love for each other. He also tries to finish his daily bureaucratic paperwork, keep up with his good public image, argue meaningless propaganda with other Senators of the realm, but he also tries to find time to just have a little fun, or fix his weird relationship with his father, or to entertain his friends with his flute. Well, and also to keep his cool when his dead sister's spirit keeps pestering him for the fun of it.

    Again, my point is that fantasy is a very, very diverse genre (even with the more narrow definitions, in my opinion), and it can encompass not only many different types of settings, but also many different types of plots and characters and moods. Not all fantasy are bad LOTR or Dungeons and Dragons ripoffs, though many would seem to be like that.


    EDIT: My second-most favorite fantasy of all time (after LOTR) is a somewhat more obscure anime series called Spice and Wolf. It's main story is actually pretty simple, and doesn't really involve dragons or magic or epic battles or royal intrigue or the typical fantasy stuff, even though it technically takes place in pseudo-Europe. It's basically about a guy. And a girl (well, technically a hundreds year old wolf deity, but interestingly the story doesn't really focus on that part as much as you think it should). And they're going around as merchants ripping off people, scheming to make profits, trying to weedle out of scams themselves, manipulate others (and each other), trying to outsmart each other in a battle of wits... And, yeah. Not a lot of fighting and action and "OOHOO I'M GOING TO SAVE THE WORLD NOW". Just two people doing much more mundane (economics) stuff. And it's brilliant in that sense. I love it for its character dynamics between the two main characters and their dialogue, which is pretty amusing at times. And it's ultimately a good fantasy story at that.
     
  19. Lemex

    Lemex That's Lord Lemex to you. Contributor

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    Hahaha! Good reference, though I can politely disagree with Mr. Musmanno on that.
     
  20. mammamaia

    mammamaia nit-picker-in-chief Contributor

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    where does that 'statistic' come from?... and is it a reliable source?
     
  21. StrangerWithNoName

    StrangerWithNoName Longobard duke

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    There are some statistics from the Publishers' association, but they're old, the "problem" was widely discussed in the media about five or four years ago, but now there's a curtain of silence on the topic.

    http://www.repubblica.it/2006/a/sezioni/scuola_e_universita/servizi/giovanilibri/rapporto-lettura-italiani/rapporto-lettura-italiani.html

    Here they are talking about 57.7% of the entire population, but it was five years ago.
     
  22. Lemex

    Lemex That's Lord Lemex to you. Contributor

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    It's a silly idea to use statistics that are very likely very wrong and are at least five years out of date. Most statistics are almost meaningless.
     
  23. StrangerWithNoName

    StrangerWithNoName Longobard duke

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    This one is from Istat, it's from 2009 and it's even more scary:

    http://gruppodilettura.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/italiani-e-la-lettura-i-dati-dellistat/

    It seems that more of 15% of the population of Southern Italy doesn't have a book at home, as a matter of fact I at the fourth year of university I used to share the apartment with a pair of Law students from calabria, once they saw the saw me reading a book that wasn't a text for any Engineering course, and they were surprised. I asked them what they used to read in the leisure times, and they told flat that reading required concentration and therefore it HURT the brain.

    We are talking about people who today should be lawyers or judges.:eek:
     
  24. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    Best dissenting opinion ever.
     
  25. Tesoro

    Tesoro Contributor Contributor

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    well, italians are one thing, ( I noticed that too while being in italy) but I'm doubtful to if that is valid for the US too, and england and other european countries? I don't know how to google it, how did you find those articles? I think it's definitely not valid for sweden, it seems everyone is reading here!!!!!
     
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