I notice that on this forum, as on many writing forums, younger aspiring writers are often into fantasy. Now, I'm not going to diss the fantasy genre. I do think though that there is huge value in younger people writing about their view of the world. YOU may think it's mundane but it really isn't; everyone's life is unique. You don't need convoluted plot lines, hoardes of (often somewhat 2-dimensional) characters and imaginary worlds. I think it would be great if some of you could try and explore the ACTUAL characters, conversations, tastes and feelings around you, and concentrate on shorter works with a beginning, middle and end that you can actually finish. Let us know how you experience life--please!
I couldn't agree more and I also feel this is unfortunate. A lot of younger writers think that writing equals magic systems and extensive world-building documents. It's the whole Sanderson/Reddit sphere and method of writing which just doesn't lend itself to human stories. People can write what they want, but I think a lot of fantasy writers prioritise race/magic/setting depth and originality over simply telling an engaging and moving story. I couldn't care less about your map or how your ultra-cool dragonkin fire magelords fought your epic paladin generals in a war that lasted ten thousand years. I also don't care in the slightest about your rune system or your quirky currency... If I wanted to read a technical document, I'd open a roleplaying game manual. Edit: I'd like to make an emendation. It's wrong of me to suggest it's just young writers. I should expand this to writers of any age. Not understanding that story comes from small-scale human moments is widespread.
That is an interesting take on things. I read Sci-Fi and Fantasy (predominantly but not exclusively) as an escape from reality - not that anything is wrong with my reality, I just like a bit of something different. I am very new to writing am still learning basic sentence structure, grammar, and plot development. I don't want to chuck in loads of research on top to make sure that what I write is accurate. If I can imagine a world and makeup everything then all I need to do is focus on logical consistency. That is why, for now, I am writing exclusively fantasy. I guess what I am saying is that I will accept the 2D characters and convoluted plotlines if it means I actually write something to practice the basics. I am not saying that is the right approach but the compromise I have made, for now.
I appreciate what you are saying, but if you are coping with the basics, as you say, fantasy writing isn't really a good way to learn how to be logical and consistent. Maybe sometimes writing short, realistic stories as well as the fantasy would be useful? Just a thought and good luck with however you decide to go! Edit: I'm not sure what "research" is necessary for writing about the real world that you are living in!
It's my opinion that fantasy elements can actively strengthen a work of fiction, but the first and most prominent consideration should be the establishment of human characters with wants and needs. The only thing that truly matters is that.
Everything i wrote for several decades was fantasy and science fiction or just wild over-the-top comedy, but I was young and didn't know enough about life to write about it. As @John McNeil said above, I was mostly just getting my early writing experience, the 10,000 hours you need. I don't think I would have been capable of doing anything more serious at the time. Plus it made writing fun so I kept doing it. It wasn't until I was an adult and had racked up some experience at living that I became able to really even see the deeper human levels that make for good writing. And that seems to be the way learning works—you play around in the shallow pool until you've developed some facility with the basics. I believe it's older writers, in the sense of life experience and also writing experience, who should start to turn their attention toward the deeper human levels. Subtlety and depth come with a great deal of development and experience. My earlier efforts to write 'seriously' were silly, and if I was too determined to learn that I would have got frustrated and given up.
Great post, @Xoic. When I was a teenager I used to write about colossal gods fighting each other. The first story I ever wrote, when I was about seven, was called Kinshi Warriors and it was, I think, about a samurai fighting demonic void entities in a labyrinth. I've always been highly imaginative, but those stories were sheer nonsense. But such nonsense is crucial!
oh gosh, i couldn't agree less. if you, novice writer who is reading this, are not interested in writing fiction that doesn't have magic or spec tech, you absolutely don't need to spend a single minute writing stories that don't have these things, I promise you. It's completely unnecessary. (I also would suggest that you don't take advice about writing SFF from anyone who doesn't understand SFF and speaks of the genre dismissively and with disrespect.) If you want to write a plot driven adventure story with an emphasis on external conflict and the intricacies of your speculative element, do that. get in the paint and shoot your shot. live in the work that brings you joy. There is plenty of room for those kinds of stories in SFF. Thousands upon thousands of readers are starving for exactly this kind of story, and they have hard cash and enthusiasm. Go for it. It's your choice: you can seek out an agent in the hopes of landing an advance and royalty contract with one of the Big Four with a book like that, if you want, or you can put together your own production and marketing plan and publish it yourself. On Amazon, this kind of story is a huge, huge market. Your reader is voracious. They are mighty. They see a big old brick with a dragon on the cover and they say "challenge accepted," and if they like your book they will buy everything you ever wrote, consume it in a terrifyingly short amount of time, and come around looking for more. Take heart. You're doing it right. If you want to write a story with speculative elements, but you want to use those elements in support of a story that is about the themes you want to explore, because what you really want to do is think about what happens to the world and its people if you change this thing and then follow the pond ripples, that's fantastic. You are standing in the huddle with award winning authors who are regarded with reverence. you are hanging out with absolute legends--but you're also hanging out with breakout blockbusters who get movie deals that smash the box office to bits. You're doing amazing, sweetie. See you at the Nebulas. If you want to write a story with speculative elements, but what really drives you is the exploration of a character and their experience as they move through a story that, in spite of all its whizz and all of its bang, is really about the intimate knowledge of a character and how they live and grow and change, well amazing. you get awards too. and you get readers who walk away from your story a different person than they were before they read your book, and that's just staggering, honestly. look at you, darling, really. if you want to write stories that do two of these things, or all of these things, you're living the dream and I salute you. You're are fantastic. Do what you want to do.
I don't think Madhoca was demanding people write a certain way. If anything, he/she seemed to be advocating for the importance of traditional story beats and elements, as well as being able to actually finish something. I took it as more of a helpful suggestion and I agree completely. I've encountered a lot of people who tell me they're new to writing, but what they're working on is a Sanderson-esque epic fantasy series... Just as an artist has to learn the fundamentals and do hundreds of anatomy studies and sketches, so should a writer start with flash, shorts and novellas. A lot of writers are overly concerned with detailed worlds and narratives of huge scope. If you go to a place like /r/worldbuilding, you'll often see threads like, "Tell me about your world's magic system". That's not really writing though, is it?
Oh, well if that's what he meant then I agree. My early writing was short fiction (mostly unfinished to boot) and I rapidly went from one story to the next, and that is important. But, I also want to say that i got caught up in one massive monster of a project that consumed the better part of a decade and ended up coming to nothing. This was after about 2 decades of the aforementioned short projects. I believe despite the fact that nothing came of it, I learned a lot from that experience as well, but I did finally decide I needed to drop it and move on, get back to writing shorter easier projects. I think it's the 2 different approaches, surface-skimming and going deep. You need to make effective use of both at the right times.
I am a new writer and I am also writing a fantasy book with its own magic system, geography, and history. I do this about 1 day a week just adding a little here and there. I don't expect it to be any good - I have read a lot of posts on here stating their first 3/4 books were not very good as they learned their craft - but I am enjoying the process, research, and story arcs associated with it. And it is the kind of story I want to read. However, I bought Strunk's Elements of Style and Puglisi's Emotion Thesaurus because I know I need to get better at the basics. To practice what I am reading I write flash fiction and short stories, some of which I have been posting here for feedback. I find it easier to write fantasy and this allows me to focus on the basics. I do this a few times a week. I don't get why this approach would be seen as a bad way to get better at writing. I know I will at some point move from grammar, tenses, and punctuation to developing characters, etc. but for now I think I have a sensible approach.
I think there's nothing wrong with what you're doing so long as you understand that it's best to focus on the fundamentals and get shorter work completed. And it sounds like you're doing just that. It's people who think that writing is nothing more than making some kind of extensive chronicle of events and systems that don't quite have their head screwed on in my opinion!
I remember a thread somewhere—I don't think it was on this message board—about That One Project You Spent a Decade On and Learned Everything From. I think the last part is what's missing from the OP above. And yes, I did learn a lot of more advanced things on that massive project that I continually revamped and re-wrote and re-tooled for a decade. Being stuck is not always a bad thing, in fact in his book Mastery Robert Greene (black belt in several martial arts) says it's often when we're on a 'plateau' and seem to be making no progress that things are happening deep inside, below the threshold of conscious awareness, and after a period like this we often make big advances.
I suppose I don't understand why you've singled out fantasy here. Concentrating on works of a length you can finish is good advice, working on developing deeper and more realistic characters and drawing from your experiences is good advice, focusing on smaller casts of characters or less convoluted storylines when you start out is good advice. There is no reason you can't do all those things while writing fantasy, and other types of genre fiction present many of the same sorts of issues. Just go to wattpad to read some new writer romance and you'll find the romance characters by new writers aren't any deeper than the fantasy ones. Indeed, I've read a great deal of fantasy that showed incredible depth. Most recently, The Dream Peddler, which is an exploration of a mothers grief after the death of her only child, which is highligted by the presence of a character who sells dreams. The only fantasy specific issue you've highlighted is a focus on worldbuilding, which is a necessity for fantasy moreso than other genres, but I genuinely can't think of a writer I've met in person that thought that worldbuilding was all there was to a book, and many new fantasy writers do just as well at the other elements as any other sort of beginner writer. The other aspect is that most people write what they want to read. Writing the sort of things that they love and that inspire them is why they write in the first place, without that I suspect you'd see far fewer new writers. So long as the writer has the desire to learn and is actively working to improve their craft, then they can do it in any format or genre.
Write what you know. Well, there's nothing wrong with that, but equally valuable is writing about what you want to know and what you think you know and what you'd really rather not know. If one's imagination is expanding into other worlds, sitting down to write nice neat little essays on My Summer Vacation or What Grandma and Mama had to say to each other at Thanksgiving Dinner is not going to be satisfactory.
It's odd as I really didn't take as much of an issue with what he said as the rest of you despite the fact I read almost exclusively Fantasy/Weird. (I also have a review channel specifically for those genres.) I don't think he was really attacking the idea of fantasy, nor was he saying it's intrinsically bad. I read it more as a suggestion to bring back the human and the emotional to a piece of fiction. He even said, " explore the ACTUAL characters, conversations, tastes and feelings around you." That's certainly good advice given the sorts of fantasy I've seen from new writers and even popular writers. On a slightly different note, a serious point to be made though is what Clark Ashton Smith said about fantastical fiction: “To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term—not more. Physiological—and even psychological analysis—can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing.” I don't know if I agree with this. I adore CAS's work, but I think the human element needs to be there. I think you need introspection and small-scale events. It can't all be primordial gods, dragons and wizards.
I've seen many people here on the board say they've been locked into nothing but worldbuilding for years, and haven't begun on or even started to learn any other aspect of writing.
Looking down on fantasy/sci-fi and fantasy writers is an age-old tradition. There are modern-day writing teachers who tell their students they aren't allowed to write fantasy because it's not real art. The OP called out fantasy, and only fantasy, as an example of new writers not including enough depth or humanity, and when you see this sort of comment again and again and again it can be quite discouraging to new writers who want to write what they love. The OP had some good advice, I agree with it, but I feel that you can encourage writers to look more into the human element of the story, to include more introspection, and adding nuance to smaller-scale events without telling people not to write about dragons. I did say in person, you'll find folks of every stroke on the internet. Anything that stops you from writing is a problem. I have known people in person who have done nothing but try to outline a single story for years without actually writing a word, or claiming they're going to write a story and thinking about the story without even outlining. Worldbuilding is one way people procrastinate writing (although, it may also be that that person just loves worldbuilding, Tolkiens one true love was languages, after all, the story was incedental) but not particularly special in that regard.
In my opinion, I'm not convinced that one can write a really good story whilst simultaneously trying to figure out imagined -geography -ecology -economics -socio-political dynamics -races and their biology and cultures -magic systems -unique weather systems A lot of the masters of fantasy wrote in vague terms and focused solely on imagery or characters. Technical documents those books weren't.
I've noticed this, too. It reminds me of all the people who upon discovering that I'm a writer, lose no time assuring me that they intend to write a book someday when they find the time. One woman, a painter, told me dismissively that now that computers are widely available, "anyone can write a book." Told her I knew exactly where she was coming from- with all the art software available, anyone could create fine art. She was Not Amused.
That's what I suggested. I've seen it, too. I reckon some people think writing is nothing more than an exercise in handling a lot of information. It's like records processing in a way, especially if it's going to be one of those Sanderson-esque doorstopper fantasy epics. Just a lot of detail about nothing that really doesn't add to the story but gives the impression of depth.
right. exactly this. give all the tips you want about the craft of writing, that's awesome, but if you have to step on fantasy to do it, that's crap.
Relevant Pratchett quote: I think the problem is everyone seems to try and start as big as possible. "This will be the first book of a twelve book series and the screenplay is in progress too. What do you think of my magic system or particular flavour of elfkin?" Instead, their prority should be: 1: do they know basic writing composition (SPaG) 2: can they write a scene 3: do they have a good grip pacing/conflict/POV/dialogue 4: can they write a novel This doesn't or at least shouldn't happen in the course of producing the "magnum opus." Fledglings should set out to write as simple a novel as possible, and more importantly finish it IMO.
I think I blanked this out when I first read your post. Probably because my blood might start boiling if I think about it too much. I suppose I already knew this sort of thing happened, but it's rare that I'm ever exposed to such ideas. The irony is unreal. Lord Dunsany, considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Clark Ashton Smith, who was a seriously respected poet before he was an amazing short story writer. Mervyn Peake, considered a master of poetic fantasy writing and is often touted as "literary fantasy" George Macdonald, a writer of highly layered and symbolic fairy tales for children and adults that seem like they were crafted by some divine hand William Morris, Hope Mirlees, E.R. Eddison, etc. etc. The list goes on. I'm not even going to mention Tolkien other than to give his name since every time I do I go on about him too much, having read ten of his books and memorised most of the songs and poems off by heart. I think most of these teachers and critics consider fantasy to be nothing more than dungeons and dragons adventures for kids...
What always defeated my efforts at stopmotion animation was I'd set my goals too high. I'd try to make these big epic films. Not actually epic, but epic considering the difficulties and time consuming nature of the art form. All I could get done were practice pieces and exercises, until I wised up and started making even those into little pseudo-films in their own right. But finally one day I got disgusted with how long I had labored and produced nothing worthwhile and realized "Hey, I can do a painting in a week or maybe a month or 2!" So I switched to drawing/painting instead. In the beginning, when I was at the start of the learning curve for digital painting it took me 7 months to finish my first 2 illustrations, and they weren't great, but I had learned a lot from doing them. After that things sped up quite a bit.
