Stephen Drivick's Blog - Posts Tagged "monty-python"

Fantasy

This is my sixth entry for the April A-Z blogging challenge. Today we look at the letter F-Fantasy.

Sometimes it didn't pay to practice magic. It was too much trouble.

This was a line from a fantasy novel I attempted for National Novel Writing Month. You have to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days to “win” the contest. I gave it a try, and found out one thing.

Writing fantasy is hard.

Perhaps it was the diet of Dungeons and Dragons, or maybe it was all the Adventure Time I had on my Kindle but I thought I could write a little fantasy, sword and sorcery novel. I had an idea about a young girl, a magic-user, going through a few adventures and winning the day. It seemed like a pretty solid idea.

I tried to get cute. I added a sarcastic, Monty Pythonish angle with snarky humor and a post-apocalyptic theme. In some places it worked really well, but in other places it made me cringe a little. I didn't get it, and I wrote it for goodness sake. I could imagine the return column on my Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard flipping around like a slot machine.

So I stopped working on my fantasy story, and I didn't win National Novel Writing Month. I may revisit it one day. I read it over a few days ago, and there's a few parts that made me chuckle.

To all those who write in the Fantasy/Sword and Sorcery genre, my hat is off. You guys write some amazing stories and you make it look easy. With a little reworking of my story maybe I'll join your ranks one day.

But it's going to take a lot of editing. Writing fantasy is hard ...at least for me.:)
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