Finding Fantasy Part 1: Rules
As I have begun working on my collection of fantasy stories, I am thinking a lot about rules. As I've mentioned before, I had guidelines for myself when writing my SciFi collection and I want those to stay true.
1. I want to depict a different kind of magic or fantasy in each story, as each story in Futures Gleaming Darkly revolved around a different technology.
2. I want them to be rife with representation
3. I want them, as many fantasy stories before mine, to have a point to convey, either as reflections of myself or the world we live in.
However, while scifi comes with the rules of reality, for the most part, fantasy is not narrowed in the same way. The technologies I highlighted in FGD were permutations of technologies we have now. The near future (or retrofuture in the case of Fundamt) provided a large space to explore, but one with definite boundaries.
The beauty (and terror) for me in fantasy is that anything is possible. As previously noted, I struggle with not laying out all of the things at once, as it were. How do I convey the things that are different about the worlds I write about without getting long-winded?
Although I am only two rough drafts deep into the collection, I believe I have found my solution. You guessed it, rules.
Any good magic system has rules, whether it be bending in Avatar, witchcraft and wizardry in Harry Potter, the finger-tutting of The Magicians, or (bear with me here) the mutant powers of the X-Men. While all of these examples have been guilty of "hand-waving" (looking at you, Time Turner in Prisoner of Azkaban), they come to my mind in discussing this subject.
Their rules, namely their weaknesses, define their abilities. The near ubiquitous necessity of a wand and a magical phrase in Harry Potter means that people are limited to those spells they can learn from study. This baseline gives even more magnitude to those witches and wizards who develop their own spells or perform them without a wand or words. You could argue the impossible physics of morphing a rat into a teacup, but Rowling establishing that in order to do so some effort is involved, makes it believable, even if it's not possible.
A perfect example of this is Rainbow Rowell's "Carry On", which I adored. In it, people cast spells with words, but not pseudolatin or gobbledygook. The lyrics of songs, turns of phrase, and nursery rhymes are used to exact magical ends. The protagonist is a magical wuderkind, but at a cost that I'll let you read to find out!
I am finding confidence and footing in writing fantasy with these first couple of stories. This could change, but they have been set in our world to lend some suspension of disbelief and set up some initial guidelines to work by and I've found that helps a lot. As much as I love Tolkien, I can't craft a thousand-years anthropological study into a whole different world. And I'm choosing to accept that as one of my rules.
1. I want to depict a different kind of magic or fantasy in each story, as each story in Futures Gleaming Darkly revolved around a different technology.
2. I want them to be rife with representation
3. I want them, as many fantasy stories before mine, to have a point to convey, either as reflections of myself or the world we live in.
However, while scifi comes with the rules of reality, for the most part, fantasy is not narrowed in the same way. The technologies I highlighted in FGD were permutations of technologies we have now. The near future (or retrofuture in the case of Fundamt) provided a large space to explore, but one with definite boundaries.
The beauty (and terror) for me in fantasy is that anything is possible. As previously noted, I struggle with not laying out all of the things at once, as it were. How do I convey the things that are different about the worlds I write about without getting long-winded?
Although I am only two rough drafts deep into the collection, I believe I have found my solution. You guessed it, rules.
Any good magic system has rules, whether it be bending in Avatar, witchcraft and wizardry in Harry Potter, the finger-tutting of The Magicians, or (bear with me here) the mutant powers of the X-Men. While all of these examples have been guilty of "hand-waving" (looking at you, Time Turner in Prisoner of Azkaban), they come to my mind in discussing this subject.
Their rules, namely their weaknesses, define their abilities. The near ubiquitous necessity of a wand and a magical phrase in Harry Potter means that people are limited to those spells they can learn from study. This baseline gives even more magnitude to those witches and wizards who develop their own spells or perform them without a wand or words. You could argue the impossible physics of morphing a rat into a teacup, but Rowling establishing that in order to do so some effort is involved, makes it believable, even if it's not possible.
A perfect example of this is Rainbow Rowell's "Carry On", which I adored. In it, people cast spells with words, but not pseudolatin or gobbledygook. The lyrics of songs, turns of phrase, and nursery rhymes are used to exact magical ends. The protagonist is a magical wuderkind, but at a cost that I'll let you read to find out!
I am finding confidence and footing in writing fantasy with these first couple of stories. This could change, but they have been set in our world to lend some suspension of disbelief and set up some initial guidelines to work by and I've found that helps a lot. As much as I love Tolkien, I can't craft a thousand-years anthropological study into a whole different world. And I'm choosing to accept that as one of my rules.
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Writing Sundries
A collection of my thoughts on writing, including descriptions of my own personal methods and advice for what helps me write.
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