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Writing Fantasy Fiction
Do you long to write about heroic quests and mysterious worlds inhabited by winged serpents, unicorns, and the forces of Good and Evil? If so, this practical guide in the compelling and stimulating field of fantasy fiction is for you. Sarah LeFanu looks at different kinds of fantasy fiction, including comic, children's, and dark fantasy, illustrating her advice with many references to published work.
124 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1996
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About the author
Sarah Lefanu
22 books6 followersSarah was born on the east coast of Scotland, was brought up there and in East Africa, and now lives in the west country. In the 1980s and 1990s she was Senior Editor at The Women’s Press, where she was responsible for their innovative and highly-regarded science fiction list.
From 2004 to 2009 she was Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival. She continues to chair events for the LitFest on a regular basis, and also for the Bristol Festival of Ideas.
Sarah teaches on the BA degree in English Literature and Community Engagement at the University of Bristol. She has just completed a year's post there as RLF Writing Fellow.
She has been a judge for the James Tiptree Award (an annual award for works of SF and fantasy that expand and explore the understanding of gender), and for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Her most recent books are S is for Samora: A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream (Hurst Publishers, November 2012), and Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal (SilverWood Books, March 2013).
(from http://www.sarahlefanu.co.uk/)
From 2004 to 2009 she was Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival. She continues to chair events for the LitFest on a regular basis, and also for the Bristol Festival of Ideas.
Sarah teaches on the BA degree in English Literature and Community Engagement at the University of Bristol. She has just completed a year's post there as RLF Writing Fellow.
She has been a judge for the James Tiptree Award (an annual award for works of SF and fantasy that expand and explore the understanding of gender), and for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Her most recent books are S is for Samora: A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream (Hurst Publishers, November 2012), and Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal (SilverWood Books, March 2013).
(from http://www.sarahlefanu.co.uk/)
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 9, 2023
Teacher, editor, biographer, feminist, author of works such as In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988), Sarah LeFanu was an ideal writer to pen this entry in A & C Black’s ‘Writing’ series which offered advice to would-be authors in various genres.
As she explains in her preface she was attempting to answer – quite successfully I think – several questions on the nature of fantasy, its origins, and why it was both important and necessary, while also offering practical suggestions on how to proceed.
So in ten chapters she ranges from a consideration of fantasy through worldbuilding, characters and plots on to the subgenres of children’s fantasy, dark fantasy and comic fantasy before outlining the work and pitfalls from drafting to publication, finally offering ‘last words of encouragement.’ Given that this guide is now nearly three decades old does it still have useful things to say?
The short answer is – yes, it does. As witness I offer the copious notes and quotes I compiled while reading Writing Fantasy Fiction (though for brevity’s sake I shall narrow them down here). But first I will cite her when she’s trying hard not to define the amorphous beast that is this genre:
And so on in a long paragraph in which she emphasises the genre’s shapeshifting nature. But as she gives us examples from classic and contemporary fantasies you can see how, different though they all may be from each other, they have elements and qualities that qualify them as fantasy and differentiate them from the kind of realist fiction that became de rigueur from the nineteenth century and continues now. And yet fantasy writing survived and flourished.
LeFanu then gives us sensible advice on worldbuilding, on society and cultures in the worlds we create, on names and maps, with examples of narrative beginnings from Tolkien, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Terri Windling and others. She goes on to discuss the archetype (‘an original pattern from which copies are made,’ which she later distinguishes from the stereotype) and how landscape can function as an additional character in the story.
In a chapter on plotting she has this to say.
Whether it’s the androgyne protagonist in Geoff Ryman’s ‘drama of the acquisition of Knowledge’ The Warrior Who Carried Life, or the hero of Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné who presents as an angsty teenager, good fantasies – either single genre or crossover stories like Barbara Hambly’s fantasy thriller The Time of the Dark – need to be as character-driven as any other genre or contemporary novel; in fact elsewhere she cites Ursula K Le Guin who said much the same thing in her essays on fiction.
Above all the fantasy writer needs to remember that the typical reader is ‘interested in the truth of an experience, and what it says to them’, and that it’s advisable to draw on their own unconscious, on dreams, and on nightmares to intensify the experiences in their fiction. This applies to the discipline of writing children’s fantasy (‘writers of children’s fantasy do not write for children as an audience out there but write for the child inside themselves’) as much as to dark fantasy (where the setting is very important to increase tension, and where pacts with the devil common are in ghost stories) and also to comic fantasy.
This last subgenre requires hard graft to make humour seem spontaneous. LeFanu lists the sort of means by which laughter is elicited through the shock of surprise – overturning expectations, paradoxes, impossibilities, deliberate anachronisms, exaggeration, absurdity and sympathy – most of which function like the theatrical slapstick that audibly signalled a pratfall or a moment of feigned violence.
But comic fantasy she also describes as a ‘deeply moral genre’, one that represents ‘a touchstone of social change’: Terry Pratchett is perhaps the writer who usually comes to mind in this instance, especially when LeFanu gives the typical characteristics of the subgenre’s protagonist: ineffectual, unsuccessful and awkward, a misfit who embodies the gap between expectations and reality, ‘the chronic mismatches between destiny and desire.’ Is it because the reader of comic fantasy somehow identifies with the ubiquitous no-hoper who typically inhabits those libertarian comedies which feature an ‘escape from restraints’ to reveal the heroine’s or hero’s ‘true worth’?
So far all that LeFanu is discussing remains as true now as when she wrote it, certainly as regards characterisation, plotting, worldbuilding and so on. Then she comes on to the nitty-gritty of practical steps once the fiction is completed, and here only a little of her text is dated, especially regarding technology. But I guess much of the process of finding outlets, getting published, acquiring literary agents, coping with contracts, the realities of self-publishing and getting publicity remains to a greater or lesser extent challenging.
Just a few points occurred to me as I went through. She rails against the standards of proofreading in the publishing world, so it’s ironic that this title includes several minor spelling or printing errors such as ‘ethnic minorites’ – which are Franciscan friars – instead of ‘ethic minorities’. I’m also surprised that in her discussion of children’s fantasy no mention is made of Diana Wynne Jones, a fellow Bristol author (LeFanu herself lived a few doors down the street from me when I lived in that city).
Finally, I’m pleased to see that as a feminist LeFanu not only cites so many prominent female fantasy authors, many of whom I regret to say I’ve yet to read, but that she also prefers female pronouns when referring to readers, writers and professionals in the business, all of which helps counter the mistaken impression that male writers are naturally more able and more prolific in the fields of fantasy and its sister genre, science fiction.
As she explains in her preface she was attempting to answer – quite successfully I think – several questions on the nature of fantasy, its origins, and why it was both important and necessary, while also offering practical suggestions on how to proceed.
So in ten chapters she ranges from a consideration of fantasy through worldbuilding, characters and plots on to the subgenres of children’s fantasy, dark fantasy and comic fantasy before outlining the work and pitfalls from drafting to publication, finally offering ‘last words of encouragement.’ Given that this guide is now nearly three decades old does it still have useful things to say?
The short answer is – yes, it does. As witness I offer the copious notes and quotes I compiled while reading Writing Fantasy Fiction (though for brevity’s sake I shall narrow them down here). But first I will cite her when she’s trying hard not to define the amorphous beast that is this genre:
Fantasy concerns itself with the unexplained and the unexplainable. It treats with magic and with mystery, and sometimes with the supernatural. Very often a fantasy story has a secret at the heart of it. The story may be to do with uncovering that secret. And while a mystery may be unravelled, it does not necessarily have to be explained […]
And so on in a long paragraph in which she emphasises the genre’s shapeshifting nature. But as she gives us examples from classic and contemporary fantasies you can see how, different though they all may be from each other, they have elements and qualities that qualify them as fantasy and differentiate them from the kind of realist fiction that became de rigueur from the nineteenth century and continues now. And yet fantasy writing survived and flourished.
LeFanu then gives us sensible advice on worldbuilding, on society and cultures in the worlds we create, on names and maps, with examples of narrative beginnings from Tolkien, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Terri Windling and others. She goes on to discuss the archetype (‘an original pattern from which copies are made,’ which she later distinguishes from the stereotype) and how landscape can function as an additional character in the story.
In a chapter on plotting she has this to say.
‘Fantasy may be set in other worlds, it may draw on ancient myths and legends, but good fantasy is always about real people, real feelings, real ambivalences and real conflicts.’
Whether it’s the androgyne protagonist in Geoff Ryman’s ‘drama of the acquisition of Knowledge’ The Warrior Who Carried Life, or the hero of Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné who presents as an angsty teenager, good fantasies – either single genre or crossover stories like Barbara Hambly’s fantasy thriller The Time of the Dark – need to be as character-driven as any other genre or contemporary novel; in fact elsewhere she cites Ursula K Le Guin who said much the same thing in her essays on fiction.
Above all the fantasy writer needs to remember that the typical reader is ‘interested in the truth of an experience, and what it says to them’, and that it’s advisable to draw on their own unconscious, on dreams, and on nightmares to intensify the experiences in their fiction. This applies to the discipline of writing children’s fantasy (‘writers of children’s fantasy do not write for children as an audience out there but write for the child inside themselves’) as much as to dark fantasy (where the setting is very important to increase tension, and where pacts with the devil common are in ghost stories) and also to comic fantasy.
This last subgenre requires hard graft to make humour seem spontaneous. LeFanu lists the sort of means by which laughter is elicited through the shock of surprise – overturning expectations, paradoxes, impossibilities, deliberate anachronisms, exaggeration, absurdity and sympathy – most of which function like the theatrical slapstick that audibly signalled a pratfall or a moment of feigned violence.
But comic fantasy she also describes as a ‘deeply moral genre’, one that represents ‘a touchstone of social change’: Terry Pratchett is perhaps the writer who usually comes to mind in this instance, especially when LeFanu gives the typical characteristics of the subgenre’s protagonist: ineffectual, unsuccessful and awkward, a misfit who embodies the gap between expectations and reality, ‘the chronic mismatches between destiny and desire.’ Is it because the reader of comic fantasy somehow identifies with the ubiquitous no-hoper who typically inhabits those libertarian comedies which feature an ‘escape from restraints’ to reveal the heroine’s or hero’s ‘true worth’?
So far all that LeFanu is discussing remains as true now as when she wrote it, certainly as regards characterisation, plotting, worldbuilding and so on. Then she comes on to the nitty-gritty of practical steps once the fiction is completed, and here only a little of her text is dated, especially regarding technology. But I guess much of the process of finding outlets, getting published, acquiring literary agents, coping with contracts, the realities of self-publishing and getting publicity remains to a greater or lesser extent challenging.
Just a few points occurred to me as I went through. She rails against the standards of proofreading in the publishing world, so it’s ironic that this title includes several minor spelling or printing errors such as ‘ethnic minorites’ – which are Franciscan friars – instead of ‘ethic minorities’. I’m also surprised that in her discussion of children’s fantasy no mention is made of Diana Wynne Jones, a fellow Bristol author (LeFanu herself lived a few doors down the street from me when I lived in that city).
Finally, I’m pleased to see that as a feminist LeFanu not only cites so many prominent female fantasy authors, many of whom I regret to say I’ve yet to read, but that she also prefers female pronouns when referring to readers, writers and professionals in the business, all of which helps counter the mistaken impression that male writers are naturally more able and more prolific in the fields of fantasy and its sister genre, science fiction.
January 7, 2020
As practical guides go, this one is a must for writers of fantasy fiction to have on a shelf near the place where they write. Sarah LeFanu writes in a motivational way: ‘do read as much as you can; do write every day if you can’, while pointing out the positives and pitfalls of writing in this genre, whether for adults or children, science fiction or dark fantasy. Perhaps in reading it cover to cover in 12 days it is a little overwhelming and I would have appreciated it better by reading a chapter between chapters in a novel. That said, what is refreshing is that Sarah wrote the book for women writers primarily, quoting the likes of Ursula Le Guin as a successful writer (and role model) in the genre.
The book is illustrated by a plethora of writers, some of whom are my personal favourites; Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and Michael Moorcock to name a few, which leads to the conclusion that Sarah LeFanu firmly believes that, while not being easy to write in this genre, successful exponents of the craft can be very helpful to aspiring proponents.
A very useful addition for any budding or establishing writer.
The book is illustrated by a plethora of writers, some of whom are my personal favourites; Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and Michael Moorcock to name a few, which leads to the conclusion that Sarah LeFanu firmly believes that, while not being easy to write in this genre, successful exponents of the craft can be very helpful to aspiring proponents.
A very useful addition for any budding or establishing writer.
December 3, 2019
Sarah's book is insightful, but I found her writing convoluted. By now the book could do with a revision and more insights into self-publishing, but it's still an invaluable book if you want to write fantasy or sci-fi stories.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews