Friday, March 04, 2005

Charlie's Fantasy Rules

Charles Stross, author of the excellent "Singularity Sky" and "The Atrocity Archives" recently posted an article on his diary entitled: Five rules for cold-bloodedly designing a fantasy series.

He goes into the details of the process he went through to plot and plan his next work (a fantasy, not SF). I was quite fascinated by this as I have recently gone through a similar process just before reading his blog. His process is almost identical to the one I used.

I have almost finished a 200,000 word SF-Space Opera novel. It has taken me over 5 years to write and I'm quite happy with the results. Will it ever get published? Maybe, but given the ratio of fantasy to SF being published, probably not.

So, I thought: I'd have more chance getting published if I wrote a decent fantasy.

Normally I don't write fantasy (as such), I write SF and Horror and possibly Dark-Fantasy and Magic Realism. I never thought I would ever attempt to write a "fantasy" novel because I don't like much of what is currently on the shelf and I have drifted away from it.

For my process I thought:

a) What sort of fantasy do I enjoy? And I love old style "Sword and Sorcery" stuff, of which there is not much of these days. I would write an old-style swashbuckling Sword and Sorcery adventure. I also love "Dying Earth" type stories (Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith etc) that are set on thousands of years in the future: the sun is dying, earth is a barren wasteland reverted to barbarism and filled with remnants of Strange Science largely indistinguishable from Magick.
b) What authors do I like who wrote this stuff? And yes, they were all already dead:
  • Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan, John Carter of Mars
  • Robert E Howard - creator of Conan, amongst others
  • Clark Ashton Smith - Lovecraftian horror and fantasy, although I feel Smith is far superior to Lovecraft.
  • William Hope Hodgeson - The Night Lands, House on the Borderlands
I would use all these guys as influences. Combine all the above, shake them, stir them, and see what comes out.

In the end I am really enthusiastic about what I came up with and found the sort of fantasy story that I'd not only want to read, but want to write too! No elves, no dwarves (or dwarfs if you are that way inclined). No dragons. Instead: anthropomorphs, flying machines, automata.

In the end, I'm writing something I never thought I would write - a fantasy! And I'm loving it!

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