When worldbuilding, writers tend to focus on topics such as magic systems, fantasy races, kingdoms, politics, and religions. These elements form the settings, the backdrops against which our stories take place.
But consider your world. Not the world you’ve created, but the one you live in.
What is important to you? What aspects of your life do you take for granted?
Your world consists of things like your job, your family, your education, and your friends. It also includes the places you buy food from, or visit for entertainment.
It should be the same for your characters. They’ve got to eat and have fun too, so they’ll have places where they do those things or ways to do them.
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This article is written by Ken Hughes.
What do sports brackets have to do with writing a story?
Almost everything.
A plot depends on conflict and contrast between its characters, and on building interest in them over time.
A tournament’s system is about matching opponents together and tracking how that changes. It’s one of the simplest, purest methods there is for managing the intricacies of a plot, while staying focused on what makes it powerful.
As we’ll see, the bracketing concept needs only a few expansions to fit any kind of plotting into it.
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J.R.R. Tolkien
This article is by Anne Marie Gazzolo.
In the essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien speaks of a subject close to his heart. He had a life-long interest in and love for the genre, and approaches the topic as an author.
According to Tolkien, fairy-stories allow us as readers and authors to experience what he calls recovery, escape, and consolation. In our broken world, we need all three.
Such affords us the opportunity to profoundly change the way we view ordinary things and life itself.
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Loki
When it comes to villains, we’ve seen the clichés. Dark lords. Psychopaths. Petty super villains who kill their own henchmen.
We’ve also heard the advice. Villains need personal goals. Villains need depth. Villains need to be the heroes of their own stories.
In my experience, conversations about villains get overshadowed by the question of whether a story is about good and evil, or the morally grey. But as authors, we need to understand what that thematic choice means for developing our characters.
Do your villains embrace their villainy or attempt to justify it?
Knowing the answer to that question will help you create the character’s arc.
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Albert Einstein
“When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”
-Albert Einstein
When Albert Einstein imagined himself chasing a beam of light, he was able to conclude that the speed of time is relative to how fast one object is moving compared to another.
I’m not a physics guy, so hopefully I got that close to right.
When it comes to things like knowledge or wisdom, there are many ways to explore them. There’s science, philosophy, and religion. But what all of these approaches have in common is storytelling. And, more importantly, creative storytelling.
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Jaime from Game of Thrones
Is black and white dead?
No, I’m not talking about film.
With the recent surge in popularity of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (a.k.a. Game of Thrones), fantasy as a genre has gained a new audience. Even those who have not ventured into fantasy before can easily find themselves engrossed in the world of Westeros.
Why is this so?
Typically, fantasy has been known for depicting the struggle between good and evil – a trope that, while tried and true, may be too conventional for today’s audiences. There, I said it.
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The elusive muse. Long considered dead by some, still widely sought after with hounds, nets, and harpoons by others, the concept of “invoking the muse” still lurks out there in the writers’ ether.
Inspiration can be fickle: it doesn’t always necessarily come when you want it. There are some tried and true methods for getting ideas and motivation to write. These have been discussed in multiple “killing writer’s block” and other such advice columns.
What I want to propose are ways to find inspiration for writing fantasy, some of which may be obvious and others not so much.
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Ned Stark
For my “writer self,” cracking (or clicking) open a new fantasy novel is one of the most exciting ways to spend my free time.
It’s also one of the most terrifying.
After all, I don’t really know what I’ll find inside, and encountering a badly-crafted story is more than disappointing. It’s downright painful.
I’m sure you could name many issues that hamper your literary enjoyment, but for me, one the biggest is subpar dialogue. I encounter it in books both traditionally and self-published. The story concept may unique, and the plot clever. The prose may even be compelling, well-paced, and active. Overall I’m intrigued…
Until the characters open their mouths.
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For me, editing was the worst part of writing, which is why I never did it.
In an attempt to turn editing into a more manageable process, I have combined two of my favorite hobbies into one theory, which I call “Target Editing.”
I compare editing to archery.
Archery is a wonderful sport. It takes very little skill to get mediocre at it, and your output is directly influenced by the amount of practice you put in. Sound familiar?
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Frodo with Sting
In fantasy, weaponry is something we’ve come to expect to see. There are wars, battles, even personal fights against a single rival, and that means the combatants need something to fight with. Sometimes fists are enough; sometimes magic is used. But the rest of the time, there are weapons.
One thing fantasy weapons sometimes come under fire for, especially swords, is that they’re all fancy pants spikes and dragon motifs and not a huge amount of practicality.
Below is a catalogue of some weapons you might have read about in fantasy, looking at what makes them good or bad in different ways.
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