What motivates the choice of your subject?

[Yora]

I've been interested in fantasy writing for five years now, and every time I tried jumping back into it I found myself not really able to articulate to myself what I want to write about. I know many things from various fantasy works that I like, but those don't really make a story about something. I feel like a good story needs to have something to say and needs to have a point.
I've often been thinking about what kinds of protagonists I'd like, what places they could go to, what kinds of antagonists they could oppose, and what cool setpiece action scenes I could include. But my experience with that has always been that this doesn't magically come together in a story I feel motivated to write out to full length. It's checking boxes and painting by numbers. I find it not fulfilling to write, and who would want to read that?

So I am now thinking about approaching everything from the other side and first searching for something I feel excited to write about, and then making choices what elements would fit into such a story.

My question is what your motivations were to decide on a subject for the stories you work on? What was it that you wanted to write about, and how did that influence your choices what kind of things to put into them?

 

[skip.knox]

My first one isn't going to help much. I had Altearth and I knew that magic came into the world in the parallel year that the Goths invaded the Roman Empire. So I was re-telling that story. It wasn't until I was well into it that I was able to add an arc for the MC.

My most recent one also used a template. I decided I would re-tell A Journey to the Center of the Earth. This one, too, was in part an exercise in building out the world of Altearth.

But A Child of Great Promise was different. I had the notion of a gifted child who was a problem to those around her, a magical re-casting of the teacher's lament: this child shows great promise but she just won't apply herself. Somewhere along the way, fairly early, a chance phrase came into my head. "I'm a half-elf." To which the other person says, "Oh yeah, what's the other half?" And that gave me the key to the story.

I have a novelette that started life as a kind of detective noir story set in Renaissance times, but which took its firm direction when I managed a good opening sentence. "The elf was already dead by the time I found him."

So, it comes from different quarters, but each case involved some (or a lot of) stumbling around until something crystallized. Something that got me excited. More specifically, something that got me to the point where I felt the story needed to be told. At that juncture something curious happens. I start to feel an obligation to the story and to the characters. I don't merely need to tell the story, I need to tell it well. It's a bit like finding some ancient statue buried in the ground. One would feel obliged to clean it up, treat it with care, and make sure others saw it.

I'm particular aware of this dynamic right now because I have a current story that I know needs to get told, but it's still half-buried, to continue the metaphor. I'm not entirely sure what I've got or how to show it (tell it). Still mucking around, mixing ingredients, waiting for something to crystallize.

Not sure if all this helps much, but there it is.

 

[WooHooMan]

A recent death in the family caused me to put my life in perspective and deeply consider my view on my life and how my existence had effected those around me since I realized that before you die, the people who mean a lot to you will likely never tell you what kind of effect on them you had. And, at the end of all this, your deeds and relationships are all that will carry over after death.

So, I decided to write a story about a coke-addicted wizard breaking into a prison to fight a talking snake.

The writing process is a fantasy journey in itself; filled with obstacles, antagonists and discoveries.

 

[Miles Lacey]

Last year my home was flooded twice within a month. It was condemned as unfit for human habitation and I ended up living in a caravan on someone's property. One evening I listened to a group of guys talking about all the women and girls they had slept with, all the drugs they had snorted or smoked, all the wild parties they had attended, all the concerts and countries they had gone to and all the jobs they had done. I never said a word because the only things I had ever done was do a variety of voluntary jobs that no one cared about, worked as a public servant for a few years, write a whole lot of political stuff that few people read, wrote a book that I will not discuss because it was a total flop and I never had the chance to form a relationship because I never met a woman (or man) who liked me enough to form a relationship with me. My only claim to fame? A useless Bachelor of the Arts degree in History and Media Studies. By the end of that night I was ready to slit my throat with the sharpest knife I had.

That's when the idea began to slowly form in my head of a main character who has become an outcast even among her peers: people who have become separated from the rest of society on account of becoming mages. When her only realistic chance of getting out of the poverty trap (and escaping the stigma of being a branded unranked mage) is taken away she decides to do something about it. In the process she alienates her family and friends and attracts the wrong sort of attention from her nation's secret police as she embarks upon a journey to get what she believes she has earned.