Help with writing Fantasy, please?

I hate to break it to you, but you will have to start reading fantasy, within your specific genre. It might be a slog, but it'll have to be done. That way you can know how to avoid the sameyness that you says plagues the YA/Fantasy world.

 

I don't know what your story is, but why not...not do those things in your story. Have the MC know they're magic. Make them come from a supportive family structure. Make the government be a not bad guy. Etc.

 

I really like that idea.
The family could be really supportive and encourage and not a lick of use. Cheerleaders but not in The Game...

 

I understand the feeling of being out of your depth in a genre. I started writing fantasy when I was 11 and I haven't looked back since. It's tough for me to write other genres when I think too much about it, but if I have a basic idea of the story and let the words flow, it's generally far easier than if I sat down for hours plotting.

 

I listen to science fiction audiobooks while I write fantasy. There are similarities between the two. Fantasy has some expectations for what it supposed to have. Take a story that contained no generic fantasy elements, but still had the theme. The people in this story lived in an apocalyptic environment caused my a disaster hundreds of years ago. Fields of intense radiation segregated humans into small colonies of a few thousand people each. The Fantasy element came into play as the people developed a collective unconsciousness (shared lucid dreaming) with all people on the planet. In the dream world anything can happen with no magic needed.

 

Very much this. I took the "Lost Prince" trope about a boy from Earth who discovers another world where he learns that he's secretly magic and the long-lost heir to the throne, and then I made him into the evil wizard in my series.

Because it turns out that if you take a stoop-shouldered loser kid with no friends or social skills and hand him unlimited power and wealth (see every YA coming of age portal fantasy ever), in a few years he'll become a real dick about it. The hero in my series is brought over from Earth to kill him.

You have to know the tropes if you want to subvert them to carve your own niche, in the same way that you have to know the rules of English if you want to break them and develop as a stylist.

 

Adding here that you might not want to subvert tropes, and that's fine, too. It depends on your audience. For instance, there will always be a readership for YA & MG bildungsromans featuring lost princes / princesses. The trick is to be aware of what you're doing and where it fits . . . or doesn't. That only comes with reading voraciously across every genre but especially your own.

 

My question is, why do you think you need help? Are you struggling with the story? Does it feel like there's something missing? Have you gotten feedback that made you think you need to understand fantasy more?

If there's nothing going wrong or bothering you about writing the story, then my advice would be to just keep writing it however you want to.

 

If you're gonna start reading YA Fantasy I recommend The Bartimaeus Trilogy (plus fourth book that's an almost standalone prequel).

Alternate London in a, come to think of it, ambiguous time period that sorta resembles an even more modern 1940's or so. England is the world superpower and is famous for its magicians who do their magic by summoning demons that can't be seen by most people. Follows a boy from like 6-18 who's gifted and gets in over his head in book one, where he starts off as an apprentice. Great characters, especially the djinn Bartimaeus, who has an alternating pov with the kid.

I think you might be surprised by how delicately the genre can be handled.

 

^ Ah yes. I recall reading the Graphic Novel of The Amulet of Samarkand. It was pretty good, and Bartimaeus was a fun character.

The Fantasy genre is a very flexible genre, and it seems to me that many works of fiction that don’t ‘fit’ elsewhere, or are set in the future, are labelled as Fantasy. I recall my school library had the Dragonriders of Pern books in the Fantasy section, (because it quacked like a Fantasy) until it was revealed in the story that the inhabitants of Pern are space-faring Earthlings that had colonised this world. Subsequently, the books where moved to the Sci Fi section. I’ll quote a little from Wikipedia -

The Dragons of Pern are a fictional race created by Anne McCaffrey as an integral part of the science fiction world depicted in her Dragonriders of Pern novels.

In creating the Pern setting, McCaffrey set out to subvert the clichés associated with dragons in European folklore and in modern fantasy fiction. Pernese dragons are similar to traditional European dragons in the fact that they can breathe fire and resemble great lizards or dinosaurs with wings, but the resemblance ends there. Unlike most dragons in previous Western literature, Pernese dragons are entirely friendly to humanity. Furthermore, they are not magical at all. Instead, they are a heavily genetically modified species based on one of Pern's native life-forms, the fire-lizard.
Dragons (Pern) - Wikipedia

I agree with Devor. Let others worry about the label.