I Don't Like Anything. Why? How?

[Demesnedenoir]

Hmm, stories are often about saving the world even when they are about life. How often is a character looking to preserve or improve their current situation? That is all about saving "their World".

Eve of Snows is, for instance, about "saving their world" and it appears somewhat literal... it's what the characters think they're doing... but everyone is being played. But still, they are fighting to preserve their status quo, which is "their world". So, I have a different take on that issue, more story structure than literal.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

I'll list them by author for convenience. Some of them you may have read already, and not all of them are fantasy.

My favourites by Diana Wynne Jones:
Howl's Moving Castle
The Dark Lord of Derkholm and its sequel, Year of the Griffon
Deep Secret and its sequel, The Merlin Conspiracy
Fire and Hemlock [my personal favourite of hers]
Hexwood
Dogsbody
Enchanted Glass
Unexpected Magic

some others also by Diana Wynne Jones:
all of the Chrestomanci books
A Tale of Time City
The Dalemark Quartet
Archer's Goon
The Orge Downstairs

Garth Nix:
Sabriel, Lirael, Abbhorsen, Across the Wall, To Hold the Bridge, Clariel, Goldenhand

all of the Discworld books

Brandon Sanderson:
The Mistborn trilogy
Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians series
Elantris

Neil Gaiman:
Stardust
American Gods
Neverwhere
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Good Omens

Jasper Fforde:
The Thursday Next series [the first two books are a bit tough to read, but things get much better from the third book onwards]

Ursula Le Guin:
The Earthsea Cycle--A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind
Gifts
The Telling

Kenneth Oppel:
Silverwing
Sunwing
Firewing
Darkwing

Michael Ende
The Never-ending Story
Momo

Want more? I have an extensive collection of manga as well.

 

[CupofJoe]

That is possible too. Although, I can't see my basic craving for fantasy (or spec fic, I suppose) disappearing. Maybe I am looking in the wrong places for it. My tastes within the spec-fic framework are definitely very different...I'm a lover of horror elements, and the urban or suburban gothic rather than the traditional fantasy environment. That's probably why Welcome to Night Vale appeals to me so much.

I seem to have this very palpable idea of the kinds of things I want to read. I really want a long series with thick, meaty installments rich in depth. You mostly find that in the very traditional fantasy though.

Have you looked at HP Lovecraft?
They are Horror, sub/urban [in parts - they go all over the place] and rather gothic. And while not one series, the stories do share the same world so can be read as an enormous mega-story. There may be a few issues, though. They are old enough to have a very different feel to them to a modern tale and there is the occasional issue with language that was common at the time but not appropriate now. as they sometimes say "it reflects the language and attitudes current at the time". All that said. I love them.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

Have you looked at HP Lovecraft?
They are Horror, sub/urban [in parts - they go all over the place] and rather gothic. And while not one series, the stories do share the same world so can be read as an enormous mega-story. There may be a few issues, though. They are old enough to have a very different feel to them to a modern tale and there is the occasional issue with language that was common at the time but not appropriate now. as they sometimes say "it reflects the language and attitudes current at the time". All that said. I love them.

I haven't done much looking into Lovecraft but I would probably like them.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

Having lots of recs on this thread is nice. Thanks guys!

But really, i've done quite a bit of thinking and I think the reason I feel this way is very simple. I've written about it before. That unfulfilled craving I feel has to be for the book I am meant to write.

You're welcome to pass over my thoughts on this if you're not the spiritual type, but i am the spiritual type and creating things is very spiritual for me. Because of that I feel guided toward the stories I am meant to write by this craving, for a purpose certainly, but one I don't understand quite yet. Writing is literally my reason to live in some ways. I've known uncannily early that it's what i was meant to do and i've been story-telling long before i could think about concepts like what I was meant to do. I just popped out that way.

Exploring my spiritual and religious beliefs has made this interesting. Maybe I am the reincarnation of some writer who died with a vastly important idea still inside them and that's why i seemed to have been born with a fierce need to get things on paper. It's interesting to be fanciful like that. But to be more serious, I truly believe whatever I m meant to write is very, very important.

I don't like this process of being guided toward my purpose, though. It is very frustrating. Sometimes It hurts.

That's how I feel about it, deep down. The book I want doesn't exist because I haven't written it. That feels more damning than anything sometimes. Writing is hard. And I'm terrified of not pulling it off.

Still, I wonder if this feeling of boredom with the whole literary world is totally a result of that, or if writing my book can resolve it or will resolve it at all. They say write the book you want to read. But writing is haaaaaard.

And i really just want to read it, okay??

Or maybe this will just...pass with time. I wonder if my drive to write would stay totally the same if that happened, though?

 

[Ban]

Don't worry about it, sometimes your tastes simply change. I'm a fiction writer who hasn't read a full work of fiction in close to two years (though I'm trying to get back in). Doesn't mean you have to stop reading, but you just need to start reading what you like at the moment. For me right now, that's informative non-fiction books, for you it may simply be a genre other than fantasy.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

Having lots of recs on this thread is nice. Thanks guys!

But really, i've done quite a bit of thinking and I think the reason I feel this way is very simple. I've written about it before. That unfulfilled craving I feel has to be for the book I am meant to write.

You're welcome to pass over my thoughts on this if you're not the spiritual type, but i am the spiritual type and creating things is very spiritual for me. Because of that I feel guided toward the stories I am meant to write by this craving, for a purpose certainly, but one I don't understand quite yet. Writing is literally my reason to live in some ways. I've known uncannily early that it's what i was meant to do and i've been story-telling long before i could think about concepts like what I was meant to do. I just popped out that way.

Exploring my spiritual and religious beliefs has made this interesting. Maybe I am the reincarnation of some writer who died with a vastly important idea still inside them and that's why i seemed to have been born with a fierce need to get things on paper. It's interesting to be fanciful like that. But to be more serious, I truly believe whatever I m meant to write is very, very important.

I don't like this process of being guided toward my purpose, though. It is very frustrating. Sometimes It hurts.

That's how I feel about it, deep down. The book I want doesn't exist because I haven't written it. That feels more damning than anything sometimes. Writing is hard. And I'm terrified of not pulling it off.

Still, I wonder if this feeling of boredom with the whole literary world is totally a result of that, or if writing my book can resolve it or will resolve it at all. They say write the book you want to read. But writing is haaaaaard.

And i really just want to read it, okay??

Or maybe this will just...pass with time. I wonder if my drive to write would stay totally the same if that happened, though?

I feel the same way, a lot. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who feels that way.

 

[Malik]

It's been said that if there's a book that you want to read that hasn't been written, it's your duty to write it.

I literally crafted the approach to my series with this exact thought: "Why hasn't anyone done this?" I was pissed off at Dragonlance and other YA fantasy at the time that got so much basic, day-to-day stuff just howlingly wrong, and about the same time, The Hunt for Red October came out, and I thought, "Huh . . . why don't any authors do this for fantasy? Like, learn how castles worked, and figure out how to actually fight in armor, and learn to ride a horse, and then write about that? Why is everyone doing all this magic crap and getting everything else wrong?"

And then in college I really got into heavily researched thrillers and technothrillers and hard SF, and it's still mostly what I read. Now I write fantasy technothrillers. I rarely read fantasy, and I still have a tendency to "Nope" right out of a fantasy the first time someone treats a horse like a motorcycle or a sword slices through armor.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Yes, my characters tend to be sore, achy, exhausted, and walking crooked after a day in the saddle when they aren't used to it, LOL.

It's funny how different folks have different reality breakers. I can still watch westerns, but some of the gaffs... I think my favorite was Costner's character in Dances with Wolves was running about firing an empty Henry Rifle.

But me... I tend to tolerate slips in reality with a chuckle or roll of the eyes, IF the story and writing hold up. Most books with major reality gaffs will lose me before that.

It's been said that if there's a book that you want to read that hasn't been written, it's your duty to write it.

I literally crafted the approach to my series with this exact thought: "Why hasn't anyone done this?" I was pissed off at Dragonlance and other YA fantasy at the time that got so much basic, day-to-day stuff just howlingly wrong, and about the same time, The Hunt for Red October came out, and I thought, "Huh . . . why don't any authors do this for fantasy? Like, learn how castles worked, and figure out how to actually fight in armor, and learn to ride a horse, and then write about that? Why is everyone doing all this magic crap and getting everything else wrong?"

And then in college I really got into heavily researched thrillers and technothrillers and hard SF, and it's still mostly what I read. Now I write fantasy technothrillers. I rarely read fantasy, and I still have a tendency to "Nope" right out of a fantasy the first time someone treats a horse like a motorcycle or a sword slices through armor.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

And of course, when people talk about GRRM being "realistic" what they really seem to mean is gritty, dark, dirty, cynical, backstabbing, no black vs white, everybody is gray... etc etc. And the weird part is they tend to see Middle Earth as fluffy... which I think must be blamed on hobbits and elves who seem to live in mini-utopias... and the one rural utopia is pillaged before the end... but seeing as there isn't graphic rape, incest, murder, whores, etc., it isn't "realistic". Funny that. It's all a mindset.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

The elves, to me, don't seem to have utopias. All they have is sadness, that one day, the world will end, and they along with it.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

If that's all they got to worry about they should visit King's Landing some time.

The elves, to me, don't seem to have utopias. All they have is sadness, that one day, the world will end, and they along with it.

 

[skip.knox]

And then in college I really got into heavily researched thrillers and technothrillers and hard SF, and it's still mostly what I read. Now I write fantasy technothrillers. I rarely read fantasy, and I still have a tendency to "Nope" right out of a fantasy the first time someone treats a horse like a motorcycle or a sword slices through armor.

Malik, have you read any of Daniel Suarez? I really enjoyed his duology, Daemon and Freedom [TM].

 

[Chessie2]

Hmm, stories are often about saving the world even when they are about life. How often is a character looking to preserve or improve their current situation? That is all about saving "their World".

Eve of Snows is, for instance, about "saving their world" and it appears somewhat literal... it's what the characters think they're doing... but everyone is being played. But still, they are fighting to preserve their status quo, which is "their world". So, I have a different take on that issue, more story structure than literal.

I've been reading Eve of Snows and it's somewhat dark (still in the beginning...reading two books at once, lol). It's reminding me of the Dawnguard main questline in Skyrim when the PC goes down to the High Elf temple ruins with Serana for the very last quest. Basically, I like it.

Dragon, I wanted to come back on here because I've been thinking about this thread and your dilemma.

Before a certain age, I read a lot of fantasy. Sword and Sorcery was my favorite. I never really liked epic fantasy but made an exception for certain stories and authors. At some point though, I stopped caring. Not sure why. I seriously just fell out of love with fantasy, which had been my favorite genre except for historical romance my entire life. I played Dungeons and Dragons with my dad growing up, am STILL to this day into fantasy video games and am considering joining a Pathfinder game in our new town (lol) but I simply cannot read a whole lot of fantasy for some reason. Des' is holding my attention though.

Which leads me to believe that my tastes have shifted dramatically. As a youngster I read the entire series of the Little House books several times over. And I always have had a fondness for Wild West history (a bloody one at that but I still enjoy it). There are some tastes that you never lose, and there are others you just grow out of. I think that, however, for you and me something very interesting is happening: fantasy books need to have certain elements to keep us interested. They need to speak to the part of our tastes that still exist. For me, it's definitely history and romance. If a fantasy story has an element of romance, I'm there. If a fantasy story has a medieval feel with windswept snows and a lot of suffering, I'm there. If it has dragons, I'm there--although this has been tremendously hard for me to find. That Russian movie with the dragon prince though...it makes my heart skip a beat!

What I'm suggesting is that maybe you've grown out of fantasy for the most part, but are still willing to consider it if it has certain elements that draw you in. What are those? What do you really like, what are you crazy about? I think the reason why I ended up writing HR is because, as a wife and mother, relationships and nurturing and love is what speaks to me. I'm just built that way and I love a good romance that will bring me down to my knees and cry (North & South, here's looking at you). But what speaks to YOU, Dragon, in this period of your life? You're about to enter college and start exploring the woman who lies within. So maybe it's not that you don't like anything. I wager all of this has everything to do with your maturing person who cannot hold disbelief with a lot of fantasy these days for xyz reasons but your love for the genre is still there. It just needs to contain something else. Hm?

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

That's the thing, though. I'm still in love with the fantasy genre or the *concept* of fantasy (though very much out of love with some common tropes of it). That, and anything alt history, weird fiction, or speculative and eccentric in the broadest terms. What it seems, though, is that something in my brain is like "Not quite." whenever I read a book. I mean that at least partially, my dissatisfaction seems to be with degree rather than kind. This book is what I want, but it's not *enough* of what i want. Not imaginative enough or in depth enough or *something.* I enjoy books, but even the best ones don't seem that good. I'm somehow able to still be critical; needs more worldbuilding, more details on this, writing could be polished up, this is really underdeveloped, why is this character here?...always something to make me say, this could be better. I love fantasy because I like visiting strange realities with other cultures and creatures and kingdoms and powers. Things that are different from here...I keep ending up in bad parodies of Earth.

Or maybe it's that i'm reading everything popular and expecting my tastes to align and they just don't. I tried Pern not too long ago, for instance. Didnt like those books at all. I had to force myself to finish the first one. Read ten pages, stop, try another ten pages...Just grueling. I guess it would have been better if F'lar wasn't an abusive asswipe.

 

[skip.knox]

I agree with Chessie: be sure to branch out in your reading (maybe you already have; in which case, this is for some other reader!). I was fortunate to do this early. I was all SF all the time as a teen. Somewhere around nineteen, though, I read The Brothers Karamazov and that led me off into Russian writers for a stretch. In my late thirties I discovered Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett; later, I added Walter Moseley to that list. Somewhere in my forties I made my Book List, constructed by plundering various Best 100 [whatever] Books. I was utterly arbitrary and eclectic. I still curate that list from time to time. Nevil Shute has been my most recent discovery.

I can't really point to any specific benefit for my writing, other than to make me humble in the face of greatness. But I have no doubt at all that reading widely has improved my quality of life. Genuinely good books are as rare as genuinely good music or painting. They are treasures. Reading in one genre only means you have sunk only one mine, sampled only one sort of gem.

One other thought I'll offer. When I was young <insert audience groan>, I was a creature of obsessions. I would find an author and read everything they wrote. I would hear a band and buy all their albums. And I'd re-read. Listen to that album over and over. Binging, they'd call it now, and it was heavenly.

There was, if my memory does not deceive me, always a period afterward. If I was lucky, I'd find a new obsession hard on the heels of the old one, but however brief there was this span of dullness. The familiar honey no longer was sweet. That boredom or disillusionment could spread, causing me to regard all my days as dull and uninspired. Maybe it's only that. If it lasts weeks into months, then something else is going on.

 

[Chessie2]

That's the thing, though. I'm still in love with the fantasy genre or the *concept* of fantasy (though very much out of love with some common tropes of it). That, and anything alt history, weird fiction, or speculative and eccentric in the broadest terms. What it seems, though, is that something in my brain is like "Not quite." whenever I read a book. I mean that at least partially, my dissatisfaction seems to be with degree rather than kind. This book is what I want, but it's not *enough* of what i want. Not imaginative enough or in depth enough or *something.* I enjoy books, but even the best ones don't seem that good. I'm somehow able to still be critical; needs more worldbuilding, more details on this, writing could be polished up, this is really underdeveloped, why is this character here?...always something to make me say, this could be better. I love fantasy because I like visiting strange realities with other cultures and creatures and kingdoms and powers. Things that are different from here...I keep ending up in bad parodies of Earth.

Or maybe it's that i'm reading everything popular and expecting my tastes to align and they just don't. I tried Pern not too long ago, for instance. Didnt like those books at all. I had to force myself to finish the first one. Read ten pages, stop, try another ten pages...Just grueling. I guess it would have been better if F'lar wasn't an abusive asswipe.

Two things come to mind:

1. You're reading critically as a writer instead of reading for enjoyment.
2. Your tastes don't align with what's popular.

Let me touch on #2 because that makes the most sense. For example, GOT is hugely popular amongst my circle of friends. I effing hate it. So much so that I spent several precious minutes of my life trying to convince my father-in-law to NOT start reading the series. He, of course, didn't listen, but whatever. *shakes fist* Most of what's popular on Amazon or Goodreads is meh/lame/yawn to me. I can't do it. We have to remember that most of the popular books out there are written for the masses, so they will have a generic feel/basic plot that doesn't, quite frankly, interest someone like you who creates worlds and writes novels.

You're right in that those books don't have enough. Maybe stop reading off those Goodreads lists and popular Amazon categories. Tbh, a lot of manipulation goes on with those and they don't (truthfully) reflect what readers really want in many cases. I am specifically talking about Amazon best seller lists here. But anyway, have you considered going back like 20+ years and reading old school fantasy? I mean, if you're searching for strange outside of Medieval sword & sorcery it's out there but you gotta dig. It doesn't seem like you can rely on the average list to find books anymore. Those aren't catered to your tastes.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

It's been said that if there's a book that you want to read that hasn't been written, it's your duty to write it.

I literally crafted the approach to my series with this exact thought: "Why hasn't anyone done this?" I was pissed off at Dragonlance and other YA fantasy at the time that got so much basic, day-to-day stuff just howlingly wrong, and about the same time, The Hunt for Red October came out, and I thought, "Huh . . . why don't any authors do this for fantasy? Like, learn how castles worked, and figure out how to actually fight in armor, and learn to ride a horse, and then write about that? Why is everyone doing all this magic crap and getting everything else wrong?"

And then in college I really got into heavily researched thrillers and technothrillers and hard SF, and it's still mostly what I read. Now I write fantasy technothrillers. I rarely read fantasy, and I still have a tendency to "Nope" right out of a fantasy the first time someone treats a horse like a motorcycle or a sword slices through armor.

This is a pretty good description of how I'm feeling in part, just with different things. "Why aren't people doing THIS with fantasy?"'

Except for me it's: Why aren't people writing epic, lore-steeped fantasy sagas about non-European cultures? Why are children's books more imaginative with creatures, dragons and world building than adult novels? (Seriously. How to Train Your Dragon: Children's book full of fart jokes, comes up with over 100 unique species. Most adult novels: literally just color-codes them.) This steampunk tech is cool, why isn't there more fantasy like this? This historical fiction is cool, why can't fantasy take inspiration from this time period? *on wikipedia looking at prehistoric animals* THIS STUFF IS SO DAMN COOL WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE TO HAVE PLAIN HORSES AND WOLVES AND ETC IN FANTASY. This post apocalyptic stuff is a really interesting concept, what if dragons? This weird fiction author is so imaginative, if only his books were thicker and more in number and had DRAGONS and a large cast of characters and lots of different cultures and kingdoms...This genre has so much potential, why are we using these tropes again?

 

[Chessie2]

Also, YES, I agree with Skip: READ IN OTHER GENRES!!!

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

Two things come to mind:

1. You're reading critically as a writer instead of reading for enjoyment.
2. Your tastes don't align with what's popular.

Let me touch on #2 because that makes the most sense. For example, GOT is hugely popular amongst my circle of friends. I effing hate it. So much so that I spent several precious minutes of my life trying to convince my father-in-law to NOT start reading the series. He, of course, didn't listen, but whatever. *shakes fist* Most of what's popular on Amazon or Goodreads is meh/lame/yawn to me. I can't do it. We have to remember that most of the popular books out there are written for the masses, so they will have a generic feel/basic plot that doesn't, quite frankly, interest someone like you who creates worlds and writes novels.

You're right in that those books don't have enough. Maybe stop reading off those Goodreads lists and popular Amazon categories. Tbh, a lot of manipulation goes on with those and they don't (truthfully) reflect what readers really want in many cases. I am specifically talking about Amazon best seller lists here. But anyway, have you considered going back like 20+ years and reading old school fantasy? I mean, if you're searching for strange outside of Medieval sword & sorcery it's out there but you gotta dig. It doesn't seem like you can rely on the average list to find books anymore. Those aren't catered to your tastes.

I end up liking all the stuff that slips between the cracks and gets pounded by Goodreads. Go figure.

I've done some hunting for specific things. For example, books with animal POV's that aren't children's books. Not easy to find. That's how I came across the Ratha books.

Probably, hunting out indie or obscure stuff would do me more good.

I concur about ASOIAF. I have zero desire to read them and probably never will.

As for #1...I think i really want to find something where I DON'T have to turn off my writer side (almost all of me).